So what keeps the spammers from subscribing to these services under fictitious names, and poisoning them so that noone trusts them enough to use them?
It seems like if a service were ruining my business model, and I was capable of screwing with it, and I was already unscrupulous enough to be sending people things they didn't want and didn't ask for - while pretending that they did - I wouldn't think twice about destroying any hope they might have of getting rid of me.
ALL hardware can be emulated in software, and there is no way for Universal to prove that I haven't done that without sending jackbooted thugs to bust into my house and tear my system apart.
Actually, in a very real sense, lives CAN be replaced. The problem is that our society only places personal value on individual lives, while any REAL value is only placed on one's utility to one or another Corporate Master. You kill me, and within days someone else is doing my job, and - aside from the fifteen minutes my office spends feigning shocked resignation over the loss of my life - work goes on, just as it has before.
Besides, all it takes to make a new life is for two kids to let their hormones take over. Granted, that new life won't be an exact replacement for any one life lost, but in aggregate, nothing's really lost. Think about it - there have been over 40 billion human deaths since Caveman Oog first placed a flower on the grave of his beloved Ugah. Obviously, it's not THAT crushing a blow to humanity, or we wouldn't have made it this far.
The death of a thousand peasants is far less important than the dethroning of a king, or there would be no way for those kings to make war. Bring that concept into the 21st century, and the death of some suburban sales manager is far less important than the disruption of corporate profits, or there would be no way to push him to a heart attack at 35 just to keep his numbers up.
You are a small cog in a big machine, and ultimately, you are replacable. Learn to love it, or learn to suffer in it. Either way, the machine will churn on.
That sounds really confusing. Let me see if I can make it simpler.
A snowflake *IS* a three dimensional object, and therefore has a set three-dimensional volume, which can easily be determined by melting said snowflake. The snowflake itself isn't a fractal.
Likewise, an ice cube is a three-dimensional object, and therefore has a set three-dimensional volume, which can easily be determined by side^3. The ^3 means it's a measurement of dimension three.
Now. The snowflake has a surface area, right? This is a two-dimensional value. Each of its tiny little facets has a two-dimensional area, and by summing up all that area, you can determine exactly the total 'surface area' of the snowflake. This would take forever, considering our snowflake has an infinite number of surfaces, but we won't worry about that for now.
The ice cube, likewise, has a two-dimensional surface area - which we can very quickly compute by taking side^2, and multiplying by 6 (since a cube has 6 sides). The ^2 means it's of dimension two.
Now, comes the fun part. A cube has eight edges, each of equal length. Thus, 8 * side^1 equals the total length of all edges in the square. This is of dimension one (see the ^1?)
The snowflake also has edges. It has an infinite number of them, in fact, all of zero length. But something weird happens if you try to measure the length - it just never stops. It gets so twisty and curvy, that its edge length is infinite. This implies that at least ONE edge is fractal.
See, there's different types of solids... a sphere is the most... I'll use the term 'economical', because it has the least amount of surface area compared to volume. A cube is less economical, in this sense, because it uses more surface area to contain its volume. An incredibly thin string is even less economical, using even more volume. But all of these are still three-dimensional objects. Except that, with the string, you can eventually get a string so small that its volume and length are the same - its third dimension, its thickness, has just shrunk to 0.
This might be a hard concept to swallow, but imagine that this is a single point:
.
That is, even though I know it takes up a certain number of pixels on your screen, pretend it has no width, no height, no nothing. Now, there's an infinite number of points, exactly like that one, in this dash:
-
Bear with me, and pretend that that line segment has a thickness of exactly one point. Now, we'll call the number of points 'one zillion'. Thus, we now have a system of measurement. This would contain 'two zillion' points:
--
Now. Take one of those 'zillions' and make a square (again, bear with me, ASCII isn't the best drawing medium - pretend it's connected, and solid all the way through):
[]
Now, just like that line was made of a zillion points, all lined up next to each other, this square is made up of one zillion lines, all stacked up on top of each other. Thus, it contains one zillion lines, which each contain one zillion points. It has a perimeter, which is all the points that aren't completely surrounded on all four sides (left, right, up, down) - obviously, there's the one line on the very top, and the one line on the very bottom, so that's two zillion - plus a single point on the left and right of all the zillion other lines, which makes four zillion. Thus, the area of the square is 'one zillion squared', or one square zillion - while its perimeter is four zillions.
Now, take that square, and stack it out (towards you) a zillion times - you now have a cube. It's got one zillion CUBED points, and its 'surface area' - i.e., the measure of all the points not completely surrounded in all six directions (up, down, left, right, fore, back) - is pretty easy to figure out, since the first and last squares are both exposed, and there's a zillion edges on each of the other four sides - and we already know that a zillion edges each a zillion points wide make a one-zillion-square square.
Now, fractals are strange creatures, in that, while they obviously exist within one set of dimensionality (for example, a two-dimensional Koch snowflake clearly resides on a page, and therefore is a two dimensional object), their 'edges' are infinite in the next dimension down. I.e., the snowflake has a definitely measurable area (dimension two), but its PERIMETER isn't of dimension one! It's just got too many points exposed. So that implies that that edge, with all its twists and turns, is 'fractal'. Say we measure it out, and it turns out that it's got 3.6 zillion^1.6 points - that implies that that weird curve has a dimensionality of 1.6.
Make sense?
Now... what'll really cook your noodle: go back up through that whole 'zillion' bit, and replace the word 'zillion' with 'inch' or 'centimeter'.
Now do you understand, fundamentally, what we mean by 'distance', and what we mean when we say 'the number line is infinite'?
The situation with deregulation in this country has put the foxes in charge of hen house.
So, you're suggesting that being slaughtered for food (snap metaphor: exploited without your consent) by the farmer (snap metaphor: government) is better than being slaughtered for food (snap metaphor: exploited without your consent) by the fox?
Think about this metaphor, especially whenever it gets used to describe the government, corporations, and the public: You aren't the farmer; you're the hen. YOU'RE SCREWED EITHER WAY. Either the government cooks you over a slow-roast fire, or the corporations rend you limb from limb. You have no power to protect yourself; once, a long time ago, you might have had the opportunity to choose to leave the henhouse and risk death at the hands of the foxes in exchange for freedom from the farmer's axe. But now, even that decision is taken from you - you will be a slave to whoever they tell you to be a slave to, and you will learn to like it. Your only choice is to decide which of our 250 all-digital channels will teach you how to like it, and how to properly show your appreciation.
Two chicks at once - and I'm not talking about a casual three-way sex and then go your seperate ways, I mean a loving, committed relationship with two (or more!) women, who both care about you and care about each other, who each see BOTH other partners as a necessary part of their lives - this is a very, very difficult thing to pull off.
But I assure you - if you're the sort of person that can handle polyamory, it is well worth it. Our sexual instincts are programmed to desire stability. We want loving, committed relationships. But deeper down, we want variety. We don't want to spend twenty years with the same, single partner forever.
A stable, long-term manage a trois is a wonderful, wonderful thing - for me.
But there's deeper insight here: Your sex life is your own. You won't be truly happy or truly fulfilled unless the partner(s) you come home to are the ones you fantasize about, and you're living out those very fantasies. Go to Rocky Horror Picture Show sometime, but don't pay attention to the freaks shouting at the audience: pay attention to the screen. There's a lesson in there that transcends fishnets and stage makeup.
Don't dream it, be it.
Tell your partner about your fantasies. Don't be afraid of the consequences; if they can't deal with your sexual appetites, find someone who can. Be free, but be responsible. It's like that kitchy "Wear Sunblock" speech said in the last days of the last century:
Don't be careless with other people's hearts. Don't waste time on people who are careless with yours.
Play it safe, play it cool, but DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO. Anything done between two (or more!) consenting partners is acceptable, so long as you all commit to picking up the pieces if something breaks.
Love each other in as many ways as you can come up with. God delights in diversity.
Yeah, beautiful. And the first time some script kiddie figures out a buffer overflow in MicroSoft Outlook.NET that automatically runs the contents of an email attachment as a shell script, with said 'tremendously powerful and coherent' scripting and shell environment? Where said script kiddies don't even NEED to attach an.exe or.scr to the email, they can just embed some script as HTML comments in the message itself and pipe it to c:\winnt\system32\bash32.dll?
Every time Microsoft adds 'new powerful functionality' to its products, they're creating another exploit waiting to happen - until they fix their fundamental security model.
Let's hope to God.NET does runlength-checks on every single buffer read, and all.NET applications process their data at the lowest security level necessary to accomplish their task.
Thank you. That's what I MEANT to say, but I had a major semantic subsystem glitch about halfway through. Sorry about the obviously bogus definition of 'orbit' I posited.
If it freely orbits a star, is IN THAT STAR'S PLANE OF THE ECLIPTIC, it's a planet (note: this knocks Pluto off the list). You still need some arbitrary limits here, though: I'd say as long as the normalized dot product of the orbit's normal vector with the plane of the ecliptic is within four sigma, you can call it a planet (note - don't take the absolute value - if it's going the wrong way, it's not a planet). Interestingly enough, this places most of the asteroids in 'planet' status.
That pretty much limits planets to objects which were clearly formed from the accretion disk of the star, as opposed to 'leftover junk' (which something like Pluto most assuredly is). Of course, this also means that a planet can get knocked out of its original orbit, and lose its 'planet' status, but this is also an acceptable side-effect if you want definitional consistency.
For 'moon', any body which orbits a planet within two sigma of ITS plane of ecliptic should be considered a 'moon'. Here we need a good definition of 'orbit' - if, at any time, an object's orbit brings it *away* from the center of mass of its solar system, and towards its planetary primary, it's in orbit around that planetary primary, and not its star. This means, incidentally, that the Earth's Moon is not a moon - it's another planet that happens to co-orbit the sun within the same boundry space as the Earth, and the two planets perturb each other's orbits.
Any body which does not fall under this criteria is a 'satellite' of its primary, but not a 'planet' or 'moon'.
While this definition leads to a few counter-intuitive situations (or at least, counter-traditional), that's inevitable when formalizing terminology. People use words too loosely to expect all possible cases to fit the 'traditional' nomelcatures, so when formalizing, you sometimes have to accept a few deviances (for example, if we were to normalize biological taxonomy, dogs, wolves, coyotes, and jackals would all be the same species - since they're genetically capable of interreproducing. It's only weight of tradition that keeps them seperate, a very unscientific concept.)
Which is kinda wacky, considering that - chemically - Hydrogen behaves as a 'metal' (in the classical sense) in certain circumstances, and the other nobles (neon, argon, etc.) will NEVER behave as anything other than a noble (well, except xenon, but once you get that much separation from your orbital field and your nucleus, all bets are off.)
Just goes to show that even scientists can fall into the trap of ambiguous contextual terminology. It'd be nice to go through and create a single, agreed-upon, interdisciplinary scientific language, where when you talk about something, everyone knows what you're saying. (While we're at it, let's set the speed of light to 1 and try and normalize as many fundamental constants as possible.)
Disney's fired about 80% of its art staff, because with new computer technology, they just don't need all those 'tweeners, fillers, background painters, and other skilled workers.
Contrast this with other studios, who RETRAIN their staff to use the new technology instead of just dumping them (hey, it's cheaper to just train someone new, and they'll work for less).
I wonder how many of them Disney personally turned into 'artist/waiters'?
Seems a bit disingenuous, then - I can download a Linux distro, install it, and by all rights, I OWN that copy of Linux on my machine, and have (under the GPL) every possible right of ownership, so long as I preserve others' rights of ownership to their copies.
How much do I have to pay Microsoft to equally "own" my install of Windows 2000 Server?
Okay, so if I go to New Amsterdam, where nude models can pose for magazine shots at age 14, and produce some nice cheesecake with some pretty little nordic teenagers, you think I won't be arrested for producing kiddie porn the moment I step foot back on US soil, REGARDLESS of whether the material ever makes it to the US?
Heh.
There are laws specifically crafted to prosecute US citizens who go to other countries to perform certain acts which are illegal in the US - and all those acts relate to drugs, sex, or other crimes of "morality".
Town/Family killed, start self discovery, find other chacaters, more self discovery, have conflicting love interests, get close to figuring self out, discover some relationship to "Big Enemy", play through self doubt sequence, discover mentor, resolve love interest when somone makes a sacrifice, fight "Big Enemy", win for a bit, "Big Enemy" reveals "True Self", get real close to losing, defeat "Big Enemy", listen to "Big Enemy" make inspiring final speech, game end.
Wow. You just PRECISELY summed up the entire plot of the original Star Wars trilogy.
Blueshifting? How fast are these things GOING?
on
Meet The Leonids
·
· Score: 1
Wouldn't they have to be traveling at about 0.01C or faster to have any perceptible blue-shift?
Nope. A 'hammer' is an abstraction of 'apply this amount of linear force to this surface area'.
Which itself is an abstraction of the entire network of force interactions between sets of interconnected particles, when force is transferred between them.
Which itself is an abstraction of the wave-particle duality of the universe.
Think about this - how long has RS232 been defined? How long has the PC's parallel (i.e., LPT1) pin-out been defined? How long has the VGA pin-out been defined? How long has the PC keyboard pin-out and protocol been defined? A lot of things change pretty fast; a lot of things stay around forever. It all depends on whether upgrading them is worth the cost in the long run.
Arthur Dent - This is going to be a tough call, but my gut says recycle Mr. Bean.
Ford Prefect - Jeff Goldblum, as I said before.
Zaphod Beeblebrox - Brad Pitt all the way. Look at Fight Club. Look at Twelve Monkeys. Look at Se7en. The man can do 'nutball'.
Trillian - Tia Carerra. I know, it never said Trillian was asian, but my image of her was always this exotic, immigrant British. If not her, than Mariana Sirtis (sans Troi accent, thank you).
Slartibartfast - Gary Oldman.
Vogon captain - Dennis Leary. Think about it.
Voices for Trillian's Mice - Robin Williams and... Robin Williams.
Wonko the Sane - Jim Carey
Marvin - personally, I think they should use a voice synthesizer and generate all his lines synthetically.
Anyone have any other ideas?
I will also give this movie mad, mad props if they somehow manage to put a cameo of the entire cast of Red Dwarf in the scene where Zaphod steals the Heart of Gold.
Actually, I've always seen Jeff Goldblum as Ford Prefect; the description of someone whose social behaviors are just a little 'off', who smiles a little too eagerly and too earnestly, and who very deadpanly explains the end of the world just somehow pings off in my mind as his traits (especially look at his earlier, campier performances, like Buckaroo Banzai or Earth Girls are Easy)
The dealers, very often, don't get actually convicted or anything. Oftentimes their wives do, their associates do, and random users do - but actual dealers tend to wind up back on the streets very quickly, because that's what keeps the War on Drugs in business.
Hell, most PROGRAMMERS can't take the day off because we're too far outside the zone. Last time I slipped up that bad, I got fired - after an 18 month exemplary track record. I asked beforehand if I could take the day off (first day off I would have had in 13 months), and was refused because we were "on deadline". I warned them I might screw up, I was told not to. Funny enough, I did anyway - despite my best efforts not to. Punt! new job.
When a robot, on the run, can throw a stone and hit something else that's on the run, talk to me about shitty meat computers and the superiority of "clean and dry" computers.
Guess what? We've been able to do this since the 40s. What do you think the targeting computers they put on B-24's are? All modern fire control computers are designed to precisely solve this problem, and do it a far sight better than meat tends to.
Slashdot Mirror
So what keeps the spammers from subscribing to these services under fictitious names, and poisoning them so that noone trusts them enough to use them?
It seems like if a service were ruining my business model, and I was capable of screwing with it, and I was already unscrupulous enough to be sending people things they didn't want and didn't ask for - while pretending that they did - I wouldn't think twice about destroying any hope they might have of getting rid of me.
ALL hardware can be emulated in software, and there is no way for Universal to prove that I haven't done that without sending jackbooted thugs to bust into my house and tear my system apart.
And, thanks to the DMCA, they can do just that!
Actually, in a very real sense, lives CAN be replaced. The problem is that our society only places personal value on individual lives, while any REAL value is only placed on one's utility to one or another Corporate Master. You kill me, and within days someone else is doing my job, and - aside from the fifteen minutes my office spends feigning shocked resignation over the loss of my life - work goes on, just as it has before.
Besides, all it takes to make a new life is for two kids to let their hormones take over. Granted, that new life won't be an exact replacement for any one life lost, but in aggregate, nothing's really lost. Think about it - there have been over 40 billion human deaths since Caveman Oog first placed a flower on the grave of his beloved Ugah. Obviously, it's not THAT crushing a blow to humanity, or we wouldn't have made it this far.
The death of a thousand peasants is far less important than the dethroning of a king, or there would be no way for those kings to make war. Bring that concept into the 21st century, and the death of some suburban sales manager is far less important than the disruption of corporate profits, or there would be no way to push him to a heart attack at 35 just to keep his numbers up.
You are a small cog in a big machine, and ultimately, you are replacable. Learn to love it, or learn to suffer in it. Either way, the machine will churn on.
That sounds really confusing. Let me see if I can make it simpler.
A snowflake *IS* a three dimensional object, and therefore has a set three-dimensional volume, which can easily be determined by melting said snowflake. The snowflake itself isn't a fractal.
Likewise, an ice cube is a three-dimensional object, and therefore has a set three-dimensional volume, which can easily be determined by side^3. The ^3 means it's a measurement of dimension three.
Now. The snowflake has a surface area, right? This is a two-dimensional value. Each of its tiny little facets has a two-dimensional area, and by summing up all that area, you can determine exactly the total 'surface area' of the snowflake. This would take forever, considering our snowflake has an infinite number of surfaces, but we won't worry about that for now.
The ice cube, likewise, has a two-dimensional surface area - which we can very quickly compute by taking side^2, and multiplying by 6 (since a cube has 6 sides). The ^2 means it's of dimension two.
Now, comes the fun part. A cube has eight edges, each of equal length. Thus, 8 * side^1 equals the total length of all edges in the square. This is of dimension one (see the ^1?)
The snowflake also has edges. It has an infinite number of them, in fact, all of zero length. But something weird happens if you try to measure the length - it just never stops. It gets so twisty and curvy, that its edge length is infinite. This implies that at least ONE edge is fractal.
See, there's different types of solids... a sphere is the most... I'll use the term 'economical', because it has the least amount of surface area compared to volume. A cube is less economical, in this sense, because it uses more surface area to contain its volume. An incredibly thin string is even less economical, using even more volume. But all of these are still three-dimensional objects. Except that, with the string, you can eventually get a string so small that its volume and length are the same - its third dimension, its thickness, has just shrunk to 0.
This might be a hard concept to swallow, but imagine that this is a single point:
.
That is, even though I know it takes up a certain number of pixels on your screen, pretend it has no width, no height, no nothing. Now, there's an infinite number of points, exactly like that one, in this dash:
-
Bear with me, and pretend that that line segment has a thickness of exactly one point. Now, we'll call the number of points 'one zillion'. Thus, we now have a system of measurement. This would contain 'two zillion' points:
--
Now. Take one of those 'zillions' and make a square (again, bear with me, ASCII isn't the best drawing medium - pretend it's connected, and solid all the way through):
[]
Now, just like that line was made of a zillion points, all lined up next to each other, this square is made up of one zillion lines, all stacked up on top of each other. Thus, it contains one zillion lines, which each contain one zillion points. It has a perimeter, which is all the points that aren't completely surrounded on all four sides (left, right, up, down) - obviously, there's the one line on the very top, and the one line on the very bottom, so that's two zillion - plus a single point on the left and right of all the zillion other lines, which makes four zillion. Thus, the area of the square is 'one zillion squared', or one square zillion - while its perimeter is four zillions.
Now, take that square, and stack it out (towards you) a zillion times - you now have a cube. It's got one zillion CUBED points, and its 'surface area' - i.e., the measure of all the points not completely surrounded in all six directions (up, down, left, right, fore, back) - is pretty easy to figure out, since the first and last squares are both exposed, and there's a zillion edges on each of the other four sides - and we already know that a zillion edges each a zillion points wide make a one-zillion-square square.
Now, fractals are strange creatures, in that, while they obviously exist within one set of dimensionality (for example, a two-dimensional Koch snowflake clearly resides on a page, and therefore is a two dimensional object), their 'edges' are infinite in the next dimension down. I.e., the snowflake has a definitely measurable area (dimension two), but its PERIMETER isn't of dimension one! It's just got too many points exposed. So that implies that that edge, with all its twists and turns, is 'fractal'. Say we measure it out, and it turns out that it's got 3.6 zillion^1.6 points - that implies that that weird curve has a dimensionality of 1.6.
Make sense?
Now... what'll really cook your noodle: go back up through that whole 'zillion' bit, and replace the word 'zillion' with 'inch' or 'centimeter'.
Now do you understand, fundamentally, what we mean by 'distance', and what we mean when we say 'the number line is infinite'?
Out of curiosity, do you mean 'corrupt as in Nixon' or 'corrupt as in boot sector'?
And, fundamentally, is there a real semantic difference between the two concepts?
The situation with deregulation in this country has put the foxes in charge of hen house.
So, you're suggesting that being slaughtered for food (snap metaphor: exploited without your consent) by the farmer (snap metaphor: government) is better than being slaughtered for food (snap metaphor: exploited without your consent) by the fox?
Think about this metaphor, especially whenever it gets used to describe the government, corporations, and the public: You aren't the farmer; you're the hen. YOU'RE SCREWED EITHER WAY. Either the government cooks you over a slow-roast fire, or the corporations rend you limb from limb. You have no power to protect yourself; once, a long time ago, you might have had the opportunity to choose to leave the henhouse and risk death at the hands of the foxes in exchange for freedom from the farmer's axe. But now, even that decision is taken from you - you will be a slave to whoever they tell you to be a slave to, and you will learn to like it. Your only choice is to decide which of our 250 all-digital channels will teach you how to like it, and how to properly show your appreciation.
A boot stepping on a human face forever, indeed.
I just have to jump in here.
Two chicks at once - and I'm not talking about a casual three-way sex and then go your seperate ways, I mean a loving, committed relationship with two (or more!) women, who both care about you and care about each other, who each see BOTH other partners as a necessary part of their lives - this is a very, very difficult thing to pull off.
But I assure you - if you're the sort of person that can handle polyamory, it is well worth it. Our sexual instincts are programmed to desire stability. We want loving, committed relationships. But deeper down, we want variety. We don't want to spend twenty years with the same, single partner forever.
A stable, long-term manage a trois is a wonderful, wonderful thing - for me.
But there's deeper insight here: Your sex life is your own. You won't be truly happy or truly fulfilled unless the partner(s) you come home to are the ones you fantasize about, and you're living out those very fantasies. Go to Rocky Horror Picture Show sometime, but don't pay attention to the freaks shouting at the audience: pay attention to the screen. There's a lesson in there that transcends fishnets and stage makeup.
Don't dream it, be it.
Tell your partner about your fantasies. Don't be afraid of the consequences; if they can't deal with your sexual appetites, find someone who can. Be free, but be responsible. It's like that kitchy "Wear Sunblock" speech said in the last days of the last century:
Don't be careless with other people's hearts. Don't waste time on people who are careless with yours.
Play it safe, play it cool, but DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO. Anything done between two (or more!) consenting partners is acceptable, so long as you all commit to picking up the pieces if something breaks.
Love each other in as many ways as you can come up with. God delights in diversity.
Yeah, beautiful. And the first time some script kiddie figures out a buffer overflow in MicroSoft Outlook.NET that automatically runs the contents of an email attachment as a shell script, with said 'tremendously powerful and coherent' scripting and shell environment? Where said script kiddies don't even NEED to attach an .exe or .scr to the email, they can just embed some script as HTML comments in the message itself and pipe it to c:\winnt\system32\bash32.dll?
.NET does runlength-checks on every single buffer read, and all .NET applications process their data at the lowest security level necessary to accomplish their task.
Every time Microsoft adds 'new powerful functionality' to its products, they're creating another exploit waiting to happen - until they fix their fundamental security model.
Let's hope to God
Thank you. That's what I MEANT to say, but I had a major semantic subsystem glitch about halfway through. Sorry about the obviously bogus definition of 'orbit' I posited.
Actually, even better:
If it freely orbits a star, is IN THAT STAR'S PLANE OF THE ECLIPTIC, it's a planet (note: this knocks Pluto off the list). You still need some arbitrary limits here, though: I'd say as long as the normalized dot product of the orbit's normal vector with the plane of the ecliptic is within four sigma, you can call it a planet (note - don't take the absolute value - if it's going the wrong way, it's not a planet). Interestingly enough, this places most of the asteroids in 'planet' status.
That pretty much limits planets to objects which were clearly formed from the accretion disk of the star, as opposed to 'leftover junk' (which something like Pluto most assuredly is). Of course, this also means that a planet can get knocked out of its original orbit, and lose its 'planet' status, but this is also an acceptable side-effect if you want definitional consistency.
For 'moon', any body which orbits a planet within two sigma of ITS plane of ecliptic should be considered a 'moon'. Here we need a good definition of 'orbit' - if, at any time, an object's orbit brings it *away* from the center of mass of its solar system, and towards its planetary primary, it's in orbit around that planetary primary, and not its star. This means, incidentally, that the Earth's Moon is not a moon - it's another planet that happens to co-orbit the sun within the same boundry space as the Earth, and the two planets perturb each other's orbits.
Any body which does not fall under this criteria is a 'satellite' of its primary, but not a 'planet' or 'moon'.
While this definition leads to a few counter-intuitive situations (or at least, counter-traditional), that's inevitable when formalizing terminology. People use words too loosely to expect all possible cases to fit the 'traditional' nomelcatures, so when formalizing, you sometimes have to accept a few deviances (for example, if we were to normalize biological taxonomy, dogs, wolves, coyotes, and jackals would all be the same species - since they're genetically capable of interreproducing. It's only weight of tradition that keeps them seperate, a very unscientific concept.)
Which is kinda wacky, considering that - chemically - Hydrogen behaves as a 'metal' (in the classical sense) in certain circumstances, and the other nobles (neon, argon, etc.) will NEVER behave as anything other than a noble (well, except xenon, but once you get that much separation from your orbital field and your nucleus, all bets are off.)
Just goes to show that even scientists can fall into the trap of ambiguous contextual terminology. It'd be nice to go through and create a single, agreed-upon, interdisciplinary scientific language, where when you talk about something, everyone knows what you're saying. (While we're at it, let's set the speed of light to 1 and try and normalize as many fundamental constants as possible.)
Marijuana... that's an asset forfeiture.
Pirated CDs... that's an asset forfeiture.
Stolen cable... that's an asset forfeiture.
Immigration violation... that's an asset forfeiture.
Helping the terrorists... that's DEFINITELY an asset forfeiture.
Isn't this shit what we fought England over, 225 years ago? My christ, the terrorists HAVE won.
Disney's fired about 80% of its art staff, because with new computer technology, they just don't need all those 'tweeners, fillers, background painters, and other skilled workers.
Contrast this with other studios, who RETRAIN their staff to use the new technology instead of just dumping them (hey, it's cheaper to just train someone new, and they'll work for less).
I wonder how many of them Disney personally turned into 'artist/waiters'?
Doesn't TCO mean "Total Cost of Ownership"?
Seems a bit disingenuous, then - I can download a Linux distro, install it, and by all rights, I OWN that copy of Linux on my machine, and have (under the GPL) every possible right of ownership, so long as I preserve others' rights of ownership to their copies.
How much do I have to pay Microsoft to equally "own" my install of Windows 2000 Server?
Okay, so if I go to New Amsterdam, where nude models can pose for magazine shots at age 14, and produce some nice cheesecake with some pretty little nordic teenagers, you think I won't be arrested for producing kiddie porn the moment I step foot back on US soil, REGARDLESS of whether the material ever makes it to the US?
Heh.
There are laws specifically crafted to prosecute US citizens who go to other countries to perform certain acts which are illegal in the US - and all those acts relate to drugs, sex, or other crimes of "morality".
Town/Family killed, start self discovery, find other chacaters, more self discovery, have conflicting love interests, get close to figuring self out, discover some relationship to "Big Enemy", play through self doubt sequence, discover mentor, resolve love interest when somone makes a sacrifice, fight "Big Enemy", win for a bit, "Big Enemy" reveals "True Self", get real close to losing, defeat "Big Enemy", listen to "Big Enemy" make inspiring final speech, game end.
Wow. You just PRECISELY summed up the entire plot of the original Star Wars trilogy.
Wouldn't they have to be traveling at about 0.01C or faster to have any perceptible blue-shift?
Nope. A 'hammer' is an abstraction of 'apply this amount of linear force to this surface area'.
Which itself is an abstraction of the entire network of force interactions between sets of interconnected particles, when force is transferred between them.
Which itself is an abstraction of the wave-particle duality of the universe.
Have fun!!!
Think about this - how long has RS232 been defined? How long has the PC's parallel (i.e., LPT1) pin-out been defined? How long has the VGA pin-out been defined? How long has the PC keyboard pin-out and protocol been defined? A lot of things change pretty fast; a lot of things stay around forever. It all depends on whether upgrading them is worth the cost in the long run.
Arthur Dent - This is going to be a tough call, but my gut says recycle Mr. Bean.
Ford Prefect - Jeff Goldblum, as I said before.
Zaphod Beeblebrox - Brad Pitt all the way. Look at Fight Club. Look at Twelve Monkeys. Look at Se7en. The man can do 'nutball'.
Trillian - Tia Carerra. I know, it never said Trillian was asian, but my image of her was always this exotic, immigrant British. If not her, than Mariana Sirtis (sans Troi accent, thank you).
Slartibartfast - Gary Oldman.
Vogon captain - Dennis Leary. Think about it.
Voices for Trillian's Mice - Robin Williams and... Robin Williams.
Wonko the Sane - Jim Carey
Marvin - personally, I think they should use a voice synthesizer and generate all his lines synthetically.
Anyone have any other ideas?
I will also give this movie mad, mad props if they somehow manage to put a cameo of the entire cast of Red Dwarf in the scene where Zaphod steals the Heart of Gold.
Actually, I've always seen Jeff Goldblum as Ford Prefect; the description of someone whose social behaviors are just a little 'off', who smiles a little too eagerly and too earnestly, and who very deadpanly explains the end of the world just somehow pings off in my mind as his traits (especially look at his earlier, campier performances, like Buckaroo Banzai or Earth Girls are Easy)
Judge: "So, this man invented a..." (checks notes) "...'chameleon suit' in violation of your patents, and now you're suing him?"
Lawyer: "Your honor, my client has suffered greivous financial loss due to this man, right over - er... damn."
The dealers, very often, don't get actually convicted or anything. Oftentimes their wives do, their associates do, and random users do - but actual dealers tend to wind up back on the streets very quickly, because that's what keeps the War on Drugs in business.
Hell, most PROGRAMMERS can't take the day off because we're too far outside the zone. Last time I slipped up that bad, I got fired - after an 18 month exemplary track record. I asked beforehand if I could take the day off (first day off I would have had in 13 months), and was refused because we were "on deadline". I warned them I might screw up, I was told not to. Funny enough, I did anyway - despite my best efforts not to. Punt! new job.
When a robot, on the run, can throw a stone and hit something else that's on the run, talk to me about shitty meat computers and the superiority of "clean and dry" computers.
Guess what? We've been able to do this since the 40s. What do you think the targeting computers they put on B-24's are? All modern fire control computers are designed to precisely solve this problem, and do it a far sight better than meat tends to.