> Ok, my geek jones told me I had to go see Batman opening weekend.
Idiot. Did you think that it wouldn't stay around if you waited a weekend or two? Instead, you got the worst possible experience because of the slavering hordes who only attend the first weekend (are they a variant of gnurr, I wonder, coming from the release out?). Wait a weekend, and you should still be able to see it three times (or how ever many times that you normally see the ones that you really enjoy rewatching), and without the overcrowding that you described.
Well, enjoy the next Bond on your small screen (small compared to the THX screen in a multiplex, at least). Anyways, unless one of the actors turns in a great performance and then dies, I doubt that you will get the frenzy that Dark Knight had.
> Do you think it would be allowed by any of the parties that have claimed the land?
The Antarctic Treaty has put all those claims (and there are a bunch, and they overlap a lot) in abeyance for the duration, in favor of treating it as an international science reserve. Thus, in fact, every signatory nation would object.
For example, the USA has a $10,000 fine and a year in prison for knowingly introducing a new species there, and settling there would probably count, at least for US citizens, or anyone in the area that we claim. I imagine that the other signatories have their own laws, as well.
OTOH, there actually is an area down there that is unclaimed by any nation. Settle there a week after the yearly meeting and you might get away with it for a while, before you were kicked out, after the next meeting. Better than homesteading would be to research the difficulties in homesteading, as prep for a Mars mission in the distant future, by setting up a test homesteading settlement (a Biosphere III, for example). That might get you years of grace, if you sent out intelligent enough reports on a regular and frequent basis.
Maybe he is just waiting for his lawyer to craft a deal where his giving up a password other than those in place before he did his stuff isn't evidence that he did any tampering. Besides, after four felony counts, what is a little extortion added on? Just covering the poison pill with excrement.
Maybe he is looking for concurrent sentences, rather than consecutive?
I first read that as "Disgruntled Emperor Hijacks San Francisco's Computer System". Now, that would make the story a hundred times more interesting.
And appropriate to San Francisco. Unfortunately, while he was clinically insane, Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Canada, and Protector of Mexico, was not as stupid as this guy. Unfortunately for this guy, that is. Since he is long dead, nothing is particularly fortunate or unfortunate for the Emperor Norton.
> It's pronounced "make - make", the English way, > i.e. the way that the Baby Jesus would have said > it.
No, since the baby Jesus preceded the Great Vowel Shift, He would have pronounced it correctly, as would Hengist and Horsa, the founders of England (as opposed to Britannia, the Roman colony).
> You got the part about it being "christened", right?
Congratulations, you just discovered that words can migrate from specific to general, or vice versa. My Unitarian Universalist friends had their grandson "dedicated" to, well, nothing in particular, rather than use "baptized", a word which long preceded the guy in the Jordan who so annoyed Herod Antipas.
Are you going to complain about "red tape" because we don't tie up official forms or documents in vermilion ribbons, anymore, but xerox them on a Japanese photocopier? Or that something big containing a dead body can't be called a sarcophagus if it isn't made of limestone?
> given that Lockheed Martin is well known to have data > suggesting you're much more productive in Ada. And > they're CMM level 5!
Odd. I had a friend working at the Software Engineering Institute who claimed to have worked on a study that found the reverse; that the only way most projects could be done was to spend the time to get the DoD waiver, then start programming in C rather than Ada.
And they invented CMM Level 5.
Of course, the C libraries or code that they used might have tested it at run-time. Since they never do dynamic allocation, it is not difficult to PASCAL-ize a program. Tedious, not difficult.
> Shouldn't a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark > annihilate one another? How do they manage to > avoid doing so in this 'bottomonium' state?
Eventually, they do. While they are detector range, however, they can still be orbiting each other. Even if they do break down before detected, you can determine that they were there by a spike in particle energies from a point source that adds up to the mass of that meson.
You can even make positronium with an suitable accelerator, where an electron and anti-electron orbit stably for a few nanoseconds (well, about 142 nanoseconds, actually) before decaying. There, you get a spike in gammas at just the right energy.
> The whole point of the language is to let you > say "should never happen" in the code, instead > of in the comments.
You mean, like the assert macro in C does? Just because no one uses it (except lots of people that I knew) doesn't mean that it is not there.
Also, you can easily replace the compiler's assert with your own, if you need to do so.
Ada DID have one of the first cases of a major language with concurrency support built in. But by the time that Ada could be used (as opposed to gedanken programmed), everyone else had it, at least at a library level.
But everyone knows that you SELL on the news. You BUY on the rumor.
They should have sent something out reporting major troop concentrations in Iraq moving eastwards, and give a URL to a faked google earth pointer. THAT would get a good rumor going.
> Besides, the vehicles will still probably depend on petroleum-based products for lubricants.
Yeah, my car gets only 2400 miles to the gallon of motor oil, if I change it at the recommended intervals (more like 6000 MPG in practice, but don't tell my father or cousin, who both love the damned things). That will be [sarc] almost no reduction [/sarc] in oil usage.
Oh God. In the summary, I read Modem Pentathlon instead of Modern, and pictured jogging with a 3COM 56K Turbo in your hand... I really, really, need to retire from this bloody line of business.
Or get you eyes checked, and maybe use a better font, to better distinguish between "r" "n" and "m". I did, and everything looks great, now.
As far as the crazy imagery, that is nothing compared to what I saw when my then-boss said that "phone man" was coming to talk to us. I heard it as "PhoneMan!" and spent 10 minutes laughing my brains out over the image of John Ratzenberger (played Cliff Claven on Cheers), in a repairman's uniform but with a cape flying behind him like George Reeves in the 1950s Superman TV series. In defense, I had watched House II that weekend, and was a bit low on sleep that day, too.
> Do you have a credible source for your claims of 'almost every bug... is resistant'
None cite-able, mainly just conversions with MDs or read years ago. Now, this 'rarely useful' is for classical penicillin, not derivatives like ampicillian or amoxicillin (assuming that I spelled them correctly) where they added a methyl group here or shifted one there, or added another antibiotic to the cocktail, to make them fresh to the bacterial resistance mechanisms.
> Or are you just upset that your Mother is allergic to it?
No, that was the joke meme. I'd be allergic to boosterspice -- THAT would be upsetting (if developed in my lifetime, and if Niven got its source right). Unless they run out of xxx-amycins or something, she is still OK.
If your business was supporting military computers, that could be handled over the Internet, although the contract or work order needed a physical signature for each side's legal department, at some point. Then, you could handle non-Milnet computers. By this time, non-research sites could join (taking all the cache out of it), but they still couldn't transact business as some messages might cross NSFnet, so the sites had catalogs and printable forms or sales contact numbers, which was considered info, not business.
Of course, people were betting on football games (Army-Navy game over MilNet, frex) using email far earlier.
> After a while, the phone company - and note that I said "the" phone company, as there was only one at the time
No, that is false, even within the USA. I know, as I was stuck on one of those little one or two town phone companies growing up (although visiting and seeing the klickitty-klack electro-mechanicals was fun in grade and high school) growing up and while in college, and discovered just how much noise crossing the company boundaries caused. Actually, I still am, at home, as the local company was bought by another not-very-big company, that was bought by a large-but-not-that-big company, that was bought by a larger-but-still-not-an-ILEC company.
The holodeck programs were written by professional artists (see DS9, and Quark's setup). OTOH, since the Voyager people wrote their own, one could generate generic buildings and people of appropriate periods from pre-existing libraries. I expect that the libraries had a link to the computer's historical database, as well, so that just as a starship crew could synthesize their own Nazi uniforms (as in ST:TOS), so could the holodeck for its programs.
It may be that viewers born 1960 (and before) to 1970 (ei. those who did NOT start with cable) view TV programs as an "event" rather than as disposable entertainment, which may drive that demographic to watch first airings.
I, who precede that (by months:-) watch first airings so that I can catch the next Firefly *before* it disappears because no one else is watching it, waiting for the DVD. Also, so I can brag about catching the next Hellzapoppin (canceled during the first commercial break of the first episode)(like saying that you caught Plan 9 in the theaters, which I couldn't have).
Alas, still waiting for that second Nielson diary.
News coverage has been cut back too. The idea of having a studio in every country we had friendly relations with has gone by the wayside. Longform presantations of things like the political conventions have been shifted to basic cable networks.
Well, when I started watching, we had a war on every night, as part of the 15 minute network news, covered by the one in-country correspondent.
In other words, "having a studio in every country we had friendly relations with" never was, and never could be. For example, the London Bureau covered all of NATO, and shipped a camera man and correspondent out only if there were riots or Olympics. Having a separate studio in Holland or Belgium or even Paris would have been ridiculous - they don't produce that much US-interesting news (unless Europeans really care about McGreevey or Spitzer's downfalls, I doubt that they would think that anything but DC and LA produce much, in the USA, and LA only produces gossip, at that. If they do care, they're on crack). It was too expensive to have more, even for CBS at its apogee.
There used to just be "The People's Court" for court shows. Now there's enough syndicated judge-personality shows on broadcast to fill an entire daytime lineup. Cheapest to produce wins, the only thing cheaper is Jerry Springer and his knockoffs.
That's Morton Downey, Jr. and his knockoffs, sir. Actually, by MD,Jr's time, it was Phil Donahue and his knockoffs, as he had stopped putting Carl Sagan or other intelligent guests on, by then, and was doing Men Who Wear Skirts and the like.
So, anyway, you obviously would prefer more soap operas and game shows hosted by unknown radio DJs or ex-Big Band singers?
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> Ok, my geek jones told me I had to go see Batman opening weekend.
Idiot. Did you think that it wouldn't stay around if you waited a weekend or two? Instead, you got the worst possible experience because of the slavering hordes who only attend the first weekend (are they a variant of gnurr, I wonder, coming from the release out?). Wait a weekend, and you should still be able to see it three times (or how ever many times that you normally see the ones that you really enjoy rewatching), and without the overcrowding that you described.
Well, enjoy the next Bond on your small screen (small compared to the THX screen in a multiplex, at least). Anyways, unless one of the actors turns in a great performance and then dies, I doubt that you will get the frenzy that Dark Knight had.
Well, the invisible hands of Malthus and Darwin, but yes, it will.
> Do you think it would be allowed by any of the parties that have claimed the land?
The Antarctic Treaty has put all those claims (and there are a bunch, and they overlap a lot) in abeyance for the duration, in favor of treating it as an international science reserve. Thus, in fact, every signatory nation would object.
For example, the USA has a $10,000 fine and a year in prison for knowingly introducing a new species there, and settling there would probably count, at least for US citizens, or anyone in the area that we claim. I imagine that the other signatories have their own laws, as well.
OTOH, there actually is an area down there that is unclaimed by any nation. Settle there a week after the yearly meeting and you might get away with it for a while, before you were kicked out, after the next meeting. Better than homesteading would be to research the difficulties in homesteading, as prep for a Mars mission in the distant future, by setting up a test homesteading settlement (a Biosphere III, for example). That might get you years of grace, if you sent out intelligent enough reports on a regular and frequent basis.
Maybe he is just waiting for his lawyer to craft a deal where his giving up a password other than those in place before he did his stuff isn't evidence that he did any tampering. Besides, after four felony counts, what is a little extortion added on? Just covering the poison pill with excrement.
Maybe he is looking for concurrent sentences, rather than consecutive?
And appropriate to San Francisco. Unfortunately, while he was clinically insane, Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Canada, and Protector of Mexico, was not as stupid as this guy. Unfortunately for this guy, that is. Since he is long dead, nothing is particularly fortunate or unfortunate for the Emperor Norton.
> and the Earth will be virtually helium-free by the end of the 21st century.
Which is why we will develop fusion, before that occurs. :-)
> It's pronounced "make - make", the English way,
> i.e. the way that the Baby Jesus would have said
> it.
No, since the baby Jesus preceded the Great Vowel Shift, He would have pronounced it correctly, as would Hengist and Horsa, the founders of England (as opposed to Britannia, the Roman colony).
> You got the part about it being "christened", right?
Congratulations, you just discovered that words can migrate from specific to general, or vice versa. My Unitarian Universalist friends had their grandson "dedicated" to, well, nothing in particular, rather than use "baptized", a word which long preceded the guy in the Jordan who so annoyed Herod Antipas.
Are you going to complain about "red tape" because we don't tie up official forms or documents in vermilion ribbons, anymore, but xerox them on a Japanese photocopier? Or that something big containing a dead body can't be called a sarcophagus if it isn't made of limestone?
The Great Pumpkin, you Peanuts-deficient ignoramus!
> given that Lockheed Martin is well known to have data
> suggesting you're much more productive in Ada. And
> they're CMM level 5!
Odd. I had a friend working at the Software Engineering Institute who claimed to have worked on a study that found the reverse; that the only way most projects could be done was to spend the time to get the DoD waiver, then start programming in C rather than Ada.
And they invented CMM Level 5.
Of course, the C libraries or code that they used might have tested it at run-time. Since they never do dynamic allocation, it is not difficult to PASCAL-ize a program. Tedious, not difficult.
> Shouldn't a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark
> annihilate one another? How do they manage to
> avoid doing so in this 'bottomonium' state?
Eventually, they do. While they are detector range, however, they can still be orbiting each other. Even if they do break down before detected, you can determine that they were there by a spike in particle energies from a point source that adds up to the mass of that meson.
You can even make positronium with an suitable accelerator, where an electron and anti-electron orbit stably for a few nanoseconds (well, about 142 nanoseconds, actually) before decaying. There, you get a spike in gammas at just the right energy.
> The whole point of the language is to let you
> say "should never happen" in the code, instead
> of in the comments.
You mean, like the assert macro in C does? Just because no one uses it (except lots of people that I knew) doesn't mean that it is not there.
Also, you can easily replace the compiler's assert with your own, if you need to do so.
Ada DID have one of the first cases of a major language with concurrency support built in. But by the time that Ada could be used (as opposed to gedanken programmed), everyone else had it, at least at a library level.
> 3. Speculators buy on the "news" (formerly ???)
But everyone knows that you SELL on the news. You BUY on the rumor.
They should have sent something out reporting major troop concentrations in Iraq moving eastwards, and give a URL to a faked google earth pointer. THAT would get a good rumor going.
> I got some spam a while ago that was "selling" islam.
How much does it sell for, these days?
Is this an exclusive, or just personal, version?
> > Using that metric, neither are the C64 and the Amiga?
>
> That's because the US does not use metric.
Yes we do. We just haven't made it illegal to use English measurements, unlike England.
> Besides, the vehicles will still probably depend on petroleum-based products for lubricants.
Yeah, my car gets only 2400 miles to the gallon of motor oil, if I change it at the recommended intervals (more like 6000 MPG in practice, but don't tell my father or cousin, who both love the damned things). That will be [sarc] almost no reduction [/sarc] in oil usage.
Or get you eyes checked, and maybe use a better font, to better distinguish between "r" "n" and "m". I did, and everything looks great, now.
As far as the crazy imagery, that is nothing compared to what I saw when my then-boss said that "phone man" was coming to talk to us. I heard it as "PhoneMan!" and spent 10 minutes laughing my brains out over the image of John Ratzenberger (played Cliff Claven on Cheers), in a repairman's uniform but with a cape flying behind him like George Reeves in the 1950s Superman TV series. In defense, I had watched House II that weekend, and was a bit low on sleep that day, too.
> without zinc world wide shipping will come to a halt a decade later.
Square riggers and wooden ships, my boy. That is the solution!
Arr.
> Do you have a credible source for your claims of 'almost every bug... is resistant'
None cite-able, mainly just conversions with MDs or read years ago. Now, this 'rarely useful' is for classical penicillin, not derivatives like ampicillian or amoxicillin (assuming that I spelled them correctly) where they added a methyl group here or shifted one there, or added another antibiotic to the cocktail, to make them fresh to the bacterial resistance mechanisms.
> Or are you just upset that your Mother is allergic to it?
No, that was the joke meme. I'd be allergic to boosterspice -- THAT would be upsetting (if developed in my lifetime, and if Niven got its source right). Unless they run out of xxx-amycins or something, she is still OK.
> Ever look at what it takes to extract oil from shale?
Just one small nuke and it becomes very reasonable, but Operation Plowshares is SOOO politically incorrect, nowadays :-)
That actually makes sense!
(Damn, I have got to find time to see that movie!)
Of course, people were betting on football games (Army-Navy game over MilNet, frex) using email far earlier.
> After a while, the phone company - and note that I said "the" phone company, as there was only one at the time
No, that is false, even within the USA. I know, as I was stuck on one of those little one or two town phone companies growing up (although visiting and seeing the klickitty-klack electro-mechanicals was fun in grade and high school) growing up and while in college, and discovered just how much noise crossing the company boundaries caused. Actually, I still am, at home, as the local company was bought by another not-very-big company, that was bought by a large-but-not-that-big company, that was bought by a larger-but-still-not-an-ILEC company.
The holodeck programs were written by professional artists (see DS9, and Quark's setup). OTOH, since the Voyager people wrote their own, one could generate generic buildings and people of appropriate periods from pre-existing libraries. I expect that the libraries had a link to the computer's historical database, as well, so that just as a starship crew could synthesize their own Nazi uniforms (as in ST:TOS), so could the holodeck for its programs.
I, who precede that (by months :-) watch first airings so that I can catch the next Firefly *before* it disappears because no one else is watching it, waiting for the DVD. Also, so I can brag about catching the next Hellzapoppin (canceled during the first commercial break of the first episode)(like saying that you caught Plan 9 in the theaters, which I couldn't have).
Alas, still waiting for that second Nielson diary.
Well, when I started watching, we had a war on every night, as part of the 15 minute network news, covered by the one in-country correspondent.
In other words, "having a studio in every country we had friendly relations with" never was, and never could be. For example, the London Bureau covered all of NATO, and shipped a camera man and correspondent out only if there were riots or Olympics. Having a separate studio in Holland or Belgium or even Paris would have been ridiculous - they don't produce that much US-interesting news (unless Europeans really care about McGreevey or Spitzer's downfalls, I doubt that they would think that anything but DC and LA produce much, in the USA, and LA only produces gossip, at that. If they do care, they're on crack). It was too expensive to have more, even for CBS at its apogee.
That's Morton Downey, Jr. and his knockoffs, sir. Actually, by MD,Jr's time, it was Phil Donahue and his knockoffs, as he had stopped putting Carl Sagan or other intelligent guests on, by then, and was doing Men Who Wear Skirts and the like.
So, anyway, you obviously would prefer more soap operas and game shows hosted by unknown radio DJs or ex-Big Band singers?