If you are on a ship, the thing under your feet is a deck. If you are on land, the thing under your feet is either a floor or the ground. It doesn't matter if you are a jarhead, swabbie, grunt, zoomie, or civilian -- it's the English language. Call the thing by it's proper name. If you're in a building in the middle of the fucking desert, don't try and pretend that you're on a fucking boat. You don't hear people in the Air Force using aviation terminology to describe anything other than aircraft parts, do you? I never did.
Well, obviously they must be of some use to someone, because otherwise they wouldn't be routinely selling for several hundred dollars on E-Bay. We're not talking beanie babies or barbie dolls here -- a computer is a useful tool, not a collectable. (Well, I'm sure there are some computer collecters out there, but not enough to account for the volume of sales evident on E-Bay.) Noone in thier right mind is going to spend $300 on an obsolete peice of hardware unless they think it is a better value for their money than new hardware of the same price.
If I need a cheap reliable server, I'd buy a good used enterprise-grade machine off of E-Bay before I'd build a "server" out of consumer grade desktop parts. If you don't understand why, then you're not a real sysadmin.
IIRC, Micheal Jackson, at the apex of his popularity, was making the princely sum of $1 per CD, which (at the time) was the *highest* *ever* per-unit royalty paid to *any* major-label act. Even moderately successful bands only get a few cents per unit, and then have to pay most of it back to the record company for promotional fees and what-not.
"Utilities" is Marine-speak for what everyone else calls "fatigues". Marines feel that they have to give everything a different name to preserve their macho image: door = hatch, floor/ground = deck, wall = bulkhead, bathroom = head, etc. It's kind of like 1337-speak with testosterone poisoning. Guess what, guys: using nautical terminology to describe things on dry land isn't macho, it's childish.
Reminds me of an old joke:
Tell the Marines to secure a building and they'll charge in and shoot anything that moves.
Tell the Army to secure a building and they'll surround it with concertina wire and set up defensive positions.
Tell the Navy to secure a building and they'll lock the doors and turn off the lights.
Tell the Air Force to secure a building and they'll get a 5 year lease with an option to buy.
It's the pyrophoric properties that are the real problem. When a DU round hits a target, it burns releasing a whole crapload of very fine, easily inhaled particles. Particles which happen to be alpha emitters as well as being a toxic heavy metal. Yeah, your clothes will stop alpha particles but that doesn't help you much when they're lodged in your lungs.
Bottom line is that DU contaminates the battlefield for long after the battle is over, which is in direct violation of the Geneva Convention. Isn't it amazing how the innocent sounding "DU ordinance" and the scary sounding "Dirty Bomb" are effectively the exact same thing -- a device which indescriminately distributes low-grade radioactive waste over a large area? I guess that distributing radioactive material over the landscape only qualifies as using a weapon of mass distruction if you are a "terrorist".
And, before you get me wrong, I don't think that either DU or a dirty bomb is a major problem. It's the hipocricy and the double standards which I find to be far more offensive and dangerous. If we, as a nation, expect other nations to follow international law and respect international treaties, we have to lead by example. Unless we practice what we preach, we forfit the ability to claim the moral high ground.
My worst experience was pulling fibre-optic cable through a 1M diameter unventilated conduit which was infested with venomous snakes, in 110 degree heat. In a combat zone. Not exactly what I was trained to do...
Nothing beats military service for unsafe working conditions. I'm just glad that's the worst thing I had to do; I got off pretty easy compared to a lot of the people I know.
It's vital that employers pay for our time. Otherwise they just take it for granted and will abuse us
Exactly. That's something my last boss couldn't get through his head. He would give me major attitude if I had the audacity to leave on time. He worked 80 hours a week and couldn't understand why I didn't want to. Well, it might have been that my base salary was about half of his, and that unlike him, I didn't have any equity in the company. Sorry, but I'm not going to bust my ass to make you rich when you're not willing to guarantee that I'll get my fair share of the profits. And don't even get me started on how considerate it is to buy a brand new Porche 911 when you employees haven't even received a cost-of-living adjustment in two years. Or of putting your wife and brother on the payroll while refusing to even consider anyone else's spouse for a position for which they are qualified.
IIRC, Uranium has the highest density of any naturally occuring element. This is why depleted uranium (DU) is used in armor-piercing ordinance. Why build an expensive storage facility for your nuclear waste when you can shoot it at dusky-skinned foreigners? The continued widespread use of DU ordinance is one of the more shameful actions of the US military. DU weaponry violates the Geneva Convention, furthermore, it goes contrary to the stated US policy of minimizing collateral damage. Tungsten works almost as well as DU for penetrating armor, but is significantly more expensive -- DU is essentially free, because it's the waste product from the process of creating enriched Uranium.
I thought the muppets were pretty well done enough to allow suspension of disbelief. I found it refreshing to see aliens that were obviously non-human. Pilot in particular was very well done and highly believable. Rigel could have been done better, but in all I think the way he was done was more believable and less distracting than having yet another human with skin paint and head bumps. He could have been done with CGI, but given the budget they had to work with, the CGI would have been of pretty sucky quality.
Putting restrictions in software is never appropriate.
Not only because it cannot really work correctly, but because freedom is more important than such anti-crime measures, especially when they're so futile.
Replace "software" with "networks" or "servers" or "actions" or "use of my personal info" and I think you'll see the fallacy of your statements.
Actually, I see that substitution as supporting the original comment, not exposing a fallacy.
Putting artificial restrictions on $TOOL to prevent $CRIME is never appropriate because those restrictions can never accomplish their stated purpose and always have unintended side effects which hamper legitimate users. All too often, the side effects are as bad as, or worse than, the original problem. Any system devised by man can be circumvented by man. Stop blaming the tool the criminal uses and start blaming the criminal who uses the tool. You will never create a crime-free utopia by regulating technology, because technology is not the source of the problem - people are. It is a wasted effort, effort which is better spent on actually holding criminals accountable for their actions and/or identifying and addressing the underlying root causes of crime.
Would you prefer perhaps a system based on range & bearing from lander? Scientific? Yes. Accessable? No. When you are dealing with $800M of the taxpayer's money, you have to play the PR game if you want to keep doing science.
Remember that show business is business. When determining whether a movie was a flop or not, the box office total is meaningless without knowing how much it cost to make. A movie that makes a 2:1 or better return on investment is a success, irrespective of it's artistic merit. A movie which loses money or only turns a very small profit is a flop. A movie which cost $10M to make and makes $40M is a success; a movie which cost $50M to make and brings in $40M is a flop, even though they both were seen by the same number of people.
Of course, alienating your core audience to try and reach a broader audience is just plain stupidity and shortsightedness, especially when dealing with a franchise operation. Keep your core fans happy and they'll keep coming back for more. A moderately successful franchise will make more money in the long run than a single blockbuster.
I would too. The "miniseries" was pretty good, up until the last 10 minutes. I'm sorry, but I don't consider a two-part series pilot to be a proper miniseries. A miniseries needs to be at least 5 hours long to be worthy of the name. Remember Shogun? Now that was a miniseries.
I forget the name of the episode, but in one of the later ones (with the 7th Doctor and Ace) they had a shot of a Dalek levitating up a flight of stairs.
Frankly I thought Voyager sucked too. I think some of the best episodes came out when DS9 and TNG were on the air together. DS9 also did really well when it had to compete against Babelon 5. Voyager and Enterprise suffer(ed) from both complacancy and a lack of competition. There's definately a market for "space opera", but what the idiots in hollywood tend to forget is that the demographic which watches sci fi tends to be smarter and more critical than the general populous. Good stories and interesting characters are far more important than skin and special effects when it comes to keeping geeks interested.
Microsoft made an offer; Mr. Rowe simply made a (perfectly legal) counter-offer. If Mr. Rowe had written microsoft and said "I'll sell you my domain for $10K", it would be evidence of a bad faith registration. Instead, Microsoft initiated the transaction by sending an offer letter, so any response or negotiation related to that initial offer is in good faith.
Unfortunately that's the way things work when the big guy takes on the little guy. Take the case where Leonardo DiCaprio sued (and won) a little mom-and-pop ice cream shop in Italy because the propriators (Mr. and Mrs. DiCaprio) had the audacity to use their name for their business. Just goes to show you that right and wrong don't matter when you have enough money.
My first car was a '75 Pontiac LeMans GT w/ a 400 4-bbl. Ran like shit until my buddy helped me rip off all the pollution control crap... IIRC the owner's manual rated the engine around 200HP. Stripping the PC crap really made a huge difference -- I estimated that it went up to 300HP with no other changes.
Exactly The main benefit of a mission to mars will be the engineering knowlege gained by the effort. A cheap way to get stuff into LEO would be a fantastic spin-off, and probably a necessary first step to building an interplanetary spaceship (which would have to be built in space). Another great advance would be a sustainable self-contained biosystem, which is another requirement for interplanetary travel.
Basic research never fails to pay off in the long run. The billions invested in the Apollo missions have yielded countless pieces of spin-off technology.
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If you are on a ship, the thing under your feet is a deck. If you are on land, the thing under your feet is either a floor or the ground. It doesn't matter if you are a jarhead, swabbie, grunt, zoomie, or civilian -- it's the English language. Call the thing by it's proper name. If you're in a building in the middle of the fucking desert, don't try and pretend that you're on a fucking boat. You don't hear people in the Air Force using aviation terminology to describe anything other than aircraft parts, do you? I never did.
If I need a cheap reliable server, I'd buy a good used enterprise-grade machine off of E-Bay before I'd build a "server" out of consumer grade desktop parts. If you don't understand why, then you're not a real sysadmin.
IIRC, Micheal Jackson, at the apex of his popularity, was making the princely sum of $1 per CD, which (at the time) was the *highest* *ever* per-unit royalty paid to *any* major-label act. Even moderately successful bands only get a few cents per unit, and then have to pay most of it back to the record company for promotional fees and what-not.
Reminds me of an old joke:
Tell the Marines to secure a building and they'll charge in and shoot anything that moves.
Tell the Army to secure a building and they'll surround it with concertina wire and set up defensive positions.
Tell the Navy to secure a building and they'll lock the doors and turn off the lights.
Tell the Air Force to secure a building and they'll get a 5 year lease with an option to buy.
Bottom line is that DU contaminates the battlefield for long after the battle is over, which is in direct violation of the Geneva Convention. Isn't it amazing how the innocent sounding "DU ordinance" and the scary sounding "Dirty Bomb" are effectively the exact same thing -- a device which indescriminately distributes low-grade radioactive waste over a large area? I guess that distributing radioactive material over the landscape only qualifies as using a weapon of mass distruction if you are a "terrorist".
And, before you get me wrong, I don't think that either DU or a dirty bomb is a major problem. It's the hipocricy and the double standards which I find to be far more offensive and dangerous. If we, as a nation, expect other nations to follow international law and respect international treaties, we have to lead by example. Unless we practice what we preach, we forfit the ability to claim the moral high ground.
Nothing beats military service for unsafe working conditions. I'm just glad that's the worst thing I had to do; I got off pretty easy compared to a lot of the people I know.
IIRC, Uranium has the highest density of any naturally occuring element. This is why depleted uranium (DU) is used in armor-piercing ordinance. Why build an expensive storage facility for your nuclear waste when you can shoot it at dusky-skinned foreigners? The continued widespread use of DU ordinance is one of the more shameful actions of the US military. DU weaponry violates the Geneva Convention, furthermore, it goes contrary to the stated US policy of minimizing collateral damage. Tungsten works almost as well as DU for penetrating armor, but is significantly more expensive -- DU is essentially free, because it's the waste product from the process of creating enriched Uranium.
I thought the muppets were pretty well done enough to allow suspension of disbelief. I found it refreshing to see aliens that were obviously non-human. Pilot in particular was very well done and highly believable. Rigel could have been done better, but in all I think the way he was done was more believable and less distracting than having yet another human with skin paint and head bumps. He could have been done with CGI, but given the budget they had to work with, the CGI would have been of pretty sucky quality.
Putting artificial restrictions on $TOOL to prevent $CRIME is never appropriate because those restrictions can never accomplish their stated purpose and always have unintended side effects which hamper legitimate users. All too often, the side effects are as bad as, or worse than, the original problem. Any system devised by man can be circumvented by man. Stop blaming the tool the criminal uses and start blaming the criminal who uses the tool. You will never create a crime-free utopia by regulating technology, because technology is not the source of the problem - people are. It is a wasted effort, effort which is better spent on actually holding criminals accountable for their actions and/or identifying and addressing the underlying root causes of crime.
Just goes to show you that you can prove just about any point you want to make by selectively quoting the Bible.
Would you prefer perhaps a system based on range & bearing from lander? Scientific? Yes. Accessable? No. When you are dealing with $800M of the taxpayer's money, you have to play the PR game if you want to keep doing science.
Of course, alienating your core audience to try and reach a broader audience is just plain stupidity and shortsightedness, especially when dealing with a franchise operation. Keep your core fans happy and they'll keep coming back for more. A moderately successful franchise will make more money in the long run than a single blockbuster.
I would too. The "miniseries" was pretty good, up until the last 10 minutes. I'm sorry, but I don't consider a two-part series pilot to be a proper miniseries. A miniseries needs to be at least 5 hours long to be worthy of the name. Remember Shogun? Now that was a miniseries.
If you know Wil's history with Berman, you'd know he'd be the last (or maybe the second-to-last) person in the ST machine Wil would want to talk to.
I forget the name of the episode, but in one of the later ones (with the 7th Doctor and Ace) they had a shot of a Dalek levitating up a flight of stairs.
Frankly I thought Voyager sucked too. I think some of the best episodes came out when DS9 and TNG were on the air together. DS9 also did really well when it had to compete against Babelon 5. Voyager and Enterprise suffer(ed) from both complacancy and a lack of competition. There's definately a market for "space opera", but what the idiots in hollywood tend to forget is that the demographic which watches sci fi tends to be smarter and more critical than the general populous. Good stories and interesting characters are far more important than skin and special effects when it comes to keeping geeks interested.
Microsoft made an offer; Mr. Rowe simply made a (perfectly legal) counter-offer. If Mr. Rowe had written microsoft and said "I'll sell you my domain for $10K", it would be evidence of a bad faith registration. Instead, Microsoft initiated the transaction by sending an offer letter, so any response or negotiation related to that initial offer is in good faith.
Unfortunately that's the way things work when the big guy takes on the little guy. Take the case where Leonardo DiCaprio sued (and won) a little mom-and-pop ice cream shop in Italy because the propriators (Mr. and Mrs. DiCaprio) had the audacity to use their name for their business. Just goes to show you that right and wrong don't matter when you have enough money.
My first car was a '75 Pontiac LeMans GT w/ a 400 4-bbl. Ran like shit until my buddy helped me rip off all the pollution control crap... IIRC the owner's manual rated the engine around 200HP. Stripping the PC crap really made a huge difference -- I estimated that it went up to 300HP with no other changes.
Exactly The main benefit of a mission to mars will be the engineering knowlege gained by the effort. A cheap way to get stuff into LEO would be a fantastic spin-off, and probably a necessary first step to building an interplanetary spaceship (which would have to be built in space). Another great advance would be a sustainable self-contained biosystem, which is another requirement for interplanetary travel.
Basic research never fails to pay off in the long run. The billions invested in the Apollo missions have yielded countless pieces of spin-off technology.
and there are some things that a hooker won't do for money.