A rollercoaster ride has no story at all, but is still a lot of fun.
IANARCD (I am not a roller coaster designer), but I'll bet if I were I would disagree with you. A good roller coaster will take the rider through anticipation and build-up, followed by some excitement, then a few twists and turns, more build-up, more excitement, leading to a (hopefully) fulfilling conclusion. Amusement parks are all about "story."
And, to come back on topic, we watched The Eleventh Hour last night, and generally liked it, although we weren't blown away. There were some funny bits. Most of what was lacking (IMO) was the direction. The show was scattered. All the important bits were thrown in, but emphasis was off. For example, we spent an extraordinary amount of time on the fish sticks and custard stuff, but the big payoffs (calling the Atraxi back, the Doctor scaring them away) seemed to get short-changed.
I found myself more intrigued by the character of young Amelia than by Amy, almost wishing the young version was going to be the Doctor's companion. I'm sure Amy will grow on me, but Amelia's story was so touching and heartbreaking, and her interaction with the Doctor was marvelous. I loved how he talked to her no differently than he would speak to an adult.
I disagree that Matt Smith was too much like David Tennant--I didn't see that at all. He already seems a bit more like the Doctor of the old (pre-RTD) series, aloof and not as prone to falling in romantic love with his companions.
Overall I will be interested to see coming episodes, to see how the Doctor, Amy and the series shape up. I want to like it.
Oh, and was I the only one who thought the sound was cutting in and out when the new theme arrangement started up?
If you're a Doctor Who fan (and what self-respecting geek isn't?), plan out the locations you want to see while there at doctorwholocations.net. But don't spend your whole time there going from location to location. Hit a few key places, and maybe even do some that are off the beaten path. Sometimes just finding them makes for some of your most memorable trip experiences.
If you're a Neil Gaiman fan, read "Neverwhere" before you go for a helpful guide to the Underground system. Or see if you can arrange a visit to the old Highgate Cemetery West, the inspiration for his "Graveyard Book."
Buy theatre tickets ahead of time (wayyy ahead of time, if possible).
Our netbook's wireless worked just fine. One hotel had free wireless, another's was kind of pricey, but we enjoyed uploading pictures for friends and family back home.
That's an awful lot of work. Consider how many CD's and DVD's there are in the world. If even a small fraction survive, the chances are pretty good that those poor, unfortunate souls 1000 years from now will spend decades unencoding a disk, only to find it contains Britney Spears' greatest hits, or Ernest Escapes from Guantanamo. Meanwhile, the disk containing all the scientific or literary knowledge of the ages languishes untouched.
My point is, at least a judge is involved. Someone outside of the executive branch. It's a step in the right direction. I'm not saying there aren't more steps to be made, but it's head and shoulders above what we had grown accustomed to under Bush II.
They provided the judge with the specifics, and let him decide. If the Bush White House had done that, rather than declare themselves above the law, we wouldn't be so jaded about executive privilege today.
Except the Obama White House is also declaring themselves above the law - by insisting the suit be thrown out based on secret evidence rather than in open court.
If you read the article, it does not say that. The White House says they will abide by the judge's decision.
Whether they will or not is another question for another time.
I can imagine cases where making information on the warrantless wire taps available could compromise ongoing law enforcement or terrorism efforts. It could clue the bad guys into what the good guys are looking for, or even that they good guys suspect certain bad guys of being bad guys.
At the same time, I also agree that there is no need for warrantless wire taps. So I'm not justifying the new administration, or giving them a pass. Just remarking that things are getting better. Maybe if the Obama-ites have to justify themselves to a judge a few more times, they'll get the idea that they should have just gone to the judge in the first place to get a flippin' warrant. So keep the lawsuits coming!
As for the guy who said he pays for our spies, so he deserves to know exactly what they're doing, I hope he wasn't serious. If that's all it takes, then any Al Qaida operative in the U.S. just needs to pay his/her taxes to have free access to all our military secrets. Easy cheesy!
I know the previous administration had an effect on us, but it appears to me that the current administration is actually handling this the right way. It may not be transparent to *us*, but matters of national security aren't supposed to be.
They provided the judge with the specifics, and let him decide. If the Bush White House had done that, rather than declare themselves above the law, we wouldn't be so jaded about executive privilege today.
This isn't as bad as it seems, and it's actually a huge step in the right direction.
Yeah, and *none* of these being even remotely qualified or even sane enough for the job. Who's willing to throw his very existence away for a few weeks or months on Mars just has no idea what he's actually talking about and very probably has many other illusions as well.
I disagree. Especially in this age of "reality" TV and celebrities famous for being famous, I suspect there are plenty of qualified scientists and engineers who would be happy to gain a place in the history books as the first earth people to walk on another planet.
I'm not saying I'm one of them, but think about it: actually being on another planet! Can you really tell me that's not something you would be interested in? Yes, the price (never returning to earth, living the rest of your days in hardship, dying on a barren world) may be too steep for you or me, but I think it's unfair to judge someone as automatically mentally incompetent just because their priorities are different from yours.
(OK, maybe leading with reality TV stars wasn't the best idea for this sanity defense.)
It is also unfair to say their deaths would be for nothing. There would need to be major technological advances to get people that far, even without bringing them home. Plus: humans! On another planet! That is literally the stuff of science fiction.
If we're smart, the U.S. will partner with the rest of the planet, to avoid any "claiming" of Mars for any one country. Can't you just imagine another country with different priorities sending a single human on a one-way trip, just to plant a flag and lay claim to the entire planet and all minerals and materials contained therein before they died? Even a less-technologically advanced country could do that relatively quickly, while we're wasting time figuring out how to bring our guys home.
First, I also didn't like the way they glossed over the fleet's unanimous decision to forgo all technology. And I wished for a better ending for Starbuck. How about, now that her destiny is complete, she is free to be the human she should have been all along?
But when they showed up in the past, I started flashing back ("Lost" style) to the old series, and the introductory narration:
"There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. That they may have been the architects of the great pyramids, or the lost civilizations of Lemuria or Atlantis. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive somewhere beyond the heavens..." --(thanks, Wikipedia!)
So in a way they tied the new show back to that idea (sort of). Plus, remember the big white crystal ships, and the cool white uniformed Starbuck and Apollo? There was an advanced race that was sort of looking out for the fleet.
When Kara found her dead body on Old Earth, the writers had so many options open to them. We knew the old occupants had resurrection technology. Maybe they didn't all die out, and there was an advanced colony hidden somewhere nearby. And their resurrection tech is so advanced, it even works on humans (and vipers!). I mean, someone built her factory fresh spaceship!
Other random thoughts:
Why wouldn't Adm Adama come back after burying Laura? Why wouldn't he want to be near his family after suffering a loss like that? And how would Lee "know" that his father was going to go all hermit on everyone?
What was the Cylons "Plan?" Yes, I know there's another movie coming out to explain that, but we spent the first 2 or 3 seasons being told "And they have a plan," only to have said plan kind of fizzle out. At first it seemed they wanted there to be survivors, so they could experiment with making hybrid babies, or learning about emotions, or teaching the humans to say "Oh my god" instead of "Oh my gods." But by the end, they were just as lost as the humans. "And they have a plan" was brilliant as a way of making the Cylons into a truly terrifying enemy who is always going to be one step ahead of you, and making you second-guess every decision. But it turned out to be just a cool line.
The world has changed a lot since the miniseries. The events of 9/11/2001 (quick aside, do people in other countries refer to it as 11/9?) no longer haunt us the way they did back then. The reign of King Dubya is over, and we will be dealing with the fallout for years/decades to come. It would have been nice to see that reflected in the finale more, with more emphasis on humans and Cylons putting aside their differences and working together to dig themselves out of the hole they have created. (But I know the show finished production long before last year's election.)
On the whole, it was a fun ride, and the ending fell a little flat. I'm grateful the ending wasn't so bad that it will sour my memory of the show's earlier glories. (Remember Galactica jumping into the atmosphere of New Caprica? Remember Pegasus ramming the Base Stars? Remember Boomer showing up with the Cylons at the end of the miniseries? Remember Starbuck always ending up in the brig? Remember Lee and Kara's attraction even though--or because--they were totally wrong for each other? Remember Starbuck waggling the Raider's wings? Good times!)
While this particular study may have been done by a party with a vested interest in the outcome, results like this are not new. I remember reading a blurb in eWeek several years ago comparing the number of infections on an XP computer being run as an admin, a power user, and a restricted user. There was very little difference between admin and power user, but a huge improvement running as user. Since then I have run as a user, and successfully used Run As or fallen back to logging out and logging in as admin when absolutely necessary. (OK, for some legacy apps I've gone into their Program Files directory and changed the permissions so users can write. Not the best solution, but it worked.)
The thing that worries me about UAC is that, even when it's used correctly, it lulls the average user into a false sense of security. Users are being trained to click on the Approve button. They have to do this so many times each day, even when not doing anything that they would consider important or administrative, that it will be a piece of p1$$ for malware authors to simply get users to click Approve and be done with it.
The thing I don't understand about this article is what they mean by running in admin mode in Vista, because I thought it was all user and UAC. Are there different levels of UAC?
Sure, supporting sentient life may be what the universe is for, but who says humanity qualifies?
I'm only halfway baiting here. But maybe we were given this planet as a test. If we manage to avoid destroying it--or more importantly, ourselves--then we pass.
I would be interested to hear some follow-up details as the dog grows. This would be an excellent opportunity to discover how much of a dog's "personality" might be genetically determined. It would be a poor scientific study, because Lancey's owners are far from impartial, and indeed assuming they raised the original, their methods may not have changed much. But wouldn't it be interesting to know if the copy chases his tail the same way, or has the same favorite food?
When our lab was a puppy, he would only turn around to the right. We couldn't, for the life of us, get him to turn a circle to the left. He outgrew it, but that's such an odd quirk, I wonder if a clone would do the same thing.
I don't wonder $155,000 worth. In fact, I'm in the camp thinking how much the local humane society could have done with that check. But since they chose to buy a clone puppy, I would be interested to know how it turns out for them.
With the mutual threats of anthropogenic and natural ecological disasters that could wipe out all life (or at least all human life) on earth, the elephant in the room is that we could face extinction if we don't expand beyond our birth-planet in time.
But one question that nobody has been asking (with the possible exception of the writers and producers of Battlestar Galactica) remains: is humankind worth saving?
If our descendants do manage to escape certain (eventual) doom on this world, will they just go to other worlds and wreak the same havoc on them? Or will we, in the process of expanding our knowledge and abilities toward the goal of colonization of other worlds, solve the problems we face here at home?
Some other possibilities:
1) We won't make it in time. Humanity dies out. God rolls a new character and tries again.
2) Only those (pick at least one) smart, fast, strong, adaptable, short, hairy, radiation-resistant, or horny enough will succeed in colonizing space and other planets, and will create a new race quite different from humanity as we know it.
3) Human bodies will be deemed unacceptable for existence in space, and will be replaced with some other form (mechanical, bionic, cylon, who knows?) which will then colonize space and other worlds with yet another race very different from humanity.
4) None of the above.
...that couldn't already be done through an OS vulnerability?
First, for any code to even touch the CPU, it has to be executed. Is there another way to inject code into the CPU that I'm missing?
And if the worst it can do is crash the computer, then won't people eventually learn not to [run that program/visit that web site]?
The fact that it may be able to crash Windows, Linux and Mac computers that open the same program or web site isn't that exciting to me. And I can't see any way an attacker could leverage a CPU flaw into root access on every OS. Root access is an OS thing, not a CPU thing. Right?
What would Schneier Say?
The scariest part about this system is what happens when the wrong people (who might even work for the airlines and be thought to be the "right" people) get control of it.
Obviously any real hijacker is going to cut the thing off before starting the hijacking. So, much like Microsoft's copy protection systems that seem to only punish those of us who are playing nice, and barely inconvenience the scoundrels, this system will only work to punish the innocent.
If DHS is actually interested in this product based on that video, then DHS needs a crash course in consumer skepticism, before they purchase some magic anti-terrorism beans.
Slashdot Mirror
A rollercoaster ride has no story at all, but is still a lot of fun.
IANARCD (I am not a roller coaster designer), but I'll bet if I were I would disagree with you. A good roller coaster will take the rider through anticipation and build-up, followed by some excitement, then a few twists and turns, more build-up, more excitement, leading to a (hopefully) fulfilling conclusion. Amusement parks are all about "story."
And, to come back on topic, we watched The Eleventh Hour last night, and generally liked it, although we weren't blown away. There were some funny bits. Most of what was lacking (IMO) was the direction. The show was scattered. All the important bits were thrown in, but emphasis was off. For example, we spent an extraordinary amount of time on the fish sticks and custard stuff, but the big payoffs (calling the Atraxi back, the Doctor scaring them away) seemed to get short-changed.
I found myself more intrigued by the character of young Amelia than by Amy, almost wishing the young version was going to be the Doctor's companion. I'm sure Amy will grow on me, but Amelia's story was so touching and heartbreaking, and her interaction with the Doctor was marvelous. I loved how he talked to her no differently than he would speak to an adult.
I disagree that Matt Smith was too much like David Tennant--I didn't see that at all. He already seems a bit more like the Doctor of the old (pre-RTD) series, aloof and not as prone to falling in romantic love with his companions.
Overall I will be interested to see coming episodes, to see how the Doctor, Amy and the series shape up. I want to like it.
Oh, and was I the only one who thought the sound was cutting in and out when the new theme arrangement started up?
If you're a Doctor Who fan (and what self-respecting geek isn't?), plan out the locations you want to see while there at doctorwholocations.net. But don't spend your whole time there going from location to location. Hit a few key places, and maybe even do some that are off the beaten path. Sometimes just finding them makes for some of your most memorable trip experiences.
If you're a Neil Gaiman fan, read "Neverwhere" before you go for a helpful guide to the Underground system. Or see if you can arrange a visit to the old Highgate Cemetery West, the inspiration for his "Graveyard Book."
Buy theatre tickets ahead of time (wayyy ahead of time, if possible).
Our netbook's wireless worked just fine. One hotel had free wireless, another's was kind of pricey, but we enjoyed uploading pictures for friends and family back home.
That's an awful lot of work. Consider how many CD's and DVD's there are in the world. If even a small fraction survive, the chances are pretty good that those poor, unfortunate souls 1000 years from now will spend decades unencoding a disk, only to find it contains Britney Spears' greatest hits, or Ernest Escapes from Guantanamo. Meanwhile, the disk containing all the scientific or literary knowledge of the ages languishes untouched.
Windows 7 is still clunky, slow, and unstable.
Citation needed. I use Windows 7 and it's certainly not one of those.
Which one?
My point is, at least a judge is involved. Someone outside of the executive branch. It's a step in the right direction. I'm not saying there aren't more steps to be made, but it's head and shoulders above what we had grown accustomed to under Bush II.
Except the Obama White House is also declaring themselves above the law - by insisting the suit be thrown out based on secret evidence rather than in open court.
If you read the article, it does not say that. The White House says they will abide by the judge's decision.
Whether they will or not is another question for another time.
I can imagine cases where making information on the warrantless wire taps available could compromise ongoing law enforcement or terrorism efforts. It could clue the bad guys into what the good guys are looking for, or even that they good guys suspect certain bad guys of being bad guys.
At the same time, I also agree that there is no need for warrantless wire taps. So I'm not justifying the new administration, or giving them a pass. Just remarking that things are getting better. Maybe if the Obama-ites have to justify themselves to a judge a few more times, they'll get the idea that they should have just gone to the judge in the first place to get a flippin' warrant. So keep the lawsuits coming!
As for the guy who said he pays for our spies, so he deserves to know exactly what they're doing, I hope he wasn't serious. If that's all it takes, then any Al Qaida operative in the U.S. just needs to pay his/her taxes to have free access to all our military secrets. Easy cheesy!
I know the previous administration had an effect on us, but it appears to me that the current administration is actually handling this the right way. It may not be transparent to *us*, but matters of national security aren't supposed to be.
They provided the judge with the specifics, and let him decide. If the Bush White House had done that, rather than declare themselves above the law, we wouldn't be so jaded about executive privilege today.
This isn't as bad as it seems, and it's actually a huge step in the right direction.
Yeah, and *none* of these being even remotely qualified or even sane enough for the job. Who's willing to throw his very existence away for a few weeks or months on Mars just has no idea what he's actually talking about and very probably has many other illusions as well.
I disagree. Especially in this age of "reality" TV and celebrities famous for being famous, I suspect there are plenty of qualified scientists and engineers who would be happy to gain a place in the history books as the first earth people to walk on another planet.
I'm not saying I'm one of them, but think about it: actually being on another planet! Can you really tell me that's not something you would be interested in? Yes, the price (never returning to earth, living the rest of your days in hardship, dying on a barren world) may be too steep for you or me, but I think it's unfair to judge someone as automatically mentally incompetent just because their priorities are different from yours.
(OK, maybe leading with reality TV stars wasn't the best idea for this sanity defense.)
It is also unfair to say their deaths would be for nothing. There would need to be major technological advances to get people that far, even without bringing them home. Plus: humans! On another planet! That is literally the stuff of science fiction.
If we're smart, the U.S. will partner with the rest of the planet, to avoid any "claiming" of Mars for any one country. Can't you just imagine another country with different priorities sending a single human on a one-way trip, just to plant a flag and lay claim to the entire planet and all minerals and materials contained therein before they died? Even a less-technologically advanced country could do that relatively quickly, while we're wasting time figuring out how to bring our guys home.
The space race is on! Again!
First, I also didn't like the way they glossed over the fleet's unanimous decision to forgo all technology. And I wished for a better ending for Starbuck. How about, now that her destiny is complete, she is free to be the human she should have been all along?
But when they showed up in the past, I started flashing back ("Lost" style) to the old series, and the introductory narration:
"There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. That they may have been the architects of the great pyramids, or the lost civilizations of Lemuria or Atlantis. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive somewhere beyond the heavens..." --(thanks, Wikipedia!)
So in a way they tied the new show back to that idea (sort of). Plus, remember the big white crystal ships, and the cool white uniformed Starbuck and Apollo? There was an advanced race that was sort of looking out for the fleet.
When Kara found her dead body on Old Earth, the writers had so many options open to them. We knew the old occupants had resurrection technology. Maybe they didn't all die out, and there was an advanced colony hidden somewhere nearby. And their resurrection tech is so advanced, it even works on humans (and vipers!). I mean, someone built her factory fresh spaceship!
Other random thoughts:
Why wouldn't Adm Adama come back after burying Laura? Why wouldn't he want to be near his family after suffering a loss like that? And how would Lee "know" that his father was going to go all hermit on everyone?
What was the Cylons "Plan?" Yes, I know there's another movie coming out to explain that, but we spent the first 2 or 3 seasons being told "And they have a plan," only to have said plan kind of fizzle out. At first it seemed they wanted there to be survivors, so they could experiment with making hybrid babies, or learning about emotions, or teaching the humans to say "Oh my god" instead of "Oh my gods." But by the end, they were just as lost as the humans. "And they have a plan" was brilliant as a way of making the Cylons into a truly terrifying enemy who is always going to be one step ahead of you, and making you second-guess every decision. But it turned out to be just a cool line.
The world has changed a lot since the miniseries. The events of 9/11/2001 (quick aside, do people in other countries refer to it as 11/9?) no longer haunt us the way they did back then. The reign of King Dubya is over, and we will be dealing with the fallout for years/decades to come. It would have been nice to see that reflected in the finale more, with more emphasis on humans and Cylons putting aside their differences and working together to dig themselves out of the hole they have created. (But I know the show finished production long before last year's election.)
On the whole, it was a fun ride, and the ending fell a little flat. I'm grateful the ending wasn't so bad that it will sour my memory of the show's earlier glories. (Remember Galactica jumping into the atmosphere of New Caprica? Remember Pegasus ramming the Base Stars? Remember Boomer showing up with the Cylons at the end of the miniseries? Remember Starbuck always ending up in the brig? Remember Lee and Kara's attraction even though--or because--they were totally wrong for each other? Remember Starbuck waggling the Raider's wings? Good times!)
While this particular study may have been done by a party with a vested interest in the outcome, results like this are not new. I remember reading a blurb in eWeek several years ago comparing the number of infections on an XP computer being run as an admin, a power user, and a restricted user. There was very little difference between admin and power user, but a huge improvement running as user. Since then I have run as a user, and successfully used Run As or fallen back to logging out and logging in as admin when absolutely necessary. (OK, for some legacy apps I've gone into their Program Files directory and changed the permissions so users can write. Not the best solution, but it worked.)
The thing that worries me about UAC is that, even when it's used correctly, it lulls the average user into a false sense of security. Users are being trained to click on the Approve button. They have to do this so many times each day, even when not doing anything that they would consider important or administrative, that it will be a piece of p1$$ for malware authors to simply get users to click Approve and be done with it.
The thing I don't understand about this article is what they mean by running in admin mode in Vista, because I thought it was all user and UAC. Are there different levels of UAC?
Sure, supporting sentient life may be what the universe is for, but who says humanity qualifies?
I'm only halfway baiting here. But maybe we were given this planet as a test. If we manage to avoid destroying it--or more importantly, ourselves--then we pass.
I would be interested to hear some follow-up details as the dog grows. This would be an excellent opportunity to discover how much of a dog's "personality" might be genetically determined. It would be a poor scientific study, because Lancey's owners are far from impartial, and indeed assuming they raised the original, their methods may not have changed much. But wouldn't it be interesting to know if the copy chases his tail the same way, or has the same favorite food?
When our lab was a puppy, he would only turn around to the right. We couldn't, for the life of us, get him to turn a circle to the left. He outgrew it, but that's such an odd quirk, I wonder if a clone would do the same thing.
I don't wonder $155,000 worth. In fact, I'm in the camp thinking how much the local humane society could have done with that check. But since they chose to buy a clone puppy, I would be interested to know how it turns out for them.
With the mutual threats of anthropogenic and natural ecological disasters that could wipe out all life (or at least all human life) on earth, the elephant in the room is that we could face extinction if we don't expand beyond our birth-planet in time.
But one question that nobody has been asking (with the possible exception of the writers and producers of Battlestar Galactica) remains: is humankind worth saving?
If our descendants do manage to escape certain (eventual) doom on this world, will they just go to other worlds and wreak the same havoc on them? Or will we, in the process of expanding our knowledge and abilities toward the goal of colonization of other worlds, solve the problems we face here at home? Some other possibilities: 1) We won't make it in time. Humanity dies out. God rolls a new character and tries again. 2) Only those (pick at least one) smart, fast, strong, adaptable, short, hairy, radiation-resistant, or horny enough will succeed in colonizing space and other planets, and will create a new race quite different from humanity as we know it. 3) Human bodies will be deemed unacceptable for existence in space, and will be replaced with some other form (mechanical, bionic, cylon, who knows?) which will then colonize space and other worlds with yet another race very different from humanity. 4) None of the above.
All that talk about the mythical importance, and you never once used the words "phallic" and "symbol?"
...that couldn't already be done through an OS vulnerability? First, for any code to even touch the CPU, it has to be executed. Is there another way to inject code into the CPU that I'm missing? And if the worst it can do is crash the computer, then won't people eventually learn not to [run that program/visit that web site]? The fact that it may be able to crash Windows, Linux and Mac computers that open the same program or web site isn't that exciting to me. And I can't see any way an attacker could leverage a CPU flaw into root access on every OS. Root access is an OS thing, not a CPU thing. Right?
What would Schneier Say? The scariest part about this system is what happens when the wrong people (who might even work for the airlines and be thought to be the "right" people) get control of it. Obviously any real hijacker is going to cut the thing off before starting the hijacking. So, much like Microsoft's copy protection systems that seem to only punish those of us who are playing nice, and barely inconvenience the scoundrels, this system will only work to punish the innocent. If DHS is actually interested in this product based on that video, then DHS needs a crash course in consumer skepticism, before they purchase some magic anti-terrorism beans.