If you don't capitalize "badlands", then it is no longer a proper noun, but just a generic term referring to bad lands. Any region can have bad areas of land, so it is quite possible (though I've never been there to see) that there are badlands in Nevada, but definitely no Badlands in Nevada.
The solution chosen was quite a simple one, and I'm amazed that more people have never noticed
it. It is thus: The second digit of all area codes is either a zero or a one. Thus, if the second digit
dialed in is a zero or a one, the phone switch will wait for 10 digits as opposed to just seven.
Most people have never noticed this because it isn't true (perhaps it was in the past?). I used to live in 765 and now live in 847, for example.
In the book the worms were actually part of the destruction of Arrakeen (IIRC), which didn't occur in the miniseries.
Background music really would have added a lot - some parts were very "theatrical" in the sense of almost monologue-like exposition with no music to highlight the important/dramatic parts.
No explanation of why they don't all use shields and lasers - nobody really had shields after the first few minutes (due to the worms) but there was no explanation why they don't all use lasers rather than knives and tommyguns.
Come to think of it, no real explanation of the "family atomics" concept either, which made the part where Gurney has to breach the shield wall a little confusing.
There did seem to be a storm right when the worms came through the wall, but it sure cleared up fast.
I watched it all the way through, but somehow the way it was paced made it seem much longer than it really was. It was nice to have more than just the 1 hour of a TV show or the 2 hours of a feature film to explain all of the stuff, but somehow the combination of lack of music, theatrical staging, and iffy effects didn't keep things moving enough through the whole 6 hours.
Not that I could do better, though. Apparently adapting sci-fi classics for the screen is tougher than it looks. Still more watchable than the Lynch version, though.
The conflict is really between the law which states there is such-and-such a deadline, and the law which states that a candidate may request a recount. In the case of a large county, it is realistically impossible to complete a recount before the specified deadline. Thus, the legal conflict which the court resolved.
I would be more sympathetic to the Bush camp if they would have announced immediately that, secure in their victory, they did not feel threatened by any recounts since those recounts would still show Bush to be the victor. The fact that they have instead opposed any recounts on any and all grounds possible makes their opposition appear politically motivated and really not within the spirit of the democratic (small 'd') to me. If this were any other country in the world, the American people would be united in supporting a full, impartial recount of all ballots in any areas where there were questions about electoral procedures. A true statesman (not that I'm assigning Al Gore that label either) would support a full recount in such a cloudy situation, regardless of their potential personal gain or loss.
* both suffer in comparison to the Capitalist competition - the products made by Communists
were, and are inferior in build and technology, to those made by Capitalists. So it is with open
source software - the Capitalist option is superior to the Communist one - Windows is greatly
superior to KDE/Gnome, and Solaris is better than Linux.
It was at about this point that you should have determined that this was a troll. Maybe the next item after that, but that's pushing it.
Bonus points if you picked it up after "Open source software is, plainly, too open - like Communism". Don't be fooled by the fact that the first few paragraphs were on-topic and fairly reasonable.
The Florida SC ignored laws and essentially wrote it's own legislation with it's
ill-founded ruling. Now they're looking like jackasses because of it.:)
When the legislature passes contradictory laws, it is the job of the judiciary to interpret the correct course of action. IMHO their choice to try to get the most complete count after the election was correct and was closest to the spirit of the law and of democracy, but YMMV.
If anything, this whole debacle demonstrates that legislatures don't consider the potential interactions of new laws very well when they write them. If legislatures throughout the U.S. could draft better law, then the judiciary would have much less to do.
That was what I though too - that the Fremen were already blue-eyed due to their ancestry, but the spice turned the sclera of their eyes blue too. Thus, blue-in-blue eyes.
Or I could just be reading a little too deeply into things, as usual.
Carl Sagan was not a fictional persona, and generally did not write works of fiction. Cosmos was not a work of fiction.
Mars hasn't really been scanned very much - we've sent a few fairly stupid robots which have explored less territory than the state of Rhode Island. Sure, there's the Mars Global Surveyor, but although that covers a lot of territory, it's not exactly a close inspection of the places where life forms would hide - underground, or just under the surface of large rocks are likely spots. We're not going to see bacteria (or anything up to the size of a small mammal) from a satellite.
According to Carl Sagan's Cosmos, when the three tests that were sent to Mars were also tested in Antarctica (a much more hospitable environment than Mars), one of the tests that indicated there was no life on Mars, also indicated there was no life in Antarctica! Coupled with Levin's positive results, the prospects for native life on Mars may be much better than expected.
Also, Dell must be planning on putting a lot of effort into making their GNOME install usable by
the masses. There are a lot of little pieces that have to go together.
That's the point of having Dell do it - the masses don't have to install Linux if Dell does it. All of the sudden the major hurdle to getting set up with Linux has been removed for the vast majority of people (who probably couldn't have installed Windows either).
It sucks when that happens. But that's a management failing, not an engineering one. Management is supposed to shield the technical guys from feature creep by expressing to the marketing/business guys exactly what the cost associated with their change will be, and sticking to it. And it never hurts to multiply all time periods by two and convert to the next highest unit, either:)
The best situation is when the engineering team owns their product/feature requirements, and others have to talk them into adding features rather than imposing those changes on them from above.
The "magic bullet" for those issues is requirements analysis and requirements, design, and code reviews. Requirements that are supported by test cases, peer-reviewed code, and configuration management by technical experts would go a long way towards making sure that the right code is being written. This sort of falls under the communication that you mentioned, though.
One possible exception: when the user decides they want things to work in a different way after you've already written the software once. That's more of a feature creep problem than a real bug, though, and it's basically management/business people's jobs to deal with that sort of thing.
...since just yesterday my wife and I bought an old Genesis and some games to relive those happy memories of 16-bit gaming. Streets of Rage 2 is pretty much her "killer app" of the console market.
What's funny is that in some ways, those old games still look better than what's currently on the market. Sure, there was only one or a few fixed camera angles, with repetitive effects and so on, but on the other hand the people and objects didn't have all of those damn jagged corners that polygon-based 3D brought us. Polygon 3D is going to have to get about an order of magnitude better before I'll give up my bright, shiny, 2D sprite animation.
Of course, at this rate an order of magnitude is just a couple years:)
A public blacklist would work if you have enough contributors that you can verify that many of them, including some trusted contributors, feel that the IP in question should be blacklisted. If you can have a reasonable belief that the majority of data on the system is valid, then the blacklist will be more-or-less effective.
For example, how many people have been framed in such a manner onto the RBL? Sure, there are plenty of cases of people who feel that they shouldn't be on the RBL because they weren't really spamming. But how often do several people conspire to accuse an IP of being a spammer or an unsecured relay just to get back at that IP? Not too often, I imagine.
Just like any online collaboration, from the RBL to online gaming matchups to/., you can gauge the reliability of the community's input based on a trust rating that you assign to contributors based on their past performance.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't capitalize "badlands", then it is no longer a proper noun, but just a generic term referring to bad lands. Any region can have bad areas of land, so it is quite possible (though I've never been there to see) that there are badlands in Nevada, but definitely no Badlands in Nevada.
How would you dial a non-rotary phone and not get touch tones?
Most people have never noticed this because it isn't true (perhaps it was in the past?). I used to live in 765 and now live in 847, for example.
Literally "Thou shalt not make a mind in the likeness of a man's".
I did notice some of those problems.
I watched it all the way through, but somehow the way it was paced made it seem much longer than it really was. It was nice to have more than just the 1 hour of a TV show or the 2 hours of a feature film to explain all of the stuff, but somehow the combination of lack of music, theatrical staging, and iffy effects didn't keep things moving enough through the whole 6 hours.
Not that I could do better, though. Apparently adapting sci-fi classics for the screen is tougher than it looks. Still more watchable than the Lynch version, though.
-Old Man of the Desert
The sad thing is that we were both equally off- or on-topic, but only one of us got moderated down. Lousy frickin moderation...
The conflict is really between the law which states there is such-and-such a deadline, and the law which states that a candidate may request a recount. In the case of a large county, it is realistically impossible to complete a recount before the specified deadline. Thus, the legal conflict which the court resolved.
I would be more sympathetic to the Bush camp if they would have announced immediately that, secure in their victory, they did not feel threatened by any recounts since those recounts would still show Bush to be the victor. The fact that they have instead opposed any recounts on any and all grounds possible makes their opposition appear politically motivated and really not within the spirit of the democratic (small 'd') to me. If this were any other country in the world, the American people would be united in supporting a full, impartial recount of all ballots in any areas where there were questions about electoral procedures. A true statesman (not that I'm assigning Al Gore that label either) would support a full recount in such a cloudy situation, regardless of their potential personal gain or loss.
...so it's doomed? :)
It was at about this point that you should have determined that this was a troll. Maybe the next item after that, but that's pushing it.
Bonus points if you picked it up after "Open source software is, plainly, too open - like Communism". Don't be fooled by the fact that the first few paragraphs were on-topic and fairly reasonable.
When the legislature passes contradictory laws, it is the job of the judiciary to interpret the correct course of action. IMHO their choice to try to get the most complete count after the election was correct and was closest to the spirit of the law and of democracy, but YMMV.
If anything, this whole debacle demonstrates that legislatures don't consider the potential interactions of new laws very well when they write them. If legislatures throughout the U.S. could draft better law, then the judiciary would have much less to do.
That was what I though too - that the Fremen were already blue-eyed due to their ancestry, but the spice turned the sclera of their eyes blue too. Thus, blue-in-blue eyes.
Or I could just be reading a little too deeply into things, as usual.
Maybe he's an "Archie and Jughead" double issue?
No, you're thinking of Arthur C. Clarke. When I'm that old, I plan to be flattered if somebody thinks I'm a dirty old man :)
Not sure if this is a troll or not, but:
According to Carl Sagan's Cosmos, when the three tests that were sent to Mars were also tested in Antarctica (a much more hospitable environment than Mars), one of the tests that indicated there was no life on Mars, also indicated there was no life in Antarctica! Coupled with Levin's positive results, the prospects for native life on Mars may be much better than expected.
Well, comparing both of your posts, I know which I thought was more grown-up, and it wasn't yours. The only one bitching is you.
That's the point of having Dell do it - the masses don't have to install Linux if Dell does it. All of the sudden the major hurdle to getting set up with Linux has been removed for the vast majority of people (who probably couldn't have installed Windows either).
It sucks when that happens. But that's a management failing, not an engineering one. Management is supposed to shield the technical guys from feature creep by expressing to the marketing/business guys exactly what the cost associated with their change will be, and sticking to it. And it never hurts to multiply all time periods by two and convert to the next highest unit, either :)
The best situation is when the engineering team owns their product/feature requirements, and others have to talk them into adding features rather than imposing those changes on them from above.
The "magic bullet" for those issues is requirements analysis and requirements, design, and code reviews. Requirements that are supported by test cases, peer-reviewed code, and configuration management by technical experts would go a long way towards making sure that the right code is being written. This sort of falls under the communication that you mentioned, though.
One possible exception: when the user decides they want things to work in a different way after you've already written the software once. That's more of a feature creep problem than a real bug, though, and it's basically management/business people's jobs to deal with that sort of thing.
Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!!
...since just yesterday my wife and I bought an old Genesis and some games to relive those happy memories of 16-bit gaming. Streets of Rage 2 is pretty much her "killer app" of the console market.
What's funny is that in some ways, those old games still look better than what's currently on the market. Sure, there was only one or a few fixed camera angles, with repetitive effects and so on, but on the other hand the people and objects didn't have all of those damn jagged corners that polygon-based 3D brought us. Polygon 3D is going to have to get about an order of magnitude better before I'll give up my bright, shiny, 2D sprite animation.
Of course, at this rate an order of magnitude is just a couple years :)
A public blacklist would work if you have enough contributors that you can verify that many of them, including some trusted contributors, feel that the IP in question should be blacklisted. If you can have a reasonable belief that the majority of data on the system is valid, then the blacklist will be more-or-less effective.
For example, how many people have been framed in such a manner onto the RBL? Sure, there are plenty of cases of people who feel that they shouldn't be on the RBL because they weren't really spamming. But how often do several people conspire to accuse an IP of being a spammer or an unsecured relay just to get back at that IP? Not too often, I imagine.
Just like any online collaboration, from the RBL to online gaming matchups to /., you can gauge the reliability of the community's input based on a trust rating that you assign to contributors based on their past performance.
Insightful? Unbelievable...
What's really funny is that your post is currently moderated "Redundant" - sounds like somebody has a sense of humor...