Cities can always be rebuilt. After WWII Warsaw was a pile of rubble, but the Poles rebuilt it to look the same as before. There's numerous other examples all over Europe. New Orleans was only a couple of hundred years old, so it's not like there's anything really tricky to do there.
Locked for me too, although did manage to end the quicktime process and get windows back (running at 99% machine resources).
This is at about 1'43'' into the movie? (blusih frame with 'Serenity' on it).
In my experience this is more probably Quicktime's fault than Windows. God I hate Quicktime - it never sits on Windows cleanly, and more to the point is always after you to upgrade. Only reason I ever install the damm thing is to play the occassional movie trailer.
Orange appears only to have been percieved as a separate colour after the introduction of Oranges (the colour is named after the fruit). Previous to that it was referred to as 'yellow-red' and seems to have been thought of as a shade of red, not a distinct colour.
Well, pea plants can grow under those conditions with ease. Back in the days when I was a biochem postdoc working in a botany department one of my collegues was working on plant cell walls, so started germinating peas in a centrifuge. A couple of extra Gs was easily shrugged off with a mild thickening of the cell wall. Even 10 or 20 Gs was handled without too much of a problem.
Things only got serious at serveral hundred Gs. I think (from recall a long time back) he had them germinating at 300G or more. By that time the electromicrographs of the plants showed some very odd structures with all the organelles bunched up in the bottom corner and the shoot failed miserably to stand upward.
I agree it is difficult to apply terms such as left and right wing to The Culture, but there's a comment by one of the characters in The State of the Art (the novella about The Culture visiting earth in the early 1970's) about America out-competing the USSR and thinking capitalism was the winning strategy when, as the character says, The Culture is in their terms 'Deepest Red'.
Also Banksie, if you've ever seen him speak, sits pretty far over in the Socialist/Communist camp.
Whatever happened to the proposals to film Ian M Bank's novel 'Use of Weapons'? The Culture universe is much better realized than either Star Trek or Star Wars, has vastly more interesting technology and politics, and isn't limited to the back-yard scope that Star Trek increasingly feels like.
But parchment is not the same a vellum, and your medieval monk would only wish to use the finer material for holy texts. Also, whilst it is possible to make vellum from the skin of a young goat, calf vellum was strongly preferred.
As to monks soaking up meager supluses, well apart from the medieval mind seeing praying as crucial for the well-being of the community, they also provided lodgings for travellers, hospitals, employment, charity and much else.
Firstly on Lucas's mania for filling the screen constantly with distracting stuff. Like trying to watch a movie in front a fishtank full of demented goldfish.
Secondly on the Younglings. How on earth did he come up with that line? To an English viewer at least it brings up images of Woodhousinan cocktail-drinking middle-aged couple in the Surrey stockbroker belt. Aka..
[Somewhere near Guildford ca mid 1930s. A couple are drinking Pimms and Lemon after tennis]
"I say dear, have you hear about that frightful business with the Younglings?"
"No dear. Did his wife find out about his mistress?"
"No dear, terribly shocking. Apparently they came home after drinks at Whites to some trouble with that Darth Vader chappie and his regimental sword"
"Terrible how you just can't get good staff these days"
Whoever rated this post as insightful? It's just ignorant. Vellum was a highly costly resource in medieval society because it's obtain from the skin of a young, animal - usually a calf. As generally speaking a cow would only produce one calf per year the cost of producing a calf's worth of vellum is the cost of keeping a cow alive over the winter needed to produce the calf - which was more difficult at the time because in the abscence of root feeds most cattle were slaughtered and salted in the autumn, plus the loss of revenue from allowing the calf to grow.
Although it's true that there does appear to have been periods when medieval society was relatively affluent - the 12th Century in particular - famine was never far away and the grinding poverty should not be underestimated. There are even accounts of periods where it is remarked by chroniclers that it was not uncommon for peasants to own just a single garment or even none at all. This cannot have been the norm as otherwise the chroniclers would not have remarked upon it, but nevertheless, in a society which is living as close to the edge as medieval europe managed to do it is not suprising that vellum for books was a costly and rare resource
Must admit I cannot see the point of this. As many point out, Pascal doesn't really exist any more as a real-world programming language outside Borland's Delphi. Delphi may be a minority taste these days, but it's still, for my money, the best (fastest development time, minimum debugging time) environment available. The Pascal language as extended in Delphi is as powerful (well 99%) as C++ and easier to handle - but it bears little resemblence to the original Pascal beyond core language syntax and structure.
It is getting a little long in the tooth now, but this can be a real advantage. There's literally thousands of free, shareware and commercial add-on components for it, with several sites indexing them, numerous 'fan' sites on many obscure and not-so-obscure aspects of the system. Borland latest version - Delphi 2005 - can also target.net - so there's life in the product line yet.
All-in-all of which make continuing to develop in Delphi a very viable option. However all the advantages of Delphi do not apply to Free Pascal, which leaves it as a bit of a curiosity.
I wish the project well etc. but I really can't see, as a regular Delphi user for 10 years, why I , or anyone else, would want to use it.
BT are without a shadow of doubt the worst company in the UK. The don't just treat their customers with contempt, they actually seem to hate them and go out of their way to be cause them as much pain as possible. At BT being a sadist is a job requirement.
I'm on one of the last exchanges in the UK scheduled to be upgraded to broadband, and at present I use a combination of Satellite and ISDN. The sat is rock solid, the ISDN is a continual tail of woe. It regularly dies and BT won't fix it within 72 hours unless you pay extra for some 'service' contract. However the 'service' contract only guarentees a 'response' - which BT seem to take as simply phoning you up on another line and saying word to the effect 'oh dear, looks like your ISDN needs an engineer'. They don't actually do anything until they absolutly have to.
They always make the excuse that they are short of engineers because 'work is heavy at the moment'. Work is always heavy, in 5 years of my ISDN line they have never had even the glimmer of enough engineers to service the system with any hint of a timely response. An as to bullet-proofing the line so it doesn't do down as regularly - dream on, that would only take the fun out of torturing their customers.
In the days when they ran a mobile phone business I made the mistake of having a contract with them and their behaviour came pretty close to fraud.
I used to commute regularly on the railways, and bad as their service was - legendary awful in fact - the rail companies still can't lay a finger on the shere loathsome corporate dreadfulness that is British Telecom.
Apparently, when I was about 5 or 6 I was so scared of Daleks I didn't just hide behind the sofa, I actually used to run to the end of out back garden when they appeared and hide out for the rest of the episode.
And I do still remember those green glowing maggoty things as really yuck. I've had a real parania about maggots ever since.
Over most aspects of the arms race / defense I'd agree with you, but the point that's different about SDI is the technology to fire missiles is far, far simpler than that required to intercept them and the attacker can ramp up the cost to the defender (in both material and technology) at a much faster rate than the defender.
With the case in point all the Russian had to do was remove the paint from their missiles and polish them to a mirror finish. To counteract that SDI would have to increase the power output of their lasers by orders of magnitude. And I bet even the North Koreans still have sandpaper and polish:-)
Similar arguments applied if intercepting with anti-missile missiles. The best scenario was always thought to be to intercept ICBMs in cruise phase (that's the 20 mins or so when they are on a ballistic tragetory outside the atmosphere), the problem there was that in balistic phase it's impossible to tell real warheads from dummies (good old Newton) and it's technologically much easier just to add decoys - such as inflatable balloons (same tragetory outside the atmosphere) than upgrade SDI to maybe handle an extra order of magnitude or more in targets.
And it's arguable if technological superiority is much use against an inventive foe anway if you let the foe choose the battle. I note that the Americans still haven't managed to locate a the most wanted man in the world who's armed with just an AK47. Not to mention the continual death toll on the technologically far superior American soldiers by wire and semtex.
Ah, so by writing THEORY in captials were supposed to grab the idea that evolution hasn't been proven and intelligent design is a THEORY of equal merit?
You know what? Personally over here in good old secular Europe - now a larger economic power than the USA - I'm starting not to care any longer about the replacement of American Democracy by a Xian Theocracy. For decades the brain-drain was westwards, but nowdays biological sciences are stronger in Europe and attract good people across the atlantic to the intellectual freedom of our shores. If you prefer comfortable lies compatible with your religion then that's fine, in the long run it's just going to stump your inventivness and economic growth - and hasten the decline the American Theocratic Empire.
Well, strategic defense doesn't work, and can't be made to work in any meaningful way. It's just far to easy to mount aggressive countermeasures against defensive countermeasures.
For instance back in the days of President Reagan when SDI first glinted in the eyes of Dr Strangel^H^H^H^H Teller it rapidly transpired that the most powerful laser the US could conceviably come up with could be defeated by the pesky Ruskies polishing their warheads to a mirror finish and spinning them.
All credit to Scientific American to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
IMHO I think that if anything your average joe user has got more scared of technology over the past year or two with the rise of malware and other nasties. A real professional who helps his users by making them feel safe and in control gets as much respect as they ever did - probably more if anything. It's BOFH and uncommunicative geek types are treated with disdain - which is a good thing. I wouldn't expect that type of behaviour in my car mechanic so I don't see why users should receive it from me.
Other side of the coin I think is I've seen precisely no impact from the Indian etc programming shops. I'm mainly a developer for SMEs so probably not particularly vunerable anyway, but I but I do believe that a major reason why clients stay with me - and recommend me to others - is because I'm a nice friendly face. Business people are often 'right brain' types, and being able to discuss a project face-to-face (and maybe informally over a pint down the pub) is always going to score highly.
And to be really geeky, if you think about even Gandalf is respected more because he is wise and friendly council more than because of the raw power he wields.
Sounds like you exactly what's needed - good social skills.
I run my own small development consultancy business and have done for 6 or 7 years - I'm still in business - so I must be doing something right. Anyway the thing I've identified that I think keeps people coming back is I can talk business speak about IT on a level that the end-users understand. They know I'm a geek and a what I do as far as they are concerned is black magic, but I'm a friendy geek who talks english not jargon to them, and I'm valued as a techie they can call to translate jargon and give specialist advise when they need it.
It probably helps I'm in my 40s and have a fair bit of 'life' under the belt. One of the places I worked for once employed a young coder in his 20's to do some system development for them inhouse. Although a very clever guy he completely got up there noses and didn't last long - a complete inability to communicate and a propensity to run highly geekish software on his own box and sort of imply that the rest of the users were dumb because they didn't know how to do x really doesn't help. In other words you don't get respect for what you know, rather what you know and how you can apply and interperate it for the user.
Slashdot Mirror
The Marching Morons, by CM Kornbluth
A couple of hundred people and one major city is hardly on the same scale as a hundreds of thousands dead and and half a million or more homeless.
On raw stats less than 1% as bad.
Cities can always be rebuilt. After WWII Warsaw was a pile of rubble, but the Poles rebuilt it to look the same as before. There's numerous other examples all over Europe. New Orleans was only a couple of hundred years old, so it's not like there's anything really tricky to do there.
Locked for me too, although did manage to end the quicktime process and get windows back (running at 99% machine resources).
This is at about 1'43'' into the movie? (blusih frame with 'Serenity' on it).
In my experience this is more probably Quicktime's fault than Windows. God I hate Quicktime - it never sits on Windows cleanly, and more to the point is always after you to upgrade. Only reason I ever install the damm thing is to play the occassional movie trailer.
Orange appears only to have been percieved as a separate colour after the introduction of Oranges (the colour is named after the fruit). Previous to that it was referred to as 'yellow-red' and seems to have been thought of as a shade of red, not a distinct colour.
Well, pea plants can grow under those conditions with ease. Back in the days when I was a biochem postdoc working in a botany department one of my collegues was working on plant cell walls, so started germinating peas in a centrifuge. A couple of extra Gs was easily shrugged off with a mild thickening of the cell wall. Even 10 or 20 Gs was handled without too much of a problem.
Things only got serious at serveral hundred Gs. I think (from recall a long time back) he had them germinating at 300G or more. By that time the electromicrographs of the plants showed some very odd structures with all the organelles bunched up in the bottom corner and the shoot failed miserably to stand upward.
Possibly, whatever, I just find it very interesting that a mainstream hollywood movie expressed the sentiment.
"holding Americas schools back."
One of the more interesting asides in "The Incredibles" was the comment by the kid about school where "everyone wins, so no-one does"
I agree it is difficult to apply terms such as left and right wing to The Culture, but there's a comment by one of the characters in The State of the Art (the novella about The Culture visiting earth in the early 1970's) about America out-competing the USSR and thinking capitalism was the winning strategy when, as the character says, The Culture is in their terms 'Deepest Red'.
Also Banksie, if you've ever seen him speak, sits pretty far over in the Socialist/Communist camp.
Yes, maybe one can see why Hollywood isn't to keen to touch an ultra-left-wing anarchistic drug-using sexually liberated utopia.
Whatever happened to the proposals to film Ian M Bank's novel 'Use of Weapons'? The Culture universe is much better realized than either Star Trek or Star Wars, has vastly more interesting technology and politics, and isn't limited to the back-yard scope that Star Trek increasingly feels like.
But parchment is not the same a vellum, and your medieval monk would only wish to use the finer material for holy texts. Also, whilst it is possible to make vellum from the skin of a young goat, calf vellum was strongly preferred.
As to monks soaking up meager supluses, well apart from the medieval mind seeing praying as crucial for the well-being of the community, they also provided lodgings for travellers, hospitals, employment, charity and much else.
Firstly on Lucas's mania for filling the screen constantly with distracting stuff. Like trying to watch a movie in front a fishtank full of demented goldfish.
Secondly on the Younglings. How on earth did he come up with that line? To an English viewer at least it brings up images of Woodhousinan cocktail-drinking middle-aged couple in the Surrey stockbroker belt. Aka..
[Somewhere near Guildford ca mid 1930s. A couple are drinking Pimms and Lemon after tennis]
"I say dear, have you hear about that frightful business with the Younglings?"
"No dear. Did his wife find out about his mistress?"
"No dear, terribly shocking. Apparently they came home after drinks at Whites to some trouble with that Darth Vader chappie and his regimental sword"
"Terrible how you just can't get good staff these days"
Whoever rated this post as insightful? It's just ignorant. Vellum was a highly costly resource in medieval society because it's obtain from the skin of a young, animal - usually a calf. As generally speaking a cow would only produce one calf per year the cost of producing a calf's worth of vellum is the cost of keeping a cow alive over the winter needed to produce the calf - which was more difficult at the time because in the abscence of root feeds most cattle were slaughtered and salted in the autumn, plus the loss of revenue from allowing the calf to grow.
Although it's true that there does appear to have been periods when medieval society was relatively affluent - the 12th Century in particular - famine was never far away and the grinding poverty should not be underestimated. There are even accounts of periods where it is remarked by chroniclers that it was not uncommon for peasants to own just a single garment or even none at all. This cannot have been the norm as otherwise the chroniclers would not have remarked upon it, but nevertheless, in a society which is living as close to the edge as medieval europe managed to do it is not suprising that vellum for books was a costly and rare resource
Must admit I cannot see the point of this. As many point out, Pascal doesn't really exist any more as a real-world programming language outside Borland's Delphi. Delphi may be a minority taste these days, but it's still, for my money, the best (fastest development time, minimum debugging time) environment available. The Pascal language as extended in Delphi is as powerful (well 99%) as C++ and easier to handle - but it bears little resemblence to the original Pascal beyond core language syntax and structure.
.net - so there's life in the product line yet.
It is getting a little long in the tooth now, but this can be a real advantage. There's literally thousands of free, shareware and commercial add-on components for it, with several sites indexing them, numerous 'fan' sites on many obscure and not-so-obscure aspects of the system. Borland latest version - Delphi 2005 - can also target
All-in-all of which make continuing to develop in Delphi a very viable option. However all the advantages of Delphi do not apply to Free Pascal, which leaves it as a bit of a curiosity.
I wish the project well etc. but I really can't see, as a regular Delphi user for 10 years, why I , or anyone else, would want to use it.
BT are without a shadow of doubt the worst company in the UK. The don't just treat their customers with contempt, they actually seem to hate them and go out of their way to be cause them as much pain as possible. At BT being a sadist is a job requirement.
I'm on one of the last exchanges in the UK scheduled to be upgraded to broadband, and at present I use a combination of Satellite and ISDN. The sat is rock solid, the ISDN is a continual tail of woe. It regularly dies and BT won't fix it within 72 hours unless you pay extra for some 'service' contract. However the 'service' contract only guarentees a 'response' - which BT seem to take as simply phoning you up on another line and saying word to the effect 'oh dear, looks like your ISDN needs an engineer'. They don't actually do anything until they absolutly have to.
They always make the excuse that they are short of engineers because 'work is heavy at the moment'. Work is always heavy, in 5 years of my ISDN line they have never had even the glimmer of enough engineers to service the system with any hint of a timely response. An as to bullet-proofing the line so it doesn't do down as regularly - dream on, that would only take the fun out of torturing their customers.
In the days when they ran a mobile phone business I made the mistake of having a contract with them and their behaviour came pretty close to fraud.
I used to commute regularly on the railways, and bad as their service was - legendary awful in fact - the rail companies still can't lay a finger on the shere loathsome corporate dreadfulness that is British Telecom.
As opposed to a few long months?
Apparently, when I was about 5 or 6 I was so scared of Daleks I didn't just hide behind the sofa, I actually used to run to the end of out back garden when they appeared and hide out for the rest of the episode.
And I do still remember those green glowing maggoty things as really yuck. I've had a real parania about maggots ever since.
That Mandleson has been exposed as being bent
Over most aspects of the arms race / defense I'd agree with you, but the point that's different about SDI is the technology to fire missiles is far, far simpler than that required to intercept them and the attacker can ramp up the cost to the defender (in both material and technology) at a much faster rate than the defender.
:-)
With the case in point all the Russian had to do was remove the paint from their missiles and polish them to a mirror finish. To counteract that SDI would have to increase the power output of their lasers by orders of magnitude. And I bet even the North Koreans still have sandpaper and polish
Similar arguments applied if intercepting with anti-missile missiles. The best scenario was always thought to be to intercept ICBMs in cruise phase (that's the 20 mins or so when they are on a ballistic tragetory outside the atmosphere), the problem there was that in balistic phase it's impossible to tell real warheads from dummies (good old Newton) and it's technologically much easier just to add decoys - such as inflatable balloons (same tragetory outside the atmosphere) than upgrade SDI to maybe handle an extra order of magnitude or more in targets.
And it's arguable if technological superiority is much use against an inventive foe anway if you let the foe choose the battle. I note that the Americans still haven't managed to locate a the most wanted man in the world who's armed with just an AK47. Not to mention the continual death toll on the technologically far superior American soldiers by wire and semtex.
Oh get real. Evolution is now as well proven as any other aspect of biological or medical science.
The Wikipedia for instance - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution - has reams of pointers.
Ah, so by writing THEORY in captials were supposed to grab the idea that evolution hasn't been proven and intelligent design is a THEORY of equal merit?
You know what? Personally over here in good old secular Europe - now a larger economic power than the USA - I'm starting not to care any longer about the replacement of American Democracy by a Xian Theocracy. For decades the brain-drain was westwards, but nowdays biological sciences are stronger in Europe and attract good people across the atlantic to the intellectual freedom of our shores. If you prefer comfortable lies compatible with your religion then that's fine, in the long run it's just going to stump your inventivness and economic growth - and hasten the decline the American Theocratic Empire.
Well, strategic defense doesn't work, and can't be made to work in any meaningful way. It's just far to easy to mount aggressive countermeasures against defensive countermeasures.
For instance back in the days of President Reagan when SDI first glinted in the eyes of Dr Strangel^H^H^H^H Teller it rapidly transpired that the most powerful laser the US could conceviably come up with could be defeated by the pesky Ruskies polishing their warheads to a mirror finish and spinning them.
All credit to Scientific American to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
With that attitude you'll go far ;-)
IMHO I think that if anything your average joe user has got more scared of technology over the past year or two with the rise of malware and other nasties. A real professional who helps his users by making them feel safe and in control gets as much respect as they ever did - probably more if anything. It's BOFH and uncommunicative geek types are treated with disdain - which is a good thing. I wouldn't expect that type of behaviour in my car mechanic so I don't see why users should receive it from me.
Other side of the coin I think is I've seen precisely no impact from the Indian etc programming shops. I'm mainly a developer for SMEs so probably not particularly vunerable anyway, but I but I do believe that a major reason why clients stay with me - and recommend me to others - is because I'm a nice friendly face. Business people are often 'right brain' types, and being able to discuss a project face-to-face (and maybe informally over a pint down the pub) is always going to score highly.
And to be really geeky, if you think about even Gandalf is respected more because he is wise and friendly council more than because of the raw power he wields.
Sounds like you exactly what's needed - good social skills.
I run my own small development consultancy business and have done for 6 or 7 years - I'm still in business - so I must be doing something right. Anyway the thing I've identified that I think keeps people coming back is I can talk business speak about IT on a level that the end-users understand. They know I'm a geek and a what I do as far as they are concerned is black magic, but I'm a friendy geek who talks english not jargon to them, and I'm valued as a techie they can call to translate jargon and give specialist advise when they need it.
It probably helps I'm in my 40s and have a fair bit of 'life' under the belt. One of the places I worked for once employed a young coder in his 20's to do some system development for them inhouse. Although a very clever guy he completely got up there noses and didn't last long - a complete inability to communicate and a propensity to run highly geekish software on his own box and sort of imply that the rest of the users were dumb because they didn't know how to do x really doesn't help. In other words you don't get respect for what you know, rather what you know and how you can apply and interperate it for the user.