Most Sci-Fi doesn't even consider the problems of micrometeorites. It's only in the last ten years or so that we see "repair the shell or die from asphyxiation" scenes, and those are something that we'll still want to be able to repair.
And, FWIW, serious structural damage and equipment failure will still require potential EVAs.
The printer sitting on my Desk is a Brother HL-1440 -- seperate tonor cartridge and print drum to save on costs, still works fine after four years (although it could use a new tonor cartridge and some cleaning), built-in USB and Parallell. $140 three years ago.
In that same price range, Brother has a personal laser printer with a built-in print server and standard duplexing. If my Brother dies, it's the one I'm picking up.
I was going to point out how Fudge isn't really a copylefted game--but then I went to Grey Ghost's page, and found that Fudge is released under the OGL.
If they think I'm going to kiss their butts just because they've given me "permission" to do what was always legal to do (but for their horde of lawyers), they've got another thing coming.
It has always been legal to re-design Windows from the ground up.
It has NOT always been legal to copy Windows and turn it into whatever you want it to.
The OGL is a significant and real copyleft, no matter what you may have been told by "fandom" types who think D&D is a terrible game that everyone should abandon for their particular rule. The exact text of anything released under the OGL can be reproduced in ammounts far exceeding anything that a Court would recognize as fair use--up to and including selling the SRD as a seperate product.
The d20 License, OTOH, is a shameless attempt to get their logo on other people's compatible games. Except that, by and large, the companies who put it on their books (like Malhavoc and Mongoose) are the ones pushing for the logo, not Wizards.
You don't have to settle for the Microsoft of roleplaying.
Bad, false example.
d20 is a copylefted version of D&D, which makes things like SpyCraft, Iron Heroes, the World of Warcraft RPG, Mutants and Masterminds, and a slew of others possible, without a single dollar ever being paid to Wizards of the Coast.
d20 is the Linux of Roleplaying, not the Microsoft.
Actually, no, that's pretty easy. Make public any relations you have with anyone in Arabia, and if you have any financial ties ask the State Department if they might be terrorists.
Ideally, you could go so far as to find out which arabic terrorists you are supporting, and help your arabic freinds turn them in to Arabic governments.
I haven't heard of the US really cracking down on non-Arabic terrorists, but then again most of them have decided they want to be proactive in keeping an angry USA from their doors, so have worked fairly strongly in distancing themselves from the latter.
Whereas it is difficult to get even legislation which is very obviously at odds with the US Constitution voided.
Yes. You need to file in federal court, show that you're affected by that law, and convince the judge that the law is unconstitutional. It costs time and money, and you still need to be able to support your position through the inevitable appeals.
Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't describe Wind Waker or Super Mario Sunshine as "buggy."
I'd describe the latter as "horridly designed." The sequence for trying a level again was "Die -> Wait for Island level to load -> go back to level -> Wait for Level to load -> play level for a bit -> Die". Bad, bad, BAD design that keeps me from really even looking for my copy of the game.
Wind waker was much less so, although it could have used more game.
Windows users have no interest in looking under the hood. The hobbyist model sells OSX as an alternative to Linux, not Windows.
Wrong.
There are a goodly portion of Windows users who like to understand their OS: folk who sort out the C: Drive and play with the command prompt or fill MSDN and MVPs.com with all sorts of odd things.
They don't use Linux because Linux doesn't do what they need it to do--or, to put it another way, because it's too different from Windows and not enough better to re-learn what they know about Windows already.
So one question that arises is: how do we actually value our work?
The way you value your work is by expressing how much cost you have kept the company from otherwise spending. If you had unlimited time to evaluate, you could go out and see how many dollars the company would have to spend to have someone come in and support every project you support, with the same level of response that you have.
Demostrating it is less easy, especially if there aren't any renovations you can do to immediately save your company money (that is, the job has been done right already.)
How do we value the contributions of each IT staff member (say, for a bonus or raise) in an objective, quantifiable manner?
Decide on a perfomance metric that you can objectively measure for each task. A web developer should be rated differently than a tech support person, for example. Metrics should preferrably be such that a tech trying to game the numbers will be working more like your ideal employee (i.e., instead of looking at "time to close ticket", look at "time to first response" and "satisfaction of non-IT")
Sure, the Constitution doesn't order the government to create a national ID either, but by default what isn't prohibited is allowed.
Not so for the Federal Government. ONLY those laws that have a basis in the Constitution are valid when passed by Congress; the rest, no matter how good an idea they may be, are summarily dismissed.
OTOH, Congress's powers to regulate interstate trade, levy taxes, and regulate the militia give it plenty of power.
An extremely significant percentage of auto buyers do want to know MANY statistics, including horsepower, torque, mileage city and freeway, and interior space.
Yes, which is why I only included the example as an aside.
Cars are pretty much commodoties -- a car from GM will peform all of the tasks that a car from Toyota will. Not so for video game consoles.
You are 100% wrong about the horsepower rating of a lawnmower. People do want to know this, which is why every single lawnmower at sears has a horsepower rating on it
The presence or absencse of a number doesn't mean that people care about it -- it means that the manufacturer and the merchant care about it.
Actually, it's like when you buy a cell phone, a toaster, or a lawn mower. Most of us don't care about the phone's processor speed or memory, just how well it handles calls and for how long. Most of us don't care about the wattage of the toaster, just that it makes toast. Most of us don't care about the horsepower of a lawnmower, just that it cuts grass.
Or to go back to cars--we don't care about horsepower, we care about performance.
The excuse given for treating I.D. as a scientific theory is that science can't teach us all of the relatively basic things about our world, and thus, must be flawed in concept, so alternatives should be allowed.
Wrong again.
The argument for I.D. being a scientific theory is that, given a sufficiently complex structure, it is simpler to presume that there was something that made it than that the thing randomly occured. A great example of line of logic is the "watch on the sand" parable -- in short, if you found a watch on an alien world keeping time, you'd presume that it was constructed by an intelligence, rather than a random creation of the universe.
To put it another way: I.D. proponents claim first that there is a level of complexity that cannot occur without a designing intelligence (i.e., no randomly occuring telephones), and that human life is such a complexity.
I.D. should be taught alongside its alternative in public high school science classroms, because if nothing else, the teaching will get students thinking enough to realize that science is a method, not a body of knowledge.
Most of the "evidence" cited for ID consists of science's supposed failures to explain certain phenomena.
Intelligent Design -- that idea that life was created by a Really Smart Thing, as opposed to life just randomly showing up -- is supporting by things being very complex, not by things being unknown.
If you want to disprove ID, you need to show an organism evolving from non-living matter. Although that still doesn't disprove it, it just disproves the "aliens did it" argument.
OTOH, proving I.D. requires us to find the designer, which is why it's generally not called scientific -- because it requirse a more complex reality than the opposite, "spontaneous genesis."
Now, if the ID advocates had their way, we would have just said, "Hey, God makes bees fly. Since I already know the real reason, there's no real reason to keep studying it."
Horse-pucky. You're making the same false argument that various religious advocates make when they say "since some Scientists are Atheists, supporting Science is supporting Atheism."
There are some I.D. advocates who don't know the first thing about science. And there are some who, on every other topic except evolution, are indisinguishable from other speakers or scientists.
By and large, "how Bees fly" says nothing about whether it was an evolved behavior or a constructed behavior. It's wrong for a moronic I.D. advocate to argue so, and it's wrong for a/. nutjob to argue that knowing how bees fly refutes I.D.
The first question I have is whether or not fair use rights apply to dead tree books. I'm pretty certain they do (and believe they should), but I have seen stranger things in the legal world.
Sure, you have certain fair use rights to a copyrighted book. But "Media shifting" usually isn't one of these. A DVD or CD is different, as it's an automated process that produces almost exactly the same work. Scanning in or photocopying a dead-tree book isn't likely the same thing, for the same reason that reading the book into an audio file isn't.
Scanning in, translating, or reading a book invovles the creation of a New, Derivitive Work. And the standard for a derivitive work is different than the standard for a mere format translation -- a.k.a., printing out that e-book you own.
It's the same thing except it uses javascript instead of vbscript.
1: MS Office doesn't use vbscript. It uses Visual Basic.
2: OpenOffice can have whatever scripting engine it wants--but the bar to actually using it is far too high. It IS NOT easy to determine either what language is used, or the object model of what's around you.
That's because text editors can cut/paste, and run macros you can code once to make them smack out templates for you.
A typical "text editor" might have cut and paste, but it sure as heck doesn't have macros in it. When you start adding that in, you're not terribly far away from being either an IDE or a "Word Processor".
Point A: All motion is relative. If I walk down the asile of a plane, I'm not suddenly walking at 202 mph; I'm walking 2mph in a 200 mph plane, so long as that plane is around me and at a steady flight.
Point B: The speed of light is NOT relative. It's always c. Always, always, always.
Point C: When you move relative to an object, the speed of light stays constant both for you and that object.
Point D: The only way to have a constant c with different relative speeds is to change the other side of a speed equation -- that is, time.
Conclusion: As you go faster, you travel through time faster.
(Bad) Example: Imagine you have ten identically sized strings ("time"), and you have to stretch them from one line on the ground to another line in the ground. The space between the two lines is the speed of light -- a constant. Normally, exactly ten strings reach from one line to the other. But if the line became further apart (as if you were moving faster through space), you'd still have to stretch those ten strings between the lines, but you'd have gaps -- time would be dilated, or slowed.
If I had to wager anything, I would wager that these sources are a more accurate reflection of what is true about our nation than you are.
So... where exactly did the Supreme Court, the BBC, the President, or the Constitution decide that the President had to be a closet atheist, or that he had to divorce his religious inclinations from all others?
They didn't, and if you don't know that, you don't read any of those sources at all as closely as you should.
1: Provide a source for that quote, or I'll presume that you made it up.
2: I'd wager that Nabil is a devout Muslim, and he can respond a lot better to "I'm on a mission from that God you say we both worship" than "I want your oil."
3: The President's job is to "faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States" and "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States". Not a bloody thing about the will of the people. (By original Federalist design, CONGRESS is the People's agent, not the National Manager.)
4: An overwhelming majority of Americans are Christian. A consistent majority of Americans have chosen overty Christian Presidents. If your argument is "Will of the People", it's not going to work very well.
5: As I've said again and again, if you want to critzise the President, you've got plenty of reasons to do it wholly apart form his religion.
Slashdot Mirror
MSRP, not sale price!: HL-5250DN for about $250
And I must say "simple economics" when it comes to duplexing.
Sheesh.
Most Sci-Fi doesn't even consider the problems of micrometeorites. It's only in the last ten years or so that we see "repair the shell or die from asphyxiation" scenes, and those are something that we'll still want to be able to repair.
And, FWIW, serious structural damage and equipment failure will still require potential EVAs.
re: Replacing that Laserjet 6L
Answer: Virtually any printer on the market.
The printer sitting on my Desk is a Brother HL-1440 -- seperate tonor cartridge and print drum to save on costs, still works fine after four years (although it could use a new tonor cartridge and some cleaning), built-in USB and Parallell. $140 three years ago.
In that same price range, Brother has a personal laser printer with a built-in print server and standard duplexing. If my Brother dies, it's the one I'm picking up.
I was going to point out how Fudge isn't really a copylefted game--but then I went to Grey Ghost's page, and found that Fudge is released under the OGL.
Hmm.....
If they think I'm going to kiss their butts just because they've given me "permission" to do what was always legal to do (but for their horde of lawyers), they've got another thing coming.
It has always been legal to re-design Windows from the ground up.
It has NOT always been legal to copy Windows and turn it into whatever you want it to.
The OGL is a significant and real copyleft, no matter what you may have been told by "fandom" types who think D&D is a terrible game that everyone should abandon for their particular rule. The exact text of anything released under the OGL can be reproduced in ammounts far exceeding anything that a Court would recognize as fair use--up to and including selling the SRD as a seperate product.
The d20 License, OTOH, is a shameless attempt to get their logo on other people's compatible games. Except that, by and large, the companies who put it on their books (like Malhavoc and Mongoose) are the ones pushing for the logo, not Wizards.
You don't have to settle for the Microsoft of roleplaying.
Bad, false example.
d20 is a copylefted version of D&D, which makes things like SpyCraft, Iron Heroes, the World of Warcraft RPG, Mutants and Masterminds, and a slew of others possible, without a single dollar ever being paid to Wizards of the Coast.
d20 is the Linux of Roleplaying, not the Microsoft.
Actually, no, that's pretty easy. Make public any relations you have with anyone in Arabia, and if you have any financial ties ask the State Department if they might be terrorists.
Ideally, you could go so far as to find out which arabic terrorists you are supporting, and help your arabic freinds turn them in to Arabic governments.
I haven't heard of the US really cracking down on non-Arabic terrorists, but then again most of them have decided they want to be proactive in keeping an angry USA from their doors, so have worked fairly strongly in distancing themselves from the latter.
Whereas it is difficult to get even legislation which is very obviously at odds with the US Constitution voided.
Yes. You need to file in federal court, show that you're affected by that law, and convince the judge that the law is unconstitutional. It costs time and money, and you still need to be able to support your position through the inevitable appeals.
Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't describe Wind Waker or Super Mario Sunshine as "buggy."
I'd describe the latter as "horridly designed." The sequence for trying a level again was "Die -> Wait for Island level to load -> go back to level -> Wait for Level to load -> play level for a bit -> Die". Bad, bad, BAD design that keeps me from really even looking for my copy of the game.
Wind waker was much less so, although it could have used more game.
Windows users have no interest in looking under the hood. The hobbyist model sells OSX as an alternative to Linux, not Windows.
Wrong.
There are a goodly portion of Windows users who like to understand their OS: folk who sort out the C: Drive and play with the command prompt or fill MSDN and MVPs.com with all sorts of odd things.
They don't use Linux because Linux doesn't do what they need it to do--or, to put it another way, because it's too different from Windows and not enough better to re-learn what they know about Windows already.
So one question that arises is: how do we actually value our work?
The way you value your work is by expressing how much cost you have kept the company from otherwise spending. If you had unlimited time to evaluate, you could go out and see how many dollars the company would have to spend to have someone come in and support every project you support, with the same level of response that you have.
Demostrating it is less easy, especially if there aren't any renovations you can do to immediately save your company money (that is, the job has been done right already.)
How do we value the contributions of each IT staff member (say, for a bonus or raise) in an objective, quantifiable manner?
Decide on a perfomance metric that you can objectively measure for each task. A web developer should be rated differently than a tech support person, for example. Metrics should preferrably be such that a tech trying to game the numbers will be working more like your ideal employee (i.e., instead of looking at "time to close ticket", look at "time to first response" and "satisfaction of non-IT")
Sure, the Constitution doesn't order the government to create a national ID either, but by default what isn't prohibited is allowed.
Not so for the Federal Government. ONLY those laws that have a basis in the Constitution are valid when passed by Congress; the rest, no matter how good an idea they may be, are summarily dismissed.
OTOH, Congress's powers to regulate interstate trade, levy taxes, and regulate the militia give it plenty of power.
An extremely significant percentage of auto buyers do want to know MANY statistics, including horsepower, torque, mileage city and freeway, and interior space.
Yes, which is why I only included the example as an aside.
Cars are pretty much commodoties -- a car from GM will peform all of the tasks that a car from Toyota will. Not so for video game consoles.
You are 100% wrong about the horsepower rating of a lawnmower. People do want to know this, which is why every single lawnmower at sears has a horsepower rating on it
The presence or absencse of a number doesn't mean that people care about it -- it means that the manufacturer and the merchant care about it.
Actually, it's like when you buy a cell phone, a toaster, or a lawn mower. Most of us don't care about the phone's processor speed or memory, just how well it handles calls and for how long. Most of us don't care about the wattage of the toaster, just that it makes toast. Most of us don't care about the horsepower of a lawnmower, just that it cuts grass.
Or to go back to cars--we don't care about horsepower, we care about performance.
The excuse given for treating I.D. as a scientific theory is that science can't teach us all of the relatively basic things about our world, and thus, must be flawed in concept, so alternatives should be allowed.
Wrong again.
The argument for I.D. being a scientific theory is that, given a sufficiently complex structure, it is simpler to presume that there was something that made it than that the thing randomly occured. A great example of line of logic is the "watch on the sand" parable -- in short, if you found a watch on an alien world keeping time, you'd presume that it was constructed by an intelligence, rather than a random creation of the universe.
To put it another way: I.D. proponents claim first that there is a level of complexity that cannot occur without a designing intelligence (i.e., no randomly occuring telephones), and that human life is such a complexity.
I.D. should be taught alongside its alternative in public high school science classroms, because if nothing else, the teaching will get students thinking enough to realize that science is a method, not a body of knowledge.
Most of the "evidence" cited for ID consists of science's supposed failures to explain certain phenomena.
Intelligent Design -- that idea that life was created by a Really Smart Thing, as opposed to life just randomly showing up -- is supporting by things being very complex, not by things being unknown.
If you want to disprove ID, you need to show an organism evolving from non-living matter. Although that still doesn't disprove it, it just disproves the "aliens did it" argument.
OTOH, proving I.D. requires us to find the designer, which is why it's generally not called scientific -- because it requirse a more complex reality than the opposite, "spontaneous genesis."
Now, if the ID advocates had their way, we would have just said, "Hey, God makes bees fly. Since I already know the real reason, there's no real reason to keep studying it."
/. nutjob to argue that knowing how bees fly refutes I.D.
Horse-pucky. You're making the same false argument that various religious advocates make when they say "since some Scientists are Atheists, supporting Science is supporting Atheism."
There are some I.D. advocates who don't know the first thing about science. And there are some who, on every other topic except evolution, are indisinguishable from other speakers or scientists.
By and large, "how Bees fly" says nothing about whether it was an evolved behavior or a constructed behavior. It's wrong for a moronic I.D. advocate to argue so, and it's wrong for a
IANAL. I am a semi-professional Author.
The first question I have is whether or not fair use rights apply to dead tree books. I'm pretty certain they do (and believe they should), but I have seen stranger things in the legal world.
Sure, you have certain fair use rights to a copyrighted book. But "Media shifting" usually isn't one of these. A DVD or CD is different, as it's an automated process that produces almost exactly the same work. Scanning in or photocopying a dead-tree book isn't likely the same thing, for the same reason that reading the book into an audio file isn't.
Scanning in, translating, or reading a book invovles the creation of a New, Derivitive Work. And the standard for a derivitive work is different than the standard for a mere format translation -- a.k.a., printing out that e-book you own.
It's the same thing except it uses javascript instead of vbscript.
1: MS Office doesn't use vbscript. It uses Visual Basic.
2: OpenOffice can have whatever scripting engine it wants--but the bar to actually using it is far too high. It IS NOT easy to determine either what language is used, or the object model of what's around you.
That's because text editors can cut/paste, and run macros you can code once to make them smack out templates for you.
A typical "text editor" might have cut and paste, but it sure as heck doesn't have macros in it. When you start adding that in, you're not terribly far away from being either an IDE or a "Word Processor".
I don't think the series would work with Fry and Leela as a couple.
You weren't paying attention.
Fry and Leela were a couple from the first episode of the first season. They just didn't realize it.
You need a basic lesson in relativity.
Point A: All motion is relative. If I walk down the asile of a plane, I'm not suddenly walking at 202 mph; I'm walking 2mph in a 200 mph plane, so long as that plane is around me and at a steady flight.
Point B: The speed of light is NOT relative. It's always c. Always, always, always.
Point C: When you move relative to an object, the speed of light stays constant both for you and that object.
Point D: The only way to have a constant c with different relative speeds is to change the other side of a speed equation -- that is, time.
Conclusion: As you go faster, you travel through time faster.
(Bad) Example: Imagine you have ten identically sized strings ("time"), and you have to stretch them from one line on the ground to another line in the ground. The space between the two lines is the speed of light -- a constant. Normally, exactly ten strings reach from one line to the other. But if the line became further apart (as if you were moving faster through space), you'd still have to stretch those ten strings between the lines, but you'd have gaps -- time would be dilated, or slowed.
There is no such thing as knowledge "ending" with open source, you are limited only by your own ability to read and learn.
That would be adding to one's knowledge. Until one does the work to do that, one's knowledge has ended.
If I had to wager anything, I would wager that these sources are a more accurate reflection of what is true about our nation than you are.
So... where exactly did the Supreme Court, the BBC, the President, or the Constitution decide that the President had to be a closet atheist, or that he had to divorce his religious inclinations from all others?
They didn't, and if you don't know that, you don't read any of those sources at all as closely as you should.
1: Provide a source for that quote, or I'll presume that you made it up.
2: I'd wager that Nabil is a devout Muslim, and he can respond a lot better to "I'm on a mission from that God you say we both worship" than "I want your oil."
3: The President's job is to "faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States" and "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States". Not a bloody thing about the will of the people. (By original Federalist design, CONGRESS is the People's agent, not the National Manager.)
4: An overwhelming majority of Americans are Christian. A consistent majority of Americans have chosen overty Christian Presidents. If your argument is "Will of the People", it's not going to work very well.
5: As I've said again and again, if you want to critzise the President, you've got plenty of reasons to do it wholly apart form his religion.