I seldom hear about the maintenance issues of the trans-bay tube.
A catastrophic failure of the trans-bay tube would certainly shut the system down for years.
Anyone knowledgeable about how that clever bit of engineering is maintained?
-S
Because the censorship covered by the First Amendment deals only with the Government.
Exactly. In the US, Republicans and Democrats alike have embraced outsourcing of government services to private companies as a means of saving money.
But what we've lost as a result is accountability, regulation and Redress. No one seems to have considered the consequences of splitting up the Public Square into a million little private squares, each setting its own rules and standards. Or, perhaps, they have considered the consequences and then gone and done it anyway.
personally I love the absurdity of their story lines. It just wouldn't be Doctor Who without it.
I agree with you its the absurdity that makes Doctor Who.
The problem I have with the rebooted Doctor Who is that the plots make absolutely no sense - even within the framework of the show. Its like the writers continually write themselves into corners that they aren't clever enough to write themselves out of. So... they just keep letting "impossible things happen."
My favorite counter-example: the movie Time Bandits. That film was totally absurd, just like Doctor Who, but it all made sense. You never got the feeling the writer was messing with you.
Its true that Science can't prove, in the mathematical sense, the non-existence of God simply because you can't mathematically prove a negative. But that's true of everything in Science, including crazy ideas such as Gravity, Electromagnetism and Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
The old trope, "Absence of proof is not proof of absence" misses the point. Absence of Evidence IS Evidence of absence.
So, it makes perfect sense to me that people with a higher level of education ( people with more evidence ) would see less need for God or a prescriptive religion.
Can you imagine spending your day reading nonsense like:
Contexts are selected and combined into new information structures called alternates, which are combinable with contexts into preferred situations. The preferred situations in turn are combinable with the foregoing components into meta-situations.
I mean, it sounds like the output of an unholy mind-meld between a scientist and a marketing manager.
The other guilty party here is us, and by us, you do mean us, among everybody else [LAUGHS] in the media. We aired an interview with Heap back in May, and we were quite impressed with his story. You say that Heap has proved to be catnip for the media. Why do you think his narrative is so appealing?
That's an admission you don't hear too often in the press, oblique though it was.
...then we sure as hell aren't going to be able to get robotic characters to act human.
CGI animators, in some sense, have a much easier task then the roboticist. Its much easier to program a full musculature into an animated character than to physically build a robotic one.
The difficulty of all this is exemplified by Robert Zemeckis' dismal "Polar Express" and "A Christmas Carol". Even when capturing hundreds of control points on the faces of the actors, you're still left teetering on the edge of the Uncanny Valley.
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and "Avatar" were more successful because they did complete surface capture of the actors faces rather than point-capture.
Which gets back to the difficulty of making robots appear human. Its the same problem, magnified 1000 times by the fact that, in essence, you have to pack the equivalent of a millions of "control-points" into the robots face.
... or any other isolated work environment, like a submarine, military base, etc.
But as soon as those plastic sheets start making it home in people's brief-cases and notepads, the cost of operation starts to creep up.
Its an interesting niche product that solves one problem ( consumables ) at the expense of creating another problem ( proprietary, expensive print substrate ).
To an author, I think the attraction of Science Fiction is that it allows them to put a veneer of plausibility on settings which would otherwise be too fantastic to be credible. This allows them the freedom to explore ideas or situations which couldn't possibly occur if set in "the real world."
But the current world has become sufficiently complex and interesting that writers such as William Gibson and Margaret Attwood no longer need to set their stories in some near-future dystopia - our current dystopia is sufficient to tell the stories they want to tell.
Gibson's last few books have been set in, effectively, the present day. There's no need for him to go to 2030 or beyond to explore the idea of immersive, ubiquitous computing and communication: we all have smart-phones in 2009. Everyone I see on the streets of San Francisco is walking around in a trance, like they're jacked into Cyberspace.
There's no need for Margaret Attwood to set The Handmaiden's Tail in 2195, there's plenty of opportunity to explore theocracy and coercive reproduction in the crazy, polluted and Balkanized world of the present day.
I think that Science Fiction writers who rely on the old cliches of Warp-drive and alien worlds simply aren't trying hard enough.
21st Century Earth IS an alien world... all you have to do is pay attention.
WASHINGTON -- President Reagan took time out Friday from visiting with Chad's president, tracking South Korean unrest and trying to influence a Senate trade bill to proclaim last week "National Dairy Goat Awareness Week."
Acting on a congressional resolution, Reagan praised dairy goats for their ability to thrive in harsh surroundings and for their link with American history.
There are times and places for each. Streaming lets you discover new music with little risk. Downloading lets you listen to specific music any time and any place, without regards to network conditions.
Surely, there is room in this world for both models.
I'm not very familiar with RIM's network architecture, so it wasn't clear to me whether the UAE needed RIM's help in distributing the spyware or whether it was entirely the doing of the local phone carrier in the UAE.
Would the UAE had to have had RIM's help or did they simply buy the services of the third-party spyware vendor?
This has many of the hallmarks of a pseudo-science:
The implicit assumption of a mechanistic relationship behind the supposed correlation.
An Inability to put forward a falsifiable theory based on testable hypothesis (how does it work? No, really. How. Does. It. Work?).
Unchanging over time, despite the availability of new information (is it better than an FMRI scan? If no, why? If yes, why?)
Results tainted by the confirmation bias of the psychologist (the test works, except when it doesn't. Just like Astrology and Homeopathy.)
And, finally, the fact that they are protesting the publication of these images means that they assume that the images work... but they don't know how. That's the same as the DMV forbidding the publication of Eye-Charts to prevent blind people from getting their driver's license. As if we know those specific eye-charts work for testing eye-sight, but we don't know how they work and cannot, therefore, make new or better eye-charts.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar... and this cigar smells like bullshit.
...the FBI is carrying out a Chicken investigation using Chicken guidelines on what is and is not constitutional, and as part of that investigation they've compelled the Chicken of a service provider and are using a Chicken justification to argue that nobody's First Amendment rights are being violated.
Slashdot Mirror
I seldom hear about the maintenance issues of the trans-bay tube.
A catastrophic failure of the trans-bay tube would certainly shut the system down for years.
Anyone knowledgeable about how that clever bit of engineering is maintained?
-S
$5000 is not enough for me to watch Bio-Dome.
-S
...because I know some harry-nosed wombats who would prefer it if we weren't.
-S
Marry Me.
-S
Exactly. In the US, Republicans and Democrats alike have embraced outsourcing of government services to private companies as a means of saving money.
But what we've lost as a result is accountability, regulation and Redress. No one seems to have considered the consequences of splitting up the Public Square into a million little private squares, each setting its own rules and standards. Or, perhaps, they have considered the consequences and then gone and done it anyway.
-S
I agree with you its the absurdity that makes Doctor Who.
The problem I have with the rebooted Doctor Who is that the plots make absolutely no sense - even within the framework of the show. Its like the writers continually write themselves into corners that they aren't clever enough to write themselves out of. So... they just keep letting "impossible things happen."
My favorite counter-example: the movie Time Bandits. That film was totally absurd, just like Doctor Who, but it all made sense. You never got the feeling the writer was messing with you.
-S
... is here. (Pretty Sure.)
"Here's a quarter, kid. Buy yourself a decent server."
-Sean
Its true that Science can't prove, in the mathematical sense, the non-existence of God simply because you can't mathematically prove a negative. But that's true of everything in Science, including crazy ideas such as Gravity, Electromagnetism and Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
The old trope, "Absence of proof is not proof of absence" misses the point. Absence of Evidence IS Evidence of absence.
So, it makes perfect sense to me that people with a higher level of education ( people with more evidence ) would see less need for God or a prescriptive religion.
-S
...it will pop your microwave popcorn simply by dangling the bag 6 inches from the antennae.
Now that's power!
-S
Can you imagine spending your day reading nonsense like:
I mean, it sounds like the output of an unholy mind-meld between a scientist and a marketing manager.
-S
That's an admission you don't hear too often in the press, oblique though it was.
-S
Now THAT is a movie I'd pay money to see.
-S
My Catholic 8-Ball says: "Signs point to Yes."
-S
CGI animators, in some sense, have a much easier task then the roboticist. Its much easier to program a full musculature into an animated character than to physically build a robotic one.
The difficulty of all this is exemplified by Robert Zemeckis' dismal "Polar Express" and "A Christmas Carol". Even when capturing hundreds of control points on the faces of the actors, you're still left teetering on the edge of the Uncanny Valley.
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and "Avatar" were more successful because they did complete surface capture of the actors faces rather than point-capture.
Which gets back to the difficulty of making robots appear human. Its the same problem, magnified 1000 times by the fact that, in essence, you have to pack the equivalent of a millions of "control-points" into the robots face.
Not an easy task.
-Sean
George W Bush.
Check And Mate. USA Wins!
-S
... or any other isolated work environment, like a submarine, military base, etc.
But as soon as those plastic sheets start making it home in people's brief-cases and notepads, the cost of operation starts to creep up.
Its an interesting niche product that solves one problem ( consumables ) at the expense of creating another problem ( proprietary, expensive print substrate ).
-S
To an author, I think the attraction of Science Fiction is that it allows them to put a veneer of plausibility on settings which would otherwise be too fantastic to be credible. This allows them the freedom to explore ideas or situations which couldn't possibly occur if set in "the real world."
But the current world has become sufficiently complex and interesting that writers such as William Gibson and Margaret Attwood no longer need to set their stories in some near-future dystopia - our current dystopia is sufficient to tell the stories they want to tell.
Gibson's last few books have been set in, effectively, the present day. There's no need for him to go to 2030 or beyond to explore the idea of immersive, ubiquitous computing and communication: we all have smart-phones in 2009. Everyone I see on the streets of San Francisco is walking around in a trance, like they're jacked into Cyberspace.
There's no need for Margaret Attwood to set The Handmaiden's Tail in 2195, there's plenty of opportunity to explore theocracy and coercive reproduction in the crazy, polluted and Balkanized world of the present day.
I think that Science Fiction writers who rely on the old cliches of Warp-drive and alien worlds simply aren't trying hard enough.
21st Century Earth IS an alien world... all you have to do is pay attention.
-Sean
G A T T A C A
-S
Agreed. In 2004, Brazil turned around and started subjecting US visitors to the same treatment the US was meting out to Brazilian travelers.
As they say on the school playground: "The United States Started it."
The 2016 Olympics should be interesting for American travelers.
-S
Or... National Dairy Goat Awareness Week
I'm glad we all have our priorities in order.
-S
There are times and places for each. Streaming lets you discover new music with little risk. Downloading lets you listen to specific music any time and any place, without regards to network conditions.
Surely, there is room in this world for both models.
-Sean
I'm not very familiar with RIM's network architecture, so it wasn't clear to me whether the UAE needed RIM's help in distributing the spyware or whether it was entirely the doing of the local phone carrier in the UAE.
Would the UAE had to have had RIM's help or did they simply buy the services of the third-party spyware vendor?
-Sean
This has many of the hallmarks of a pseudo-science:
And, finally, the fact that they are protesting the publication of these images means that they assume that the images work... but they don't know how. That's the same as the DMV forbidding the publication of Eye-Charts to prevent blind people from getting their driver's license. As if we know those specific eye-charts work for testing eye-sight, but we don't know how they work and cannot, therefore, make new or better eye-charts.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar... and this cigar smells like bullshit.
-Sean
Chicken, chicken chicken chicken chicken. Chicken. Chicken. CHICKEN!!!
-Chicken
How about the "Super-Hyper-Colossal-Magnetoresistence Effect?"
At some point, you run out of superlatives and need to go Exponential:
Magneto X 10^Super-Hyper-Colossal
-S