Yes, admitting the entirety of data into calculations of this scale would be foolish.
However, that is NOT what the Russian IEA is claiming Hadley Center did.
The 21-page PDF (http://www.iea.ru/article/kioto_order/15.12.2009.pdf) specifically explains how the English "scientists" discarded more-complete datasets in favor of less complete, used data from stations that were moved around (less reliable) and ignored stations that were, ahem, stationary, etc, etc.
So it's not a question of admitting all data & risking contamination - it's a question of intentionally choosing worse data when better data was available.
Programmable plastics.
Bionic implants.
Mind transfers into hardware and back into "wetware".
Superconducting quantum CPU robots with real AI and free will, as well as capacity to self-replicate.
"Cost-free" communications using the 4th spatial dimension
etc, etc.
There's plenty of ideas to be developed. SF is still as full of ideas as back in Jules Verne's day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ware_Tetralogy
"It's now possible to hope for something other than WWIII?"
With the nutcase Ahmadinejad going full speed ahead with a nuclear arms program - and Obama talking about "multilateralism" rather than kicking his ass back to the Stone Age?
Last fucking thing this world needs is a homicidal jackass with his finger on the proverbial button.
Why not take it even further, and allow a complete reset of the skill points / abilities / etc?
Not only will this get rid of situations where a highly specialized class who's been kicking butt suddenly runs into enemies with perfectly opposite defenses (*cough* Diablo II *cough* sorceress *cough* fire/cold/lightning immunes), leaving the player with little choice but to either quit the quest or be forced to find other party members, but it will also bring an unparalleled degree of flexibility and replay value to the game.
Take Gemcraft Zero's approach to skills as an example: sure, you can invest points into particular skills that grant you lower spell cost or higher damage or more defense - but you can reconfigure your skills at any time, or even reset the whole skill tree & start from scratch. This setup allows players to avoid getting frustrated due to being unable to beat a particular stage/battletype because of a mismatch between their skillset and the current situation. Sure, GCZero is a simplistic example (being a Flash tower-defense game), but the point is, giving players true freedom of choice - and the ability to reconsider those choices - in regard to character development results in near-infinite replay value.
Too many MMORPG's channel players into a few specific paths by making certain classes/builds more attractive than others - then turn around and punish them for their choices with a sudden change in game mechanics.
I can't speak for WoW (having decided to avoid being drawn into the life-consuming madness), but I used to play Diablo II, and I bet if Blizzard allowed D II players to reconfig the skillsets, there wouldn't be quite so much butthurt after each patch, when highly-specialized characters became totally useless due to a formula change. How many players were upset when their CE necros or GA zons were suddenly rendered pointless, making all the hours invested in the character a waste of time? Of course, character-class balancing is necessary, but I think it's only fair to allow players to change their skills in response to a change in calculation formulas - or a changing game environment.
Because...
When a Republican changes his mind, he's a liar.
When a Democrat changes his mind, he's "seen the light" - or "gained a new awareness of the issues".
When a Republican raises taxes, he's a heartless bastard.
When a Democrat raises taxes, he's "taking necessary steps in a troubled time to keep the budget balanced".
Yes, it is ridiculous.
If Hollywood can get away with portraying real rape, why can't a porn producer get away with portraying a simulation of the same?
FFS, there's movies like "Cannibal Holocaust" and "Last House On The Left" that show [what most people would consider to be] extreme depictions of rape, cannibalism, genital torture, and plenty of other perverse acts.
Even classics like Ingmar Bergman's "Aus dem Leben der Marionetten" feature rape scenes and stark violence.
Not simulated or implied rape, but real, violent, gory, crying-and-shitting rape.
There's a torrent compilation of over 130 rape scenes from mainstream movies. And the torrent poster states that this is just a "small sample" of what's out there.
But, apparently if it's done "ars gratia artis", it's OK - if it's done for profit+pleasure, all of a sudden we have a moral shit-storm.
Bullshit double-standards, and weak-assed half-measures, will be the end of this society.
Great feature for multiplayer games.
Not only do you get to tell the idiot teamkiller how you feel, you can accompany it with the actual gesture.
Awesome.
what is the relative velocity of an object that is stationary in one of these spacetime reference frames with respect to another object that is stationary in the other spacetime reference frame? FTL?
Yes, a stationary object inside the ergosphere of a rotating black hole (if it's even possible for anything to be stationary in there, considering the rotational forces and the turbulence) is moving faster than light in relation to the rest of the Universe - because the ergosphere itself is dragging spacetime around faster than c. (This is not prohibited by relativity).
The only way that it would be possible for an object inside the ergosphere to remain stationary (in relation to rest of Universe), is for that object to be moving faster than c (and that Einstein would have a problem with).
The outer limit of the ergosphere is moving at c (WRT Universe); an object orbiting exactly at the boundary would have to move at c in order to remain stationary - outside the boundary, less than c - inside the boundary, faster than c (which is impossible according to relativity - as speed approaches c, energy approaches infinity. Can't have more energy than infinity.)
...Hope that made some sense. Tying to condense a few hundred pages of astrophysical theory into a paragraph inevitably loses something in the translation, LOL.
(or, if you don't trust/like NYT - google "900 million" and pick any of the suggestions.)
Clearly shows where Obama's priorities lie.
Our economy is in the shitter.
100-year-old corporations are shutting down.
Educational system is utterly fucked-up (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/26/174212) ...
{too many examples} ...
And now NASA's budget is getting cut.
Meanwhile, Hillary and Obama want to give the better part of a trillion bucks to a "nation" with a proven track record of terrorism.
1.) Action: change current system to runoff elections. If neither party gets a winning majority - remove all but top 2 contestants, and run it again.
Reason: under a runoff system, candidates must appeal to a broad range of voters; runoff voting discourages extreme partisanship, and prevents minor f[r]actions from upsetting the balance (example: 1992, Candidate #3 "steals" 3% of votes from Candidate #2, resulting in Candidate #3 [barely] getting the majority and royally pissing off voters supporting Candidate #2)
Result: discordant elections (Bush-Gore, Bush-Clinton-Perot) are much less likely; winner has clear support and mandate from majority of voters.
2.) Action: prohibit political advertising. Debates, yes. Town hall meetings, sure. Q-and-A sessions, of course. Buying a Senate seat or the Presidency? Hell no.
Reason: political leadership should be elected on the basis of merits / values / track record, not on the basis of who's got a fatter wallet.
Result: no more travesties like (just an example, nothing personal) Jon Corzine deciding that he's made enough money, now it's time to play politics, wallpapering New Jersey with $ 63,000,000.00's worth of advertising, and winning a Senate seat.
3.) Action: allow ONLY open-source voting machines, audited by several independent sources.
Reason: voters must have proof that their vote was received and counted. The right to vote should not be canceled by a "glitch in the system", or a behind-the-scenes manipulation of the vote totals, without any possibility of an audit. (Hey, AutoMark / Diebold / ES&S, my CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to have my voice heard trumps your profit margin. Either make it work correctly, or GTFO the election.) Closed-source, un-auditable "black box" voting machines have a proven track record of miscounting votes. If it's a "black box", it doesn't get to play.
Result: no more "missing votes", "extra votes", "double-counted votes", or any other bullshit. If there's an issue, it's detected, fixed, and the election is run again.
Of course, this is all a dream. The 2-party duopoly will never allow #1. The media makes too much profit from political advertisement to allow #2. And the makers of voting machines make too much money to allow #3. Oh well.
Oh damn, forgot to include the relativistic jet. Idioth. Anyhoo... black hole spins, drags stellar gas / dust / occasional star towards it (accretion disk, om nom nom), things spin around faster than the speed of light (yes, FTL. Objects can't move faster than speed of light, but regions of spacetime can move FTL relative to other regions), eventually the sheer rotational energy + radiation forces the particles outward in a thin jet, perpendicular to the accretion disk, which can be as long as tens of thousands of parsecs. There's enough junk flying outward, and at high enough speed, to create its own disturbance in the Force^H^H^H^H^H spacetime continuum, in addition to the screwiness created by the black hole itself.
The common view that a black hole has a definite "boundary" beyond which nothing can escape, although essentially true, overlooks several important factors.
Yes, the "event horizon" (EH) is the boundary beyond which nothing can escape the gravitational pull of the black hole.
However, it's not a physical boundary (black holes do not have a physical surface), it's the mathematically-calculated boundary beyond which events inside the EH cannot affect an outside observer. As a particle gets closer to the EH, its chances of escape shrink to infinity, and once the EH is crossed, it's effectively gone from the outside world.
That being said, under certain conditions, particles can be radiated outward from a black hole:
1.) If an object inside the "photon sphere" (Schwartzchild Radius X 1.5) but still outside the EH emits photons, those photons can still escape. (Photons coming inbound are screwed, though. Approaching on a tangent, have a slim chance to "bounce off" due to rotational gain.).
2.) If the black hole is rotating, and a particle is approaching the black hole at a tangent, it may also escape via "stealing" some of the rotational energy.
3.) Rotating black holes also emit particles via Hawking radiation, which is more of a particle-antiparticle explanation that I want to get into here.
So, yeah, it's sort of an issue of semantics - if you consider the zone right outside the EH a part of the black hole, then yes, things can escape from a black hole; if you take the common (and incorrect) view that a black hole has a definite "border", and discount all the fun stuff that's going on around the black hole, then no, nothing can escape.
(Of course, this is a ridiculously simplified explanation, and I do expect at least one Slashdot astrophysicist to poke it full of holes (pun intended).)
...is the integrated "porn theater" feature. Turn off SafeSearch (or w/e they call it, I care so little I forgot already), look up any porn search term - et voila! watch the videos right in the search results window.
Looks like they're trying to kill off Redtube, not Google:D
Is it the teachers that are shitty, or is it an educational system that demands teachers teach a certain way?
It's definitely the system. The 40's and 50's brought massive application of B.F. Skinner's methods to the public education system. The less said about the 60's, the better. The 70's gave us the "gift" of "Mastery Learning", which focuses on by-the-numbers learning instead of independent thinking. The 80's continued this disturbing trend with "Results-Based Education" (later renamed to "Outcome-Based Education" to avoid criticism. Ah, semantics.). And the 90's through the millennium saw the application of principles such as "No Child Left Behind", social promotion, curve-based grading, and other bullshit methods for accepting failure and passing it as achievement.
And now, we have an education system that is thoroughly and completely fucked.
American teens' test scores are consistently around the 25th place compared to the rest of the world. (And this is considering the fact that the vast majority of public education is geared towards "teaching to the test", with special prep courses and example tests given out. Even when we cheat, we're still losing. Badly.)
I count myself lucky to have gotten a European education - and a first-hand look at the difference between that and American public education system. Having seen the system from the outside and from within, I can safely say that unless we drop the liberal (not Liberal as in political party, but liberal in the socioeconomic sense, settle down) bullshit of OBE, NCLB, SCANS, and all the other mediocrity-promoting crap, we'll soon be left in the dust.
Of course, this will never happen as long as the teachers' unions are in power, and as long as the politicians can sell the same bullshit to the public year after year.
No, I don't have a solution. And I'm not qualified to offer one, either. Just throwing my opinion out there; mod it as you wish.
P.P.S. By the way, Akido37, your local professor isn't the only one who's gotten in trouble for teaching "to the brain" instead of "to the test". There are at least 20 (that I've come across personally) well-documented cases around the country.
The entire "pilot" episode was hastily put together, which turned off quite a lot of contributed (among oh-so-many other things) to the show's failure on Fox.
.
Dammit. That should be:
The entire "pilot" episode was hastily put together, which turned off quite a lot of potential viewers, and contributed (among oh-so-many other things) to the show's failure on Fox.
It was never meant to be the pilot or possibly not even meant to be an episode at all.
You're right, it was basically forced upon Wheadon by the network execs. He wanted a "space frontier drama saga" type of deal, they wanted the usual mass-market "guns n lasers n babes n spaceships" crap. So an amazing, intelligent series was handicapped right from the start by a crappy pilot.
In order to "get" Serenity, you have to watch at least 3 episodes.
The entire "pilot" episode was hastily put together, which turned off quite a lot of contributed (among oh-so-many other things) to the show's failure on Fox.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, admitting the entirety of data into calculations of this scale would be foolish.
However, that is NOT what the Russian IEA is claiming Hadley Center did.
The 21-page PDF (http://www.iea.ru/article/kioto_order/15.12.2009.pdf) specifically explains how the English "scientists" discarded more-complete datasets in favor of less complete, used data from stations that were moved around (less reliable) and ignored stations that were, ahem, stationary, etc, etc.
So it's not a question of admitting all data & risking contamination - it's a question of intentionally choosing worse data when better data was available.
There's a translation of the "Conclusions" section of the PDF (can't blame the guy for not translating the entire document, it's a linguistic bitch). Not posting it here - too long - follow the link http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/16/iearussia-hadley-center-probably-tampered-with-russian-climate-data/ and search for "Posted Dec 17, 2009 at 2:44 AM".
Programmable plastics. Bionic implants. Mind transfers into hardware and back into "wetware". Superconducting quantum CPU robots with real AI and free will, as well as capacity to self-replicate. "Cost-free" communications using the 4th spatial dimension etc, etc. There's plenty of ideas to be developed. SF is still as full of ideas as back in Jules Verne's day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ware_Tetralogy
You're either a troll or a blind moron.
"It's now possible to hope for something other than WWIII?"
With the nutcase Ahmadinejad going full speed ahead with a nuclear arms program - and Obama talking about "multilateralism" rather than kicking his ass back to the Stone Age?
Last fucking thing this world needs is a homicidal jackass with his finger on the proverbial button.
Why not take it even further, and allow a complete reset of the skill points / abilities / etc? Not only will this get rid of situations where a highly specialized class who's been kicking butt suddenly runs into enemies with perfectly opposite defenses (*cough* Diablo II *cough* sorceress *cough* fire/cold/lightning immunes), leaving the player with little choice but to either quit the quest or be forced to find other party members, but it will also bring an unparalleled degree of flexibility and replay value to the game. Take Gemcraft Zero's approach to skills as an example: sure, you can invest points into particular skills that grant you lower spell cost or higher damage or more defense - but you can reconfigure your skills at any time, or even reset the whole skill tree & start from scratch. This setup allows players to avoid getting frustrated due to being unable to beat a particular stage/battletype because of a mismatch between their skillset and the current situation. Sure, GCZero is a simplistic example (being a Flash tower-defense game), but the point is, giving players true freedom of choice - and the ability to reconsider those choices - in regard to character development results in near-infinite replay value. Too many MMORPG's channel players into a few specific paths by making certain classes/builds more attractive than others - then turn around and punish them for their choices with a sudden change in game mechanics. I can't speak for WoW (having decided to avoid being drawn into the life-consuming madness), but I used to play Diablo II, and I bet if Blizzard allowed D II players to reconfig the skillsets, there wouldn't be quite so much butthurt after each patch, when highly-specialized characters became totally useless due to a formula change. How many players were upset when their CE necros or GA zons were suddenly rendered pointless, making all the hours invested in the character a waste of time? Of course, character-class balancing is necessary, but I think it's only fair to allow players to change their skills in response to a change in calculation formulas - or a changing game environment.
Because...
...etc, etc.
When a Republican changes his mind, he's a liar.
When a Democrat changes his mind, he's "seen the light" - or "gained a new awareness of the issues".
When a Republican raises taxes, he's a heartless bastard.
When a Democrat raises taxes, he's "taking necessary steps in a troubled time to keep the budget balanced".
Mass-media linguistic gymnastics, ain't it grand?
Kitty porn? Meowhere can I get some? My cat's lonely.
MOD PARENT UP!
Yes, it is ridiculous.
If Hollywood can get away with portraying real rape, why can't a porn producer get away with portraying a simulation of the same?
FFS, there's movies like "Cannibal Holocaust" and "Last House On The Left" that show [what most people would consider to be] extreme depictions of rape, cannibalism, genital torture, and plenty of other perverse acts.
Even classics like Ingmar Bergman's "Aus dem Leben der Marionetten" feature rape scenes and stark violence.
Not simulated or implied rape, but real, violent, gory, crying-and-shitting rape.
There's a torrent compilation of over 130 rape scenes from mainstream movies. And the torrent poster states that this is just a "small sample" of what's out there.
But, apparently if it's done "ars gratia artis", it's OK - if it's done for profit+pleasure, all of a sudden we have a moral shit-storm.
Bullshit double-standards, and weak-assed half-measures, will be the end of this society.
Also, COCKS.
Yeah, me neither. Also, what are those "previews" and "FBI warnings" people are complaining about?
track individual hand and finger movement
Great feature for multiplayer games.
Not only do you get to tell the idiot teamkiller how you feel, you can accompany it with the actual gesture.
Awesome.
HDMI already has the awesome encryption of HDCP between the device and the display unit
As usual, an encryption system that (likely) cost millions to develop, can be defeated with a simple device.
http://www.hdfury.com/
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with this company in any way; this is not an endorsement, only a link to a potentially useful resource.
And wish them a heartfelt "goodluckwiththat".
Microsoft: if you want to beat Google, find a way to develop a completely open search ranking system.
Most insightful sentence in the discussion so far.
what is the relative velocity of an object that is stationary in one of these spacetime reference frames with respect to another object that is stationary in the other spacetime reference frame? FTL?
Yes, a stationary object inside the ergosphere of a rotating black hole (if it's even possible for anything to be stationary in there, considering the rotational forces and the turbulence) is moving faster than light in relation to the rest of the Universe - because the ergosphere itself is dragging spacetime around faster than c. (This is not prohibited by relativity).
...Hope that made some sense. Tying to condense a few hundred pages of astrophysical theory into a paragraph inevitably loses something in the translation, LOL.
The only way that it would be possible for an object inside the ergosphere to remain stationary (in relation to rest of Universe), is for that object to be moving faster than c (and that Einstein would have a problem with).
The outer limit of the ergosphere is moving at c (WRT Universe); an object orbiting exactly at the boundary would have to move at c in order to remain stationary - outside the boundary, less than c - inside the boundary, faster than c (which is impossible according to relativity - as speed approaches c, energy approaches infinity. Can't have more energy than infinity.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/washington/24gaza.html.
...
...
(or, if you don't trust/like NYT - google "900 million" and pick any of the suggestions.)
Clearly shows where Obama's priorities lie.
Our economy is in the shitter.
100-year-old corporations are shutting down.
Educational system is utterly fucked-up (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/26/174212)
{too many examples}
And now NASA's budget is getting cut.
Meanwhile, Hillary and Obama want to give the better part of a trillion bucks to a "nation" with a proven track record of terrorism.
Yeah, change we can believe in.
(O/b/ligatory SFX: FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU- )
1.) Action: change current system to runoff elections. If neither party gets a winning majority - remove all but top 2 contestants, and run it again.
Reason: under a runoff system, candidates must appeal to a broad range of voters; runoff voting discourages extreme partisanship, and prevents minor f[r]actions from upsetting the balance (example: 1992, Candidate #3 "steals" 3% of votes from Candidate #2, resulting in Candidate #3 [barely] getting the majority and royally pissing off voters supporting Candidate #2) Result: discordant elections (Bush-Gore, Bush-Clinton-Perot) are much less likely; winner has clear support and mandate from majority of voters.
2.) Action: prohibit political advertising. Debates, yes. Town hall meetings, sure. Q-and-A sessions, of course. Buying a Senate seat or the Presidency? Hell no.
Reason: political leadership should be elected on the basis of merits / values / track record, not on the basis of who's got a fatter wallet.
Result: no more travesties like (just an example, nothing personal) Jon Corzine deciding that he's made enough money, now it's time to play politics, wallpapering New Jersey with $ 63,000,000.00's worth of advertising, and winning a Senate seat.
3.) Action: allow ONLY open-source voting machines, audited by several independent sources.
Reason: voters must have proof that their vote was received and counted. The right to vote should not be canceled by a "glitch in the system", or a behind-the-scenes manipulation of the vote totals, without any possibility of an audit. (Hey, AutoMark / Diebold / ES&S, my CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to have my voice heard trumps your profit margin. Either make it work correctly, or GTFO the election.) Closed-source, un-auditable "black box" voting machines have a proven track record of miscounting votes. If it's a "black box", it doesn't get to play.
Result: no more "missing votes", "extra votes", "double-counted votes", or any other bullshit. If there's an issue, it's detected, fixed, and the election is run again.
Of course, this is all a dream. The 2-party duopoly will never allow #1. The media makes too much profit from political advertisement to allow #2. And the makers of voting machines make too much money to allow #3. Oh well.
Oh damn, forgot to include the relativistic jet. Idioth. Anyhoo... black hole spins, drags stellar gas / dust / occasional star towards it (accretion disk, om nom nom), things spin around faster than the speed of light (yes, FTL. Objects can't move faster than speed of light, but regions of spacetime can move FTL relative to other regions), eventually the sheer rotational energy + radiation forces the particles outward in a thin jet, perpendicular to the accretion disk, which can be as long as tens of thousands of parsecs. There's enough junk flying outward, and at high enough speed, to create its own disturbance in the Force^H^H^H^H^H spacetime continuum, in addition to the screwiness created by the black hole itself.
The common view that a black hole has a definite "boundary" beyond which nothing can escape, although essentially true, overlooks several important factors.
Yes, the "event horizon" (EH) is the boundary beyond which nothing can escape the gravitational pull of the black hole.
However, it's not a physical boundary (black holes do not have a physical surface), it's the mathematically-calculated boundary beyond which events inside the EH cannot affect an outside observer. As a particle gets closer to the EH, its chances of escape shrink to infinity, and once the EH is crossed, it's effectively gone from the outside world.
That being said, under certain conditions, particles can be radiated outward from a black hole:
1.) If an object inside the "photon sphere" (Schwartzchild Radius X 1.5) but still outside the EH emits photons, those photons can still escape. (Photons coming inbound are screwed, though. Approaching on a tangent, have a slim chance to "bounce off" due to rotational gain.).
2.) If the black hole is rotating, and a particle is approaching the black hole at a tangent, it may also escape via "stealing" some of the rotational energy.
3.) Rotating black holes also emit particles via Hawking radiation, which is more of a particle-antiparticle explanation that I want to get into here.
So, yeah, it's sort of an issue of semantics - if you consider the zone right outside the EH a part of the black hole, then yes, things can escape from a black hole; if you take the common (and incorrect) view that a black hole has a definite "border", and discount all the fun stuff that's going on around the black hole, then no, nothing can escape.
(Of course, this is a ridiculously simplified explanation, and I do expect at least one Slashdot astrophysicist to poke it full of holes (pun intended).)
...is the integrated "porn theater" feature. Turn off SafeSearch (or w/e they call it, I care so little I forgot already), look up any porn search term - et voila! watch the videos right in the search results window.
:D
Looks like they're trying to kill off Redtube, not Google
Fact is different things are important to different people. It doesn't make them an idiot.
Mhm. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1236397&cid=27995845
Is it the teachers that are shitty, or is it an educational system that demands teachers teach a certain way?
It's definitely the system. The 40's and 50's brought massive application of B.F. Skinner's methods to the public education system. The less said about the 60's, the better. The 70's gave us the "gift" of "Mastery Learning", which focuses on by-the-numbers learning instead of independent thinking. The 80's continued this disturbing trend with "Results-Based Education" (later renamed to "Outcome-Based Education" to avoid criticism. Ah, semantics.). And the 90's through the millennium saw the application of principles such as "No Child Left Behind", social promotion, curve-based grading, and other bullshit methods for accepting failure and passing it as achievement.
And now, we have an education system that is thoroughly and completely fucked.
American teens' test scores are consistently around the 25th place compared to the rest of the world. (And this is considering the fact that the vast majority of public education is geared towards "teaching to the test", with special prep courses and example tests given out. Even when we cheat, we're still losing. Badly.)
I count myself lucky to have gotten a European education - and a first-hand look at the difference between that and American public education system. Having seen the system from the outside and from within, I can safely say that unless we drop the liberal (not Liberal as in political party, but liberal in the socioeconomic sense, settle down) bullshit of OBE, NCLB, SCANS, and all the other mediocrity-promoting crap, we'll soon be left in the dust.
Of course, this will never happen as long as the teachers' unions are in power, and as long as the politicians can sell the same bullshit to the public year after year.
No, I don't have a solution. And I'm not qualified to offer one, either. Just throwing my opinion out there; mod it as you wish.
P.S. Check out Charlotte Iserbyt's excellent "The Deliberate Dumbing Down Of America" (all over Amazon and a free download at http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/ (6 MB PDF, about 520 pages).
P.P.S. By the way, Akido37, your local professor isn't the only one who's gotten in trouble for teaching "to the brain" instead of "to the test". There are at least 20 (that I've come across personally) well-documented cases around the country.
According to the RIAA they only are planning on searching the data for an unreleased album.
Uh-huh. And because the RIAA has such a stellar record of transparency and accountability, we should trust them explicitly.
Oh, let's not even get into all the technological inconsistencies of Star Wars... there's room for a whole 'nother /. article there.
The entire "pilot" episode was hastily put together, which turned off quite a lot of contributed (among oh-so-many other things) to the show's failure on Fox.
. Dammit. That should be:
The entire "pilot" episode was hastily put together, which turned off quite a lot of potential viewers, and contributed (among oh-so-many other things) to the show's failure on Fox.
It was never meant to be the pilot or possibly not even meant to be an episode at all.
You're right, it was basically forced upon Wheadon by the network execs. He wanted a "space frontier drama saga" type of deal, they wanted the usual mass-market "guns n lasers n babes n spaceships" crap. So an amazing, intelligent series was handicapped right from the start by a crappy pilot.
In order to "get" Serenity, you have to watch at least 3 episodes. The entire "pilot" episode was hastily put together, which turned off quite a lot of contributed (among oh-so-many other things) to the show's failure on Fox.