When is the last time you watched the original Cosmos?
Actually, I watched it last week. I have the DVD set. The series was not meant to be a pure documentary. If you wanted that, you can read the book. It was meant to be beautiful, a work of art, and the producers, cinematographers, and the editing crew did a great of creating it.
Regarding pontificating, Dr. Sagan was more preaching than pontificating. But given that the show's purpose was to teach the general public about a subject he loved and believed, something he'd spent most of his professional life doing, it was to be expected.
According to the Wikipedia entry for the series, the soundrack will be written by Alan Silvestri. He's a good film composer (I liked his score for Contact) but I think the original Cosmos had a better idea. That series used existing music, mostly classical, for its score. Some of it was removed from the DVD versions due to the expense of getting the rights to it again, but if you saw the original series, the music is one of the things that made the series special. I learned a lot about classical music from that series.
I like the idea of a remade Cosmos series. It's long overdue. However, it will be difficult for the series to be anywhere near as good as the original. The original was a mix of great writing, great music, especially the classical numbers, and the love of the subject that Carl Sagan had. Dr. Sagan wasn't just host and co-writer of the series, he was THE high priest of popular science as that time and when he spoke, he was preaching like a Bible-thumping evangelist, only without the southern drawl. While Neil de Grasse Tyson has done a lot of work to fill that role, he's not Carl Sagan. Still, I look forward to seeing this series. Since I don't usually watch TV, I'll have to get a digital TV antenna.
Does anyone get the impression that our civilization is doomed? Short of finding a way of making practical nuclear fusion reactors work, something that has been always "30 years from now" since the time I was in middle school forty years ago, there seems to be no solution to our future energy needs that don't do evil things to our planet's climate that eventually will doom our civilization. So, in my mind, there are three alternatives: mass suicide, going off the grid and reverting to the behavior of our hunter/gatherer ancestors, or "drill, baby, drill". I don't like any of them but every solution seems to have its own very evil side effects. So I'm going to continue to burn fossil fuels and thank my lucky stars that I won't live to see "the end".
Maybe I'm just an ostrich who prefers to stick his head in a hole rather than face the future with more optimism.
If it were yes, the paid Dice minions who are working on the Slashdot Beta will be working for free for a long time.
Returning to all seriousness now, software development is by its very nature an imperfect activity and will, as a result, result in buggy code, especially if it is rushed and not well designed. When I was in school a long time ago toward the end of the mainframe age, I was told by one of my professors that IBM once studied the problem of the creation and fixing of bugs. Their results was that for every bug fixed, two more bugs are created. If this were true (and I believe it is), we coders would always be working for free. I don't like that idea.
Our friend Leonard Nimoy is probably feeling very mortal these days. So would you if you were 82 years old. I hope he enjoys every day he has left, spending as much time as he can spoiling his grandkids and telling Zachary Quinto more about the Zen of Spock.
One of the things I learned in a certain Twelve Step program I've worked the steps in for many years is that death is just another part of life, only the final part, and one that comes to everyone at some time or another. There is not much point in being concerned about the how and when of that final moment in this existence. It just wastes energy and brain cycles that can be better spent on other endeavors. While I do have plans for the future, never want to retire, and my fondest wish is to drop dead at my desk at work, I will accept when it's my time to go. I will probably be disappointed in some ways since there are some things I want to do in life, but that's just human.
And since it seems to be obligatory these days, FUCK the BETA, it really is bad.
The only malware I have to give the FBI is a pair of my dirty underwear which I've worn for about three or four days without showering while hiking in the desert in the summer time with a bad case of hemorrhoids. However, the Slashdot BETA would be a good second choice. It stinks almost as much as my dirty underwear.
Please check that your memory is not corrupt. You might have a real hardware problem. I've had a number of cases where I had bad ram, e.g. doing a memcheck at boot failed. It's amazing that the OS could run at all in these cases, but it did. Installing new applications and moving big files were problematic, but everything else worked.
I'll check the memory but I doubt that's the problem. The laptop is a year old and only rarely gets used. It's asleep most of the time.
Two weeks ago after I upgraded to 8.1 I found that I could not copy multi-GB files to a flash drive. The copy would start the copy process but very soon afterward it the transfer rate would get slower and slower and eventually hit 0 and stay there. Eventually, the OS would stop it with some stupid error. Rebooting in safe mode and trying again allows the copy to be completed but you'd never know it because the graphical display showing the copy STILL shows it stalling although the LED on the flash drive continues to indicate that it's being written to. Eventually, the graphical display will catch up with what is being copied and it appears that half a gigabyte was copied to the drive in a couple seconds.
How in the name of hell did 8.1 ever get passed QA with such an obvious bug? Has Windows gotten so huge and clunky and full of bloat that even the code for a simple file copy is riddled with bugs?
Suffice it to say, I don't use that machine very often except when I have to use Windows.
When I first read this story I was amazed to read that someone was still using a printing press to print phony money. I thought only the North Koreans did that because their fakes are printed using the intaglio printing method, the same one used by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing to print American money. You're not going to get that from an offset press.
switch to australian made notes, i'd like to see them try and replicate those notes!
Yes, I've advocated the US switching to Aussie plastic ever since my first experience with it when I visited Oz in 1995. Canada is now doing it and Mexico has been using it for several years. Even the damn Romanians are using it! The polymer money has its detractors (it's slippery and doesn't fold nicely unless you put a book on the fold for a month and then you can't get the fold out) but it's pretty much damn impossible to counterfeit unless you're a government. And I suspect even the North Koreans will have trouble with it since I have no doubt the Aussies will ever license the technology to them for obvious reasons.
I have a hard time believing that people are spending hundreds of dollars on average in vet bills on their pets. My beloved but very evil black cat goes to the vet once a year to get her shots and a quick physical. $100 max. She's an indoor cat, very healthy, eats dry food mostly but gets a bit of Greek yogurt from me sometimes, and has never seen let alone eaten a mouse. Spending these big bucks on a healthy pet is nonsense.
... as I get older I find that I get wiser. But it also fills up with useless information. The next time someone says to me, "You're full of shit," they may be accurate for a change.
I second this opinion. I've been using Open Office in order to avoid paying the Microsoft tax on my Macs. It works very well for what I use it for. It has little quirks which I've been able to figure out but MS Office is no different in that regard; they're just different quirks. And that damned ribbon menu is nowhere to be seen. That is a blessing.
Surely there is something more important for the editors to post on Slashdot today. Perhaps Obama's willingness to legislate by executive order (sometimes known as "dictatorship") in order to bypass a Congress that appears to be unwilling to do anything. That's just something I picked off the top of my head. A new species of river dolphin was announced yesterday. Surely that is more newsworthy than this. And the fact that Justin Bieber hasn't gotten himself arrested again must be more newsworthy than this.
This kind of thing has happened before. The ancient Library of Alexandria was much more than a library. It was a government -funded research facility and think tank where many of the greatest minds of the ancient world worked. Granted that it was not a public library like those found in ancient Rome, it's not a surprise at all that public libraries would try to enter this space in at least some form.
Worst attorney general ever? Oh, if only memory were not so short. I think John Ashcroft was pretty bad. And let's not forget that embarrassment Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson's last attorney general.
Edward Snowden's situation is most difficult to analyze. If all he did was reveal the NSA's surveillance on American citizens then I would say he deserves a full pardon and the awarding of the Medal of Freedom from the president. He did us as much of a service as Daniel Ellsberg did when he spilled the beans by giving the New York Times the Pentagon Papers, demonstrating the Lyndon Johnson's administration systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress about the government's involvement in Vietnam.
But he did more than that; he also revealed the legal and legitimate (if somewhat dodgy in some cases) spying on those in other countries, including Angela Merkel's cell phone conversations and the penetration by the NSA of the Chinese communications infrastructure. For that he deserves a long prison sentence.
So long as your Air Force is made up of nothing but experienced pilots, you'll do fine then.
Yep. American fighter pilots regularly shot down Serbian MiG-29's in the 1990's during the NATO intervention. The MiG-29 is a very good fighter jet but only when flown by a experienced pilot.
What surprises me is the implication that this is something new. The Soviet jets seldom if ever met the specs of similar Western planes, and pretty much never met the claims made for them.
Well, historically, that has been true to a point. Originally, early jet fighters from the Soviet Union were hot stuff. The MiG-15 was the equal of the American F-86, more or less. But later, Russian fighters were later designed with the idea that they would be simpler to build and fix. The combat strategy was that they would overwhelm Western air forces in battle by sheer numbers. This theory seemed to change with the development of the MiG-29 which is a pretty good fighter when there is a good pilot sitting at the sharp end.
There is another analogue of this thinking. The German Sturmgewehr 44, the first assault rifle, was a good weapon but overly complicated. The Russian AK-47 is not as accurate but is more reliable and easier to manufacture because it has fewer parts and was designed to work when wet, dirty, muddy, etc. I dare say that jammed weapon is not much of a weapon no matter how well-engineered.
Keep in mind that the Russians can build good military equipment if they want to. The Germans in World War II learned that fact the hard way. German military equipment and vehicles was good and well-engineered but was not designed to operate in the bitter cold. Russian equipment was designed to operate in the cold and the rest is history.
During peak load, the utility ran peaker plants. This isn't unusual.
Exactly, many utilities have peaker plants for this purpose and they use something like jet engines to run generators. This is not exactly news. The utility faced a massive crunch due to the cold and they used Plan B.
Nutraloaf is this shit that some jails and prisons feed to their inmates who are in solitary confinement for punishment purposes. It sounds very nasty, not unlike this Soylent shit.
Slashdot Mirror
When is the last time you watched the original Cosmos?
Actually, I watched it last week. I have the DVD set. The series was not meant to be a pure documentary. If you wanted that, you can read the book. It was meant to be beautiful, a work of art, and the producers, cinematographers, and the editing crew did a great of creating it.
Regarding pontificating, Dr. Sagan was more preaching than pontificating. But given that the show's purpose was to teach the general public about a subject he loved and believed, something he'd spent most of his professional life doing, it was to be expected.
According to the Wikipedia entry for the series, the soundrack will be written by Alan Silvestri. He's a good film composer (I liked his score for Contact) but I think the original Cosmos had a better idea. That series used existing music, mostly classical, for its score. Some of it was removed from the DVD versions due to the expense of getting the rights to it again, but if you saw the original series, the music is one of the things that made the series special. I learned a lot about classical music from that series.
I like the idea of a remade Cosmos series. It's long overdue. However, it will be difficult for the series to be anywhere near as good as the original. The original was a mix of great writing, great music, especially the classical numbers, and the love of the subject that Carl Sagan had. Dr. Sagan wasn't just host and co-writer of the series, he was THE high priest of popular science as that time and when he spoke, he was preaching like a Bible-thumping evangelist, only without the southern drawl. While Neil de Grasse Tyson has done a lot of work to fill that role, he's not Carl Sagan. Still, I look forward to seeing this series. Since I don't usually watch TV, I'll have to get a digital TV antenna.
Does anyone get the impression that our civilization is doomed? Short of finding a way of making practical nuclear fusion reactors work, something that has been always "30 years from now" since the time I was in middle school forty years ago, there seems to be no solution to our future energy needs that don't do evil things to our planet's climate that eventually will doom our civilization. So, in my mind, there are three alternatives: mass suicide, going off the grid and reverting to the behavior of our hunter/gatherer ancestors, or "drill, baby, drill". I don't like any of them but every solution seems to have its own very evil side effects. So I'm going to continue to burn fossil fuels and thank my lucky stars that I won't live to see "the end".
Maybe I'm just an ostrich who prefers to stick his head in a hole rather than face the future with more optimism.
If it were yes, the paid Dice minions who are working on the Slashdot Beta will be working for free for a long time.
Returning to all seriousness now, software development is by its very nature an imperfect activity and will, as a result, result in buggy code, especially if it is rushed and not well designed. When I was in school a long time ago toward the end of the mainframe age, I was told by one of my professors that IBM once studied the problem of the creation and fixing of bugs. Their results was that for every bug fixed, two more bugs are created. If this were true (and I believe it is), we coders would always be working for free. I don't like that idea.
Our friend Leonard Nimoy is probably feeling very mortal these days. So would you if you were 82 years old. I hope he enjoys every day he has left, spending as much time as he can spoiling his grandkids and telling Zachary Quinto more about the Zen of Spock.
One of the things I learned in a certain Twelve Step program I've worked the steps in for many years is that death is just another part of life, only the final part, and one that comes to everyone at some time or another. There is not much point in being concerned about the how and when of that final moment in this existence. It just wastes energy and brain cycles that can be better spent on other endeavors. While I do have plans for the future, never want to retire, and my fondest wish is to drop dead at my desk at work, I will accept when it's my time to go. I will probably be disappointed in some ways since there are some things I want to do in life, but that's just human.
And since it seems to be obligatory these days, FUCK the BETA, it really is bad.
The only malware I have to give the FBI is a pair of my dirty underwear which I've worn for about three or four days without showering while hiking in the desert in the summer time with a bad case of hemorrhoids. However, the Slashdot BETA would be a good second choice. It stinks almost as much as my dirty underwear.
Please check that your memory is not corrupt. You might have a real hardware problem. I've had a number of cases where I had bad ram, e.g. doing a memcheck at boot failed. It's amazing that the OS could run at all in these cases, but it did. Installing new applications and moving big files were problematic, but everything else worked .
I'll check the memory but I doubt that's the problem. The laptop is a year old and only rarely gets used. It's asleep most of the time.
Might be just your machine. I've used several different flash drives to copy multi-GB images on Windows 8.
It worked before the upgrade to 8.1.
... here's why.
Two weeks ago after I upgraded to 8.1 I found that I could not copy multi-GB files to a flash drive. The copy would start the copy process but very soon afterward it the transfer rate would get slower and slower and eventually hit 0 and stay there. Eventually, the OS would stop it with some stupid error. Rebooting in safe mode and trying again allows the copy to be completed but you'd never know it because the graphical display showing the copy STILL shows it stalling although the LED on the flash drive continues to indicate that it's being written to. Eventually, the graphical display will catch up with what is being copied and it appears that half a gigabyte was copied to the drive in a couple seconds.
How in the name of hell did 8.1 ever get passed QA with such an obvious bug? Has Windows gotten so huge and clunky and full of bloat that even the code for a simple file copy is riddled with bugs?
Suffice it to say, I don't use that machine very often except when I have to use Windows.
When I first read this story I was amazed to read that someone was still using a printing press to print phony money. I thought only the North Koreans did that because their fakes are printed using the intaglio printing method, the same one used by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing to print American money. You're not going to get that from an offset press.
switch to australian made notes, i'd like to see them try and replicate those notes!
Yes, I've advocated the US switching to Aussie plastic ever since my first experience with it when I visited Oz in 1995. Canada is now doing it and Mexico has been using it for several years. Even the damn Romanians are using it! The polymer money has its detractors (it's slippery and doesn't fold nicely unless you put a book on the fold for a month and then you can't get the fold out) but it's pretty much damn impossible to counterfeit unless you're a government. And I suspect even the North Koreans will have trouble with it since I have no doubt the Aussies will ever license the technology to them for obvious reasons.
I have a hard time believing that people are spending hundreds of dollars on average in vet bills on their pets. My beloved but very evil black cat goes to the vet once a year to get her shots and a quick physical. $100 max. She's an indoor cat, very healthy, eats dry food mostly but gets a bit of Greek yogurt from me sometimes, and has never seen let alone eaten a mouse. Spending these big bucks on a healthy pet is nonsense.
... as I get older I find that I get wiser. But it also fills up with useless information. The next time someone says to me, "You're full of shit," they may be accurate for a change.
I second this opinion. I've been using Open Office in order to avoid paying the Microsoft tax on my Macs. It works very well for what I use it for. It has little quirks which I've been able to figure out but MS Office is no different in that regard; they're just different quirks. And that damned ribbon menu is nowhere to be seen. That is a blessing.
20% of people are nigger's. Coincadanse I think not.
Apparently your have more Neanderthal genes than the average. You obviously are too stupid to know how to spell or turn on your OS's spell checker.
Surely there is something more important for the editors to post on Slashdot today. Perhaps Obama's willingness to legislate by executive order (sometimes known as "dictatorship") in order to bypass a Congress that appears to be unwilling to do anything. That's just something I picked off the top of my head. A new species of river dolphin was announced yesterday. Surely that is more newsworthy than this. And the fact that Justin Bieber hasn't gotten himself arrested again must be more newsworthy than this.
The PT Cruiser is the ugliest vehicle ever made, hands down.
Then it's appropriate that my ex-wife got her purple PT Cruiser as part of the divorce settlement.
This kind of thing has happened before. The ancient Library of Alexandria was much more than a library. It was a government -funded research facility and think tank where many of the greatest minds of the ancient world worked. Granted that it was not a public library like those found in ancient Rome, it's not a surprise at all that public libraries would try to enter this space in at least some form.
Worst attorney general ever? Oh, if only memory were not so short. I think John Ashcroft was pretty bad. And let's not forget that embarrassment Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson's last attorney general.
A pardon or prison? What to give?
Edward Snowden's situation is most difficult to analyze. If all he did was reveal the NSA's surveillance on American citizens then I would say he deserves a full pardon and the awarding of the Medal of Freedom from the president. He did us as much of a service as Daniel Ellsberg did when he spilled the beans by giving the New York Times the Pentagon Papers, demonstrating the Lyndon Johnson's administration systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress about the government's involvement in Vietnam.
But he did more than that; he also revealed the legal and legitimate (if somewhat dodgy in some cases) spying on those in other countries, including Angela Merkel's cell phone conversations and the penetration by the NSA of the Chinese communications infrastructure. For that he deserves a long prison sentence.
So long as your Air Force is made up of nothing but experienced pilots, you'll do fine then.
Yep. American fighter pilots regularly shot down Serbian MiG-29's in the 1990's during the NATO intervention. The MiG-29 is a very good fighter jet but only when flown by a experienced pilot.
What surprises me is the implication that this is something new. The Soviet jets seldom if ever met the specs of similar Western planes, and pretty much never met the claims made for them.
Well, historically, that has been true to a point. Originally, early jet fighters from the Soviet Union were hot stuff. The MiG-15 was the equal of the American F-86, more or less. But later, Russian fighters were later designed with the idea that they would be simpler to build and fix. The combat strategy was that they would overwhelm Western air forces in battle by sheer numbers. This theory seemed to change with the development of the MiG-29 which is a pretty good fighter when there is a good pilot sitting at the sharp end.
There is another analogue of this thinking. The German Sturmgewehr 44, the first assault rifle, was a good weapon but overly complicated. The Russian AK-47 is not as accurate but is more reliable and easier to manufacture because it has fewer parts and was designed to work when wet, dirty, muddy, etc. I dare say that jammed weapon is not much of a weapon no matter how well-engineered.
Keep in mind that the Russians can build good military equipment if they want to. The Germans in World War II learned that fact the hard way. German military equipment and vehicles was good and well-engineered but was not designed to operate in the bitter cold. Russian equipment was designed to operate in the cold and the rest is history.
During peak load, the utility ran peaker plants. This isn't unusual.
Exactly, many utilities have peaker plants for this purpose and they use something like jet engines to run generators. This is not exactly news. The utility faced a massive crunch due to the cold and they used Plan B.
Nutraloaf is this shit that some jails and prisons feed to their inmates who are in solitary confinement for punishment purposes. It sounds very nasty, not unlike this Soylent shit.