I call troll and bullshit. You describe yourself as a libertarian and then spout nonsense like "no actual libertarian votes". Perhaps you misspelled "anarchist". The Libertarian Party (not "so called" - it exists as a registered political party) routinely gets candidates on (at least some of) the ballots, and they get votes -- just not enough because the Big Two keep pushing the "don't waste your vote" FUD, and their lackwit anarchist lackeys don't even bother voting at all.
Niven was right: "there is no cause so noble that it will not attract fuckheads".
OOXML and ODF are both thin veneers on particular application products.
OOXML may be (or pretend to be), but what application products were you thinking of for ODF? Were you aware that KOffice (no relation at all to OpenOffice.org) also uses ODF as its native document format? The old StarOffice/OpenOffice.org formats (.sxw,.sxc, etc) were vaguly similar to the ODF formats, but not the same. (And of course native formats aside, there are plenty of other office apps that can read/write ODF.)
The "thin veneer" argument against ODF is just Microsoft FUD.
If it will make no difference, then ECMA and ISO may as well give Microsoft the middle finger first and drop MS-OOXML as a proposed ISO standard. Save everyone a lot of trouble.
But I'm curious. What makes you think that DOCX files bear more than a passing resemblence to what ECMA's proposing?
Office already saves thousands, if not millions, of documents in OOXML
It's worse than that -- the MS-OOXML that Office saves documents in is not the same as the OOXML that MS spec'ed out to ECMA and got submitted to ISO. (This should be no surprise to anyone -- when has Microsoft ever produced software that matched the spec?) It's close, but different. Even if you could write software to the ECMA spec (doubtful since it is incomplete and ambiguous in places), it wouldn't interoperate well with MS Office.
In general no, they're not. Mind, if you keep messing up, expect the FCC to invite you in for a little chat about that. (Indeed, as pilot-in-command you can refuse ATC instructions and ask for different ones, but you'd better have a flight-safety reason to back that up.)
It's been a whle since I flew as pilot, but on commercial flights that have it I like to listen to the radio chatter on the headphones, it's usually more interesting than any of the music channels or the inflight movie. The ATC folks are usually a polite, friendly bunch -- it lowers the stress level for everyone -- and they'll suggest and accomodate requests for avoiding turbulence, better routing etc. Understandably when things start to get busy (a storm closes an airport and alternates start to get backed up, etc) they can get a little terse.
Side note: I recall reading in an aviation safety bulletin that the most common last words on a cockpit voice recorder, next to "oh, shit", were "was that for us?". Possibly apocryphal.
I won't argue about how much fun it isn't, but when my NAT'd laptop is VPN'd in to a secure cell and then two or three jumpboxes, options are limited. Yeah, if I have a chance ahead of time and there's another server on the VLAN I can access, I'll just set it up to get the images off the local net and do a kickstart/autoyast install.
But having the fallback beats having to have somebody drag their ass to the datacenter to swap media.
Feh, remote reboots are nothing on enterprise class hardware -- they have management consoles or RILO cards for that.
Remote installs are a bit more of a challenge, just because a virtual DVD drive is a bit slower than a local drive. (Virtual as in - the DVD is in my laptop, the system I'm booting off of it is on the other end of an internet connection.)
Yep, and Baen offers a variety of formats. I read 1632 online one slow afternoon when there wasn't much news on/. (and I was still waiting on account approvals so I couldn't do any real work).
A very skillful troll, I congratulate you sir! (Although I'm giving up the opportunity to mod you Funny to do so).
For the twits that modded parent "insightful", he first paraphrases John 8:7 to 8:11, substituting Mohammed's name for Jesus, then to up the irony he takes offense at Islam being likened to Christianity.
(I'm not even Christian, but I recognize the phrase "go, and sin no more" when I see it. Sheesh.)
Yes, change happens at the local level and tends to happen from the bottom up, but unless that's reinforced with some serious shaking up at the upper levels, it's ignorable.
The way to shake up the upper levels is to vote for people who agree with what you believe, regardless of party or whether they have a chance to win. You're only wasting your vote if you vote for someone who would win anyway. When a party loses a close race because some third (or fourth, or fifth) party candidate "drained off the votes", you damn betcha that they'll re-think their platform to pull some of those voters into their tent next time. Voting for "the lesser of two evils" because you don't think the non-evil guy has a chance of winning is short-term thinking. Short-term thinking got us into this mess in the first place.
(Of course, joining and becoming active in one of the two main parties and trying to change their platform from within, nominate the right candidates, etc, is also a worthwhile approach, if you can.)
No, you lobbed him a trick question, which he addressed. He opposes federal laws against it. He supports the constitution. Federal interference in state law enforcement (except where those state laws are clearly unconstitutional -- and sorry, I don't see how a state law against marijuana would be) is unconstitutional. What did you expect, that he'd promise to send in federal troops to liberate marijuana users from state prisons?
At least you'd have the opportunity to move to a state where there wasn't a marijuana prohibition.
which points out that the same would have happened to O'Neill colonies without constant dynamical control.
Which just goes to show that the author didn't do his research on O'Neill colonies. O'Neill was a physicist, he knew the issues and addressed them (two cylinders tethered together, the agricultural ring, etc image here). And, of course, they do have constant dynamical control.
Just because some artists and Babylon 5 get it wrong doesn't mean the physicists did.
Nope. The golf player was Alan Shepard on Apollo 14. Apollos 15-17 did a lot more science, they had the Rover to travel further, landing technique was where they could land more interesting places, and on the last mission they finally landed someone (Harrison Schmitt) who was trained as a geologist first, not a test pilot.
It's interesting, don't get me wrong--but how -practical- is it?
Its practicality is as a tool to help us understand those other questions you raise. If it does require new amino acids (certainly it probably tags for different amino acids, the question is whether or not they're found in nature (at least, terrestrial nature)) and generate new proteins, we can learn from that. By replacing specific sequences and coding for different aminos, we may get a better understanding of protein folding.
It may also give us some insights into possible extraterrestrial biologies, which again in turn helps us better understand our own biology.
No doubt when Faraday discovered that current flowing through a wire could deflect a compass needle, somebody asked how practical that was.
scientists rush into new discoveries and are not being completely honest when they proclaim them "Perfectly safe!"
I think you'll find that it's never the scientists who proclaim them "perfectly safe"; scientists (and engineers) will hedge and mention risk factors -- but they also are reasonably good at quantifying those risks rather than being hysterical about them. Eg, "injecting plutonium" is never a good idea -- depending on where it settles in your system you'll probably die within a few days to a few weeks as e.g. your bone marrow becomes unable to create new blood cells -- but that's a far cry from the popular "most toxic substance known to man" hysteria from the ignorant. There are plenty of more-toxic substances, probably most of them "natural" and of biological origin. Some of which people actually inject (botulism toxin, for example).
No, where you'll hear the "Perfectly safe!" mantra from is the marketeers and politicians who -- if they understand it at all -- want to gloss over the risk factors that the scientists mentioned.
More and more, I see SF as putting out the message "scientists as a group are stupid, shortsighted, and dangerous, only the lone researcher who disagrees with the group knows what is actually going on, and the pitchfork/torch wielding crowd have the right idea on how to fix things."
That's pretty much been the case with Hollywood SF since the 1950s. Conspiracy theorists might surmise that it really was due to communist infiltration and that it was all a Soviet plot to undermine US science, but more likely it was (and is) just a combination of the scientifically illiterates' response to something they don't understand (consider Clarke's Third Law plus equating magic to witchcraft), and the fact that the Frankenstein myth has always sold well.
As for written SF, I'm not sure that exists anymore -- I was just looking at a flyer for the upcoming MileHiCon (Denver in October, a few months after the WorldCon), and of the three author guests of honor, none of them write what I'd call science fiction. It's all magic, paranormal and shapeshifters. But that seems to be where the money is; look how "Buffy" and "Angel" did compared to "Firefly".
Well yeah, the US voting system is seriously fscked up, starting with the fact that there's one election day to elect everyone running for office from local dogcatcher to president, not to mention however many ballot initiatives and referenda there are. (Okay, there may be some local exceptions.)
In Canada, for example, it's pretty much unheard of to schedule a municipal or provincial election on the same day as a national one.
As I recall the last Canadian election I participated in (couple of decades ago), each particular race (position) had its own ballot, colour-coded, each going into a different ballot box. That simplifies the counting greatly. (Mind, I officially declined my vote in that one, all the candidates were bozos or worse. They have to count officially declined votes as equivalent to "none of the above", and they'd have to do the election over if there were enough of those. They have to record it to balance the number of ballots in the box with the number of voters who showed up. If they wanted to increase voter turnout, they should do something similar here in the US. Of course they won't, the two major parties like the lock they have in the current system.)
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't that be Internet 2.0?
.0 release of anything.
Mind, you'd think people would have learned by now not to trust a
I call troll and bullshit. You describe yourself as a libertarian and then spout nonsense like "no actual libertarian votes". Perhaps you misspelled "anarchist". The Libertarian Party (not "so called" - it exists as a registered political party) routinely gets candidates on (at least some of) the ballots, and they get votes -- just not enough because the Big Two keep pushing the "don't waste your vote" FUD, and their lackwit anarchist lackeys don't even bother voting at all.
Niven was right: "there is no cause so noble that it will not attract fuckheads".
Then there are shows like Star Trek that use fictional technology but clearly define the laws and limitations of their world.
Riiight. At least until the plot requires otherwise.
OOXML and ODF are both thin veneers on particular application products.
.sxc, etc) were vaguly similar to the ODF formats, but not the same. (And of course native formats aside, there are plenty of other office apps that can read/write ODF.)
OOXML may be (or pretend to be), but what application products were you thinking of for ODF? Were you aware that KOffice (no relation at all to OpenOffice.org) also uses ODF as its native document format? The old StarOffice/OpenOffice.org formats (.sxw,
The "thin veneer" argument against ODF is just Microsoft FUD.
If it will make no difference, then ECMA and ISO may as well give Microsoft the middle finger first and drop MS-OOXML as a proposed ISO standard. Save everyone a lot of trouble.
But I'm curious. What makes you think that DOCX files bear more than a passing resemblence to what ECMA's proposing?
Office already saves thousands, if not millions, of documents in OOXML
It's worse than that -- the MS-OOXML that Office saves documents in is not the same as the OOXML that MS spec'ed out to ECMA and got submitted to ISO. (This should be no surprise to anyone -- when has Microsoft ever produced software that matched the spec?) It's close, but different. Even if you could write software to the ECMA spec (doubtful since it is incomplete and ambiguous in places), it wouldn't interoperate well with MS Office.
Hey, at least he knew it wasn't Syd Barrett.
maybe real life ATC is just as anal,
In general no, they're not. Mind, if you keep messing up, expect the FCC to invite you in for a little chat about that. (Indeed, as pilot-in-command you can refuse ATC instructions and ask for different ones, but you'd better have a flight-safety reason to back that up.)
It's been a whle since I flew as pilot, but on commercial flights that have it I like to listen to the radio chatter on the headphones, it's usually more interesting than any of the music channels or the inflight movie. The ATC folks are usually a polite, friendly bunch -- it lowers the stress level for everyone -- and they'll suggest and accomodate requests for avoiding turbulence, better routing etc. Understandably when things start to get busy (a storm closes an airport and alternates start to get backed up, etc) they can get a little terse.
Side note: I recall reading in an aviation safety bulletin that the most common last words on a cockpit voice recorder, next to "oh, shit", were "was that for us?". Possibly apocryphal.
"There is another system."
They already tried, a few years back.
As I recall, the DOJ (FTC?) wouldn't let them. It was around the time MSFT first came out with Microsoft Money.
I won't argue about how much fun it isn't, but when my NAT'd laptop is VPN'd in to a secure cell and then two or three jumpboxes, options are limited. Yeah, if I have a chance ahead of time and there's another server on the VLAN I can access, I'll just set it up to get the images off the local net and do a kickstart/autoyast install.
But having the fallback beats having to have somebody drag their ass to the datacenter to swap media.
Feh, remote reboots are nothing on enterprise class hardware -- they have management consoles or RILO cards for that.
Remote installs are a bit more of a challenge, just because a virtual DVD drive is a bit slower than a local drive. (Virtual as in - the DVD is in my laptop, the system I'm booting off of it is on the other end of an internet connection.)
Yep, and Baen offers a variety of formats. I read 1632 online one slow afternoon when there wasn't much news on /. (and I was still waiting on account approvals so I couldn't do any real work).
A very skillful troll, I congratulate you sir! (Although I'm giving up the opportunity to mod you Funny to do so).
For the twits that modded parent "insightful", he first paraphrases John 8:7 to 8:11, substituting Mohammed's name for Jesus, then to up the irony he takes offense at Islam being likened to Christianity.
(I'm not even Christian, but I recognize the phrase "go, and sin no more" when I see it. Sheesh.)
No.
Yes, change happens at the local level and tends to happen from the bottom up, but unless that's reinforced with some serious shaking up at the upper levels, it's ignorable.
The way to shake up the upper levels is to vote for people who agree with what you believe, regardless of party or whether they have a chance to win. You're only wasting your vote if you vote for someone who would win anyway. When a party loses a close race because some third (or fourth, or fifth) party candidate "drained off the votes", you damn betcha that they'll re-think their platform to pull some of those voters into their tent next time. Voting for "the lesser of two evils" because you don't think the non-evil guy has a chance of winning is short-term thinking. Short-term thinking got us into this mess in the first place.
(Of course, joining and becoming active in one of the two main parties and trying to change their platform from within, nominate the right candidates, etc, is also a worthwhile approach, if you can.)
I lobbed him a softball and he fumbled.
No, you lobbed him a trick question, which he addressed. He opposes federal laws against it. He supports the constitution. Federal interference in state law enforcement (except where those state laws are clearly unconstitutional -- and sorry, I don't see how a state law against marijuana would be) is unconstitutional. What did you expect, that he'd promise to send in federal troops to liberate marijuana users from state prisons?
At least you'd have the opportunity to move to a state where there wasn't a marijuana prohibition.
which points out that the same would have happened to O'Neill colonies without constant dynamical control.
Which just goes to show that the author didn't do his research on O'Neill colonies. O'Neill was a physicist, he knew the issues and addressed them (two cylinders tethered together, the agricultural ring, etc image here). And, of course, they do have constant dynamical control.
Just because some artists and Babylon 5 get it wrong doesn't mean the physicists did.
Nope. The golf player was Alan Shepard on Apollo 14. Apollos 15-17 did a lot more science, they had the Rover to travel further, landing technique was where they could land more interesting places, and on the last mission they finally landed someone (Harrison Schmitt) who was trained as a geologist first, not a test pilot.
Between Mr. Freeze and The Penguin, I think DC Comics has that covered in Batman.
It also doesn't appear to work to increase voter turnout in Canada as you have not voted for a couple decades by your own admission.
That's because I don't live there any more, genius.
It's interesting, don't get me wrong--but how -practical- is it?
Its practicality is as a tool to help us understand those other questions you raise. If it does require new amino acids (certainly it probably tags for different amino acids, the question is whether or not they're found in nature (at least, terrestrial nature)) and generate new proteins, we can learn from that. By replacing specific sequences and coding for different aminos, we may get a better understanding of protein folding.
It may also give us some insights into possible extraterrestrial biologies, which again in turn helps us better understand our own biology.
No doubt when Faraday discovered that current flowing through a wire could deflect a compass needle, somebody asked how practical that was.
scientists rush into new discoveries and are not being completely honest when they proclaim them "Perfectly safe!"
I think you'll find that it's never the scientists who proclaim them "perfectly safe"; scientists (and engineers) will hedge and mention risk factors -- but they also are reasonably good at quantifying those risks rather than being hysterical about them. Eg, "injecting plutonium" is never a good idea -- depending on where it settles in your system you'll probably die within a few days to a few weeks as e.g. your bone marrow becomes unable to create new blood cells -- but that's a far cry from the popular "most toxic substance known to man" hysteria from the ignorant. There are plenty of more-toxic substances, probably most of them "natural" and of biological origin. Some of which people actually inject (botulism toxin, for example).
No, where you'll hear the "Perfectly safe!" mantra from is the marketeers and politicians who -- if they understand it at all -- want to gloss over the risk factors that the scientists mentioned.
More and more, I see SF as putting out the message "scientists as a group are stupid, shortsighted, and dangerous, only the lone researcher who disagrees with the group knows what is actually going on, and the pitchfork/torch wielding crowd have the right idea on how to fix things."
That's pretty much been the case with Hollywood SF since the 1950s. Conspiracy theorists might surmise that it really was due to communist infiltration and that it was all a Soviet plot to undermine US science, but more likely it was (and is) just a combination of the scientifically illiterates' response to something they don't understand (consider Clarke's Third Law plus equating magic to witchcraft), and the fact that the Frankenstein myth has always sold well.
As for written SF, I'm not sure that exists anymore -- I was just looking at a flyer for the upcoming MileHiCon (Denver in October, a few months after the WorldCon), and of the three author guests of honor, none of them write what I'd call science fiction. It's all magic, paranormal and shapeshifters. But that seems to be where the money is; look how "Buffy" and "Angel" did compared to "Firefly".
Now, all you kids get off my lawn!
Well yeah, the US voting system is seriously fscked up, starting with the fact that there's one election day to elect everyone running for office from local dogcatcher to president, not to mention however many ballot initiatives and referenda there are. (Okay, there may be some local exceptions.)
In Canada, for example, it's pretty much unheard of to schedule a municipal or provincial election on the same day as a national one.
As I recall the last Canadian election I participated in (couple of decades ago), each particular race (position) had its own ballot, colour-coded, each going into a different ballot box. That simplifies the counting greatly. (Mind, I officially declined my vote in that one, all the candidates were bozos or worse. They have to count officially declined votes as equivalent to "none of the above", and they'd have to do the election over if there were enough of those. They have to record it to balance the number of ballots in the box with the number of voters who showed up. If they wanted to increase voter turnout, they should do something similar here in the US. Of course they won't, the two major parties like the lock they have in the current system.)
That's okay, if the cargo container 6+ MeV x-ray inspection doesn't cook him, it should at least catch him.
Might not do those RFID tags much good, either.