This reveals the danger of quoting from memory. Quotes tend to devolve over time.
I remember the first time I heard a certain quote, it was:
Better to be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
The last time I heard the same quote it had devolved into something like:
It's better to keep your mouth shut, and let people think you're stupid, than to say something and confirm it.
I'm not sure what the original version is. I've never been able to find it in a dictionary of quotations, but I find the former far more elegant, and am therefore inclined to think it's closer to the original. I've been hearing ever more mangled versions over the years.
Hmm... How do you tell if a woman in Star Trek is on her period? Every so often you hear a beep and the words "Menstrual fluid detected" coming from her crotch.
Actually, the problem is that they're _not_ deliberately vague on the technology. It's all gravometric this, and subspace that, and universal translator the other (Why does the universal translator translate everything except Klingon?). If they only would ignore the technology and tell some stories then it would be so much better.
Instead of real plot points, Trek generates tension from how long it's taking to remodulate the gravometric doohickeys. They don't keep the technology in the background, they emphasise it, and mention it at every opportunity. The only reason they don't tell you how it works is that it's fictional, and as such they _don't know_ how it works.
I've been watching Dr. Who a lot recently, and the contrast is startling. Everyone speaks English, and there's no explanation at all. Because there's no stupid talk about universal translators, you tend to completely forget about it. Technobabble diverts your attention _toward_ the fact that these things are actually absurd.
I'm pretty sure Armstrong has admitted he flubbed it. Hence the big pause after 'man' where he's thinking to himself 'Shit, I just buggered up the first words on the moon. Oh well, I'd better finish it...'
Harder to decypher, but easier to detect. But if we don't detect anything, there's nothing to decypher, anyway. First things first.
If we detect some laser pulses aimed at us, we can then start looking for other, different signals from the same source. And funding would be easier, because instead of conducting a search for something that may or may not exist, we would be further investigating something that is known to exist - even if it turns out to be a natural phenomenon. We would know roughly what strength radio signals we would be looking for, and thus what size radio-telescope to use/build.
You could almost see the laser light as the phone ringing, telling us where to look for the radio message.
We all know that "shag" is not as casual an expression in England and the funny thing is I heard that "fanny" means exactly what we North Americans think "snatch" means on their turf.
But the real funny one is fanny-pack (aka bumbag) (Actually, they're both pretty funny. My brother was using bumbag as an insult for many years)
Re:Leave it out, it's marvellous!
on
'Snatch'
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· Score: 1
I agree. It feels like British comedy played up for the American market.
Re:You all must be old or something
on
'Snatch'
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· Score: 1
Lock, Stock was a much more natural film - it was quirky, but unforced.
Snatch has a lot of quirks, but it's too self-conscious about trying to relive Lock, Stock's success. It throws a million jokes at the wall to see what sticks, and the result is a very laboured exercise. Many of the jokes work, but too many don't.
I recommend Love, Honor, and Obey as a far better movie in the british gangster comedy genre.
I've never been called. The people I know who have been called, and did their civic duty taking a week off work going down to court every day didn't get picked. I'm not saying I would necessarily avoid jury duty, but this kind of thing does not exactly make it worthwhile.
But I'm not sure the best way to fix a flawed system is to make it work as well as it possibly can. That just hides the flaws, and so means it will be longer before it gets fixed.
Oh, and I voted in the last election, if only so people couldn't make the "You have no right to complain if you didn't vote" argument at me.
I agree. I favour something like a juror's licence - something that anyone with a little dedication could get, like a driver's licence. They'd take a few evening classes. Logic, lie detection, etc... Juries would still be random, with all the benefits that gives, but they would be a random selection of _qualified_ people.
One of the most important jobs in our society, that of juror, is one that any old unqualified person can do.
But why would anyone bother to take the classes? Well, jury duty should pay _well_. It's important. Acknowledge that importance with the green stuff.
Juries are a group of people specifically designed to be as gullible as possible.
Start with a random group of schmoes, remove anyone capable of thinking up an excuse, then give each side the opportunity to get rid of any juror which the lawyers think cannot be convinced of their side's case. You can't get people inherently biased towards your side, because the other side will get rid of them, so the optimal solution is to get the most gullible people, and rely on your persuasion skills to bring them round to your side. Both sides want gullible people, because both sides think they can argue the best.
A cynical person might think this was their tactic all along. Piss off the judge so much that it looks like he's biased against them, then use that in appeal.
It's so frustrating being an Orson Scott Card fan. You're following about 4 series of books he's writing, and it always seems that rather than write another book in any of them, he just starts another series.
It's one of the reasons I've tried to give up long series of books, and go for one-offs, or at worst trilogies that are already finished. Of course that doesn't help for the series that I started maybe 15 years ago, when I was a kid, and still aren't finished.
Pushing icons one after another would imho be far more cumbersome than simply typing (or saying)
mp3> play all songs by Nirvana in random order followed by the predefined mix entitled "punk-party mix", then around 2:30 AM switch to the predifined mix entitled "bach-piano-concertos"
Only if it understands you the first time. I'm not sure it's fair to compare a theoretical capability of a future command line to current GUIs.
I find it more than a little ironic that, as computers take on more and more capaabilities, the language the users uses to interact with them becomes more and more dumbed down. I suspect we are going down the path where we replace alphabets with pictograms because pictures are easier for an illiterate to grasp, only to discover that, when that same user later wishes to write a novel, they are forced to use something akin to egyption heiroglyphs in order to communicate their ideas: a writing form vastly more complex and difficult to use than the 26 letter alphabet the illiterate in question should have just learned in the first place.
Let's get this straight right now. Command Line versus GUI is not about Text versus Icons - there is a huge amount of text on my screen right now (I have a total of 8 icons on my web browser, and 6 text-based menus, each containing a large amount of text in themselves, plus a URL bar, which anticipates what I'm trying to type and gives me a few options for completion). It's not even about keyboard versus mouse - there's plenty of typing goes on in a gui, and it's possible to get by without a mouse at all (Albeit quite painfully).
GUIs are about direct manipulation. All the buttons and icons are peripheral. It's about being able to highlight a piece of text, and move it to the point in the document where you want in to be. I can't even begin to imagine how you'd do that with a command line.
Command lines are about telling your computer what to do, GUIs are about doing it yourself.
Even a simple xterm gains power from a GUI. Scrollbars and drag & drop editing & cut and paste. (That said, X seems to be only just getting to grips with cut and paste and other basic GUI concepts, so perhaps it's not surprising that the unix users equate GUIs to what they've been limited to.)
As lame as a "can't we all just get along" speech may sound, in this case it's true. Command lines and direct manipulation both have their place in a modern user interface.
That's precisely what's needed. A telephone version of DNS. I'm sure if some company started making phones with proper keyboards, hooked them up so they connected to their own exchange which would look up a typed name, figure out the number, and dial it, there would be a market. (Precisely what name should match what number is a question, of course...)
In that way, the actual underlying phone number would be as irrelevant as the underlying IP address on the 'net today.
Let's face it, phone numbers are 19th century technology. The only reason we're still using them is that there are millions of dollars worth of hardware and software dependant on the way it's done right now. A DNS layer on top of the existing system would neatly sidestep that issue.
Redhat sells support and does development. They logically should be undercut by some company selling support but not doing development.
_That_ is the flaw of their business model. Oh, sure, there's the 'goodwill' generated by their development, but I'm not sure I'd want to bet the farm on goodwill.
It's a business model that's very lucrative for support personnel, but not so hot for programmers. Who's gonna be laid off first when times get tough?
That's why I don't buy the whole you-sell-support as an argument in favour of free software as a general economic model. The people who actually create the software are appearing on the liabilities side of the balance sheet, and nothing they produce goes onto the assets side.
Luckily, there are headers in HTTP that allow the site to specify exactly where and how it wants its pages to be cached, how long they can be held, and whether they ought to be verified every time. (Even then, it's a hell of a lot easier for a site to send 304 Not Modified than it is to send the whole page)
Of course doing that would imply using a full-featured cache, not just an ad-hoc thing.
Of course, something 0.8AU from the sun could well be 1.8AU from the earth. There's no reason it should stay the same side of the sun as us, unless it was deliberately set up that way.
Put it this way. Bacteria are constantly self-replicating and evolving, and we're not running around screaming at the possibility _they're_ going to take over.
But given computer programs can evolve much more quickly (Not robots - forget the necessity for physical replication, it just slows things down), there is some degree of legitimate concern.
But for real disaster, several factors would have to converge: An AI would have to evolve to the point of self-determination. The AI would have to percieve humans as a threat. The AI would have to be hooked up to something dangerous (My PC could be an evil genius, but what's it gonna do, eject its CD tray at me?)
The bottom line, though, is that when evolving artificial intelligence, we control the selection criteria. It's not natural selection, it's artificial selection. If we don't select for evil planet-domineering AIs, they probably won't turn up.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems a bit silly to me. He put a random number generator in the definition of the thing, so is it really surprising that the output is random?
You can't start a definition
'freedom is the freedom...'
It's circular.
Black is the color of a black car.
This would be a great opportunity to totally rejig the Trek design. The 80s Next-Gen styling is getting very old and boring.
Mind you, I'm not holding out too much hope. In First Contact, the first ever Warp Ship was given a standard Next-Gen design.
Let's have some PROPER BUTTONS, not that silly touch-screen stuff.
"Down with pigs!"
"Yeah, especially the few bad apples that spoil their otherwise spotless image!"
This reveals the danger of quoting from memory. Quotes tend to devolve over time.
I remember the first time I heard a certain quote, it was:
Better to be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
The last time I heard the same quote it had devolved into something like:
It's better to keep your mouth shut, and let people think you're stupid, than to say something and confirm it.
I'm not sure what the original version is. I've never been able to find it in a dictionary of quotations, but I find the former far more elegant, and am therefore inclined to think it's closer to the original. I've been hearing ever more mangled versions over the years.
...feminine napkins...
Hmm... How do you tell if a woman in Star Trek is on her period? Every so often you hear a beep and the words "Menstrual fluid detected" coming from her crotch.
It's already been done. It's called Star Wars, and the Federation is known as the Empire.
Actually, the problem is that they're _not_ deliberately vague on the technology. It's all gravometric this, and subspace that, and universal translator the other (Why does the universal translator translate everything except Klingon?). If they only would ignore the technology and tell some stories then it would be so much better.
Instead of real plot points, Trek generates tension from how long it's taking to remodulate the gravometric doohickeys. They don't keep the technology in the background, they emphasise it, and mention it at every opportunity. The only reason they don't tell you how it works is that it's fictional, and as such they _don't know_ how it works.
I've been watching Dr. Who a lot recently, and the contrast is startling. Everyone speaks English, and there's no explanation at all. Because there's no stupid talk about universal translators, you tend to completely forget about it. Technobabble diverts your attention _toward_ the fact that these things are actually absurd.
I'm pretty sure Armstrong has admitted he flubbed it. Hence the big pause after 'man' where he's thinking to himself 'Shit, I just buggered up the first words on the moon. Oh well, I'd better finish it...'
Harder to decypher, but easier to detect. But if we don't detect anything, there's nothing to decypher, anyway. First things first.
If we detect some laser pulses aimed at us, we can then start looking for other, different signals from the same source. And funding would be easier, because instead of conducting a search for something that may or may not exist, we would be further investigating something that is known to exist - even if it turns out to be a natural phenomenon. We would know roughly what strength radio signals we would be looking for, and thus what size radio-telescope to use/build.
You could almost see the laser light as the phone ringing, telling us where to look for the radio message.
But the real funny one is fanny-pack (aka bumbag) (Actually, they're both pretty funny. My brother was using bumbag as an insult for many years)
I agree. It feels like British comedy played up for the American market.
Lock, Stock was a much more natural film - it was quirky, but unforced.
Snatch has a lot of quirks, but it's too self-conscious about trying to relive Lock, Stock's success. It throws a million jokes at the wall to see what sticks, and the result is a very laboured exercise. Many of the jokes work, but too many don't.
I recommend Love, Honor, and Obey as a far better movie in the british gangster comedy genre.
I've never been called. The people I know who have been called, and did their civic duty taking a week off work going down to court every day didn't get picked. I'm not saying I would necessarily avoid jury duty, but this kind of thing does not exactly make it worthwhile.
But I'm not sure the best way to fix a flawed system is to make it work as well as it possibly can. That just hides the flaws, and so means it will be longer before it gets fixed.
Oh, and I voted in the last election, if only so people couldn't make the "You have no right to complain if you didn't vote" argument at me.
I agree. I favour something like a juror's licence - something that anyone with a little dedication could get, like a driver's licence. They'd take a few evening classes. Logic, lie detection, etc... Juries would still be random, with all the benefits that gives, but they would be a random selection of _qualified_ people.
One of the most important jobs in our society, that of juror, is one that any old unqualified person can do.
But why would anyone bother to take the classes? Well, jury duty should pay _well_. It's important. Acknowledge that importance with the green stuff.
Juries are a group of people specifically designed to be as gullible as possible.
Start with a random group of schmoes, remove anyone capable of thinking up an excuse, then give each side the opportunity to get rid of any juror which the lawyers think cannot be convinced of their side's case. You can't get people inherently biased towards your side, because the other side will get rid of them, so the optimal solution is to get the most gullible people, and rely on your persuasion skills to bring them round to your side. Both sides want gullible people, because both sides think they can argue the best.
Result: A collective jellybrain.
A cynical person might think this was their tactic all along. Piss off the judge so much that it looks like he's biased against them, then use that in appeal.
It's so frustrating being an Orson Scott Card fan. You're following about 4 series of books he's writing, and it always seems that rather than write another book in any of them, he just starts another series.
It's one of the reasons I've tried to give up long series of books, and go for one-offs, or at worst trilogies that are already finished. Of course that doesn't help for the series that I started maybe 15 years ago, when I was a kid, and still aren't finished.
Only if it understands you the first time. I'm not sure it's fair to compare a theoretical capability of a future command line to current GUIs.
Let's get this straight right now. Command Line versus GUI is not about Text versus Icons - there is a huge amount of text on my screen right now (I have a total of 8 icons on my web browser, and 6 text-based menus, each containing a large amount of text in themselves, plus a URL bar, which anticipates what I'm trying to type and gives me a few options for completion). It's not even about keyboard versus mouse - there's plenty of typing goes on in a gui, and it's possible to get by without a mouse at all (Albeit quite painfully).
GUIs are about direct manipulation. All the buttons and icons are peripheral. It's about being able to highlight a piece of text, and move it to the point in the document where you want in to be. I can't even begin to imagine how you'd do that with a command line.
Command lines are about telling your computer what to do, GUIs are about doing it yourself.
Even a simple xterm gains power from a GUI. Scrollbars and drag & drop editing & cut and paste. (That said, X seems to be only just getting to grips with cut and paste and other basic GUI concepts, so perhaps it's not surprising that the unix users equate GUIs to what they've been limited to.)
As lame as a "can't we all just get along" speech may sound, in this case it's true. Command lines and direct manipulation both have their place in a modern user interface.
That's precisely what's needed. A telephone version of DNS. I'm sure if some company started making phones with proper keyboards, hooked them up so they connected to their own exchange which would look up a typed name, figure out the number, and dial it, there would be a market. (Precisely what name should match what number is a question, of course...)
In that way, the actual underlying phone number would be as irrelevant as the underlying IP address on the 'net today.
Let's face it, phone numbers are 19th century technology. The only reason we're still using them is that there are millions of dollars worth of hardware and software dependant on the way it's done right now. A DNS layer on top of the existing system would neatly sidestep that issue.
Redhat sells support and does development. They logically should be undercut by some company selling support but not doing development.
_That_ is the flaw of their business model. Oh, sure, there's the 'goodwill' generated by their development, but I'm not sure I'd want to bet the farm on goodwill.
It's a business model that's very lucrative for support personnel, but not so hot for programmers. Who's gonna be laid off first when times get tough?
That's why I don't buy the whole you-sell-support as an argument in favour of free software as a general economic model. The people who actually create the software are appearing on the liabilities side of the balance sheet, and nothing they produce goes onto the assets side.
Luckily, there are headers in HTTP that allow the site to specify exactly where and how it wants its pages to be cached, how long they can be held, and whether they ought to be verified every time. (Even then, it's a hell of a lot easier for a site to send 304 Not Modified than it is to send the whole page)
Of course doing that would imply using a full-featured cache, not just an ad-hoc thing.
Of course, something 0.8AU from the sun could well be 1.8AU from the earth. There's no reason it should stay the same side of the sun as us, unless it was deliberately set up that way.
Free will is a meaningless concept. Free to do what? To think what it wants? What does the wanting? The will does!
Put it this way. Bacteria are constantly self-replicating and evolving, and we're not running around screaming at the possibility _they're_ going to take over.
But given computer programs can evolve much more quickly (Not robots - forget the necessity for physical replication, it just slows things down), there is some degree of legitimate concern.
But for real disaster, several factors would have to converge: An AI would have to evolve to the point of self-determination. The AI would have to percieve humans as a threat. The AI would have to be hooked up to something dangerous (My PC could be an evil genius, but what's it gonna do, eject its CD tray at me?)
The bottom line, though, is that when evolving artificial intelligence, we control the selection criteria. It's not natural selection, it's artificial selection. If we don't select for evil planet-domineering AIs, they probably won't turn up.