I think the people that saw the original Tron at the time remember it as a much better movie than it really was. You're spot on when you say the original Tron heavily relied on special effects at the expense of story. While we all decry that sort of thing as laziness and lack of imagination these days, when we think back to that original movie we think of how cool it looked to us at the time, and gloss over the bad parts (like the plot and the pacing). The only imagination required to appreciate the new Tron is the imagination it takes to believe your nostalgic view of the original is an accurate measure of the quality of the film.
Disney tried to basically do the same thing with this movie, relying heavily on special effects. Unfortunately for them, and hopefully fortunately for the future of movie making, the movie-watching public may finally be getting to the point where cutting-edge technology is not enough to save bad movies. Maybe we'll finally get to where the big blockbuster movies actually have to have a coherent plot instead of relying purely on whiz-bang graphics. Of course, believing in such a future may take more imagination (or self-delusion) than believing either Tron movie is any good.
If you want to make a sysadmin's life easier (as if any programmer ever wants to do that), you can start by making your error and status messages 1.) plentiful and 2.) easy to understand. Also, provide several logging levels so we can drill down as needed, and make sure the logging levels are meaningful. Too many programmers put just two log levels: one which shows nothing useful, and another that spews out indecipherable hex dumps of every call it makes.
Face up to the fact that no matter how awesome your software is, it's going to fail. Not only that, but it's going to fail in ways you never thought possible at the worst possible times. Make sure we have enough information to figure out what happened. Otherwise, stuff like this happens:
Program: *crash for no apparent reason*
Sysadmin: Why did you crash?
Program: Because something went wrong.
Sysadmin: What went wrong?
Program: Something.
Sysadmin: I need more detail. Increasing log level.
Program: Something bad went wrong.
Sysadmin: I need more than that. Increasing log level again.
Program: Fuck you. Here's a 16GB hex dump of system memory. Figure it out yourself jackass.
Sysadmin: *picks up a crowbar and goes off to find the programmer*
Even in English it becomes less of a concern at the upper levels. At that level, your thesis and how well you express it is more important than whether or not you misspelled a couple of words. Honestly, this sort of thing would make very little difference in the grades most people receive even if bad spelling was docked before, because people who don't take the time to spell things correctly are usually deficient in other areas such as grammar and writing clarity. People who write high school essays with the same sentence structure and grammatical constructs as you would find in a first grade paper are going to flunk even if they spelled every word correctly.
It's not whether or not people should learn how to spell, it's whether or not spelling should be a graded component of that particular exam. If exam takers would normally be docked points for spelling things incorrectly, then spell check should be forbidden. If spelling is not intended to be part of what's graded, then it makes no difference if a student uses spell check or not.
Having said that, saying the exam doesn't at least in part test keyboarding skills, or that using spell checker somehow removes that component, is nonsense. If the test is timed, people who can type faster with more accuracy will have an advantage because they'll have more time to collect their thoughts and more time to revise their tests before the time runs out. Of course, back in the old days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and tests were written out by hand, people who could write faster with better penmanship had an advantage in a similar way.
What would you suggest we do? Preemptively attack? While China isn't exactly in love with North Korea, NK does serve as a valuable buffer zone for them and they aren't going to take any aggression from us in their backyard lightly. We must find a way to neutralize North Korea that China can get behind or we're in for World War III, or at the very least massive trade disruptions that would crater our economy, given how dependent we are on China.
Even regardless of the China factor, it's hard to come up with a way we could neutralize North Korea, even with the element of surprise, that wouldn't end up being devastating to South Korea. By most estimates, for example, NK could completely level Seoul in about 2 hours with their massive artillery force. It's hard to come up with a way to stop that without irradiating the entire peninsula, which obviously would be bad for SK as well.
Even assuming we could somehow find ways around those problems, you still have the North Korean people to deal with, who have been indoctrinated from birth to believe their Dear Leader is a god who is the only thing keeping them from being devoured by the rest of the world. These people, of all ages, have literally been training for a war with the US for almost 60 years. We wouldn't exactly be greeted as liberators by the vast majority of them.
If this was an easy problem to solve, it would have been solved by now.
If none of these work, register an account with a throwaway email address (mailinator etc.) and share it on bugmenot and its clones.
This seems like a good idea in theory, but it can backfire. For example, I used to use a particular email address for certain...less reputable sites. Since those sites occasionally do various email verification things, I had to check that email address every so often so I couldn't just throw it away. Over time, I started to use that address for more and more sites until I eventually remembered that address better than my actual email address. After that, it wasn't long before I instinctively started using is for *everything*.
Anyway, long story short my primary email address is now midgetgrannyhorseporn@donttellmywife.org.
In general, a movie's quality is inversely correlated to how heavily it's marketed. Tron has been so heavily marketed, with almost all of the marketing concentrating on the eye candy special effects, that I would be absolutely shocked if it turned out to be a really good movie.
I was also struck by how basically every country left in the "sick and poor" category is in Africa. A sixth of the world's population lives on the African continent, and it has, aside from being exploited virtually continuously by wealthier nations, been largely left behind.
We're the most technologically advanced civilization that ever was, and we still have city-destroying floods even in industrialized nations with some regularity. Before the invention of modern irrigation and damming, massive flooding was even more common and more devastating. Given this, and the fact that basically every ancient civilization has myths involving massive floods, I doubt you could really point to any single event as the origin of any given flood myth with any degree of certainty.
That's sort of the point though. All of these forks have happened based mostly on fears of what *might* happen and a general lack of communication from Oracle. People feared what Oracle would do, and since Oracle has, to this point, done nothing to either confirm or deny those fears, people are deciding those fears were well-founded and jumping ship, even though Oracle has not done anything much different than Sun did before.
One wonders what would have happened if, say, RedHat had bought Sun (leaving aside the financial impossibility of such a thing) and simply been silent for this long. I somehow doubt so many forks would have been created. Right or wrong, the impetus for most of this activity on the community's side has been based primarily on Oracle's pre-existing reputation rather than its actions.
This is what really puzzles me about this whole thing. Now that Sun has been acquired by the Evil Empire (tm), everybody acts like Sun was some paragon of Open Source virtue. Sun always approached open source very timidly, and only ever seemed to make the bare minimum gestures toward open source, just enough to generate some good press about it. None of Sun's "open source" licenses have been anywhere near what most people would consider really "open". Open Source has always been more about marketing than philosophy with Sun.
Given this, all Oracle has really done so far is explicitly state some of the restrictions on the software that were basically already in place, just not actually in writing, with Sun. However, since Sun was a "good" company and Oracle is a "bad" company, everyone is suddenly abandoning ship. Oracle is likely to keep all of this software, especially Java, just as "open" as it ever was (that being not very open at all). However, since Sun was a techie darling and Oracle has long been seen as a villain within the community, everyone is acting like everything's changed even though very little actually has.
Until we can figure out artificial gravity, I would think you would want to have as little space as possible between you and the walls, since the only real way to maneuver is to push off of something. This would lead to a design with a lot of small rooms connected by narrow corridors, such as you see in the ISS.
The taxpayers had no choice but to give their tax money to the state. The state has chosen to use this money to fund a theme park with the clear motivation of putting forth a particular set of religious beliefs. Hence, the taxpayer is being forced to fund religious teachings that he may or may not believe in. This is in violation of both the US Constitution and the Kentucky Constitution.
The 14th Amendment has been widely interpreted by the courts to mean that the Bill of Rights is applicable to the states, so the prohibitions in the first amendment apply to state legislatures as well.
If that's not enough for you, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that a religious college couldn't keep money given to it by the General Assembly because it was supported by a religious institution, even though the money was not going to be used for anything specifically religious.
If that's still not enough for you, Section 5 of the Kentucky Constitution states (in part) "nor shall any person be compelled to attend any place of worship, to contribute to the erection or maintenance of any such place, or to the salary or support of any minister of religion". Using taxpayer money to erect a religious theme park seems pretty squarely at odds with this provision.
Seems to be something funky going on with Slashdot's mod system today. I had mod points earlier today and when I moderated comments, it would increment the total score, but wouldn't show the moderation I gave it, even though it had always done so in the past. Probably the Slashdot admins running test code on the production server again.
Sure, then the district disciplines this teacher for excessive nuttery and everyone goes back to their day to day lives. Several weeks later, some kid stabs another kid with a pencil on the way to school and the victim ends up with a piece of graphite permanently lodged under his skin. Now you have someone with a PERMANENT DISFIGUREMENT because this teacher's sage warning wasn't heeded. That kid becomes a poster child for our schools' failure to keep our children safe, and before you know it we have the TSA moving in and strip-searching the kids to look for pencils before they can enter the school building. Meanwhile, the disciplined teacher goes on to a successful career as a security consultant working with the Department of Homeland Security to help prevent future attacks using graphite-based WMDs (Writing implements of Minor Disturbance). After that, it's only a matter of time before the Department of Education gets absorbed into the DHS.
All of this could have been avoided if we had just taken this warning seriously and immediately banned all sharp writing implements from schools. All pencils and pens should be replaced with nice blunt magic markers. For math classes or other times when frequent erasing is needed, they can use an Etch-a-Sketch (tm). This seems like a minor sacrifice to ensure the safety of our children.
It's an English translation made by the Chinese government of a press release put out by...the Chinese government. Why would the English translation be any more or less suspect than the original Chinese document? It's not like there aren't any bilingual Chinese/English speakers out there who could translate it independently, so there would be no purpose to making the text different in any meaningful way.
Also, calling China a "tin-pot dictatorship" is silly. A tin-pot dictator is one who, despite delusions of grandeur, is ultimately of little significance to the world at large. However you might choose to characterize China, "of little significance to the world at large" it is not.
They seem to be referring to competitors of Windows 1.0 specifically, not just any old Windows. OS/2 wasn't a competitor of Windows 1.0, if was supposed to be the successor to Windows, developed by IBM and Microsoft jointly. OS/2 didn't really become a competitor to Windows until around Windows 3.0/3.11 after IBM and Microsoft parted ways on the project.
Terrorism was a police matter when it was Timothy McVeigh blowing up a federal building. The police investigated, tracked him down, and a jury of his peers convicted him. At no point did we put up checkpoints near buildings and grope anyone who wanted to get in. At no point did we have the government pull over and search every vehicle large enough to carry a fertilizer bomb.
Terrorism is a criminal act and it should be treated as such. When we elevate it to an act of war we not only give the perpetrators far more legitimacy than they deserve, we also fight it with the worst possible tools for the job.
I'm more concerned with the reports of "enhanced patdowns" used on underage children. Having an image like that on some government computer is nasty, but unlikely to cause any lasting harm to the kid as long as it never leaks out into the wild (which is a real possibility, I'll grant).
However, what does it tell the child when a government employee is allowed to touch them in areas their parents have been telling them all their lives no one but the doctor is allowed to touch them? While the parents stand by powerless to do anything about it? In full view of hundreds of other people? Are we supposed to amend what we tell our children to "no one can touch you there, unless they happen to have some kind of perceived authority over you or if they're wearing a uniform"?
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I think the people that saw the original Tron at the time remember it as a much better movie than it really was. You're spot on when you say the original Tron heavily relied on special effects at the expense of story. While we all decry that sort of thing as laziness and lack of imagination these days, when we think back to that original movie we think of how cool it looked to us at the time, and gloss over the bad parts (like the plot and the pacing). The only imagination required to appreciate the new Tron is the imagination it takes to believe your nostalgic view of the original is an accurate measure of the quality of the film.
Disney tried to basically do the same thing with this movie, relying heavily on special effects. Unfortunately for them, and hopefully fortunately for the future of movie making, the movie-watching public may finally be getting to the point where cutting-edge technology is not enough to save bad movies. Maybe we'll finally get to where the big blockbuster movies actually have to have a coherent plot instead of relying purely on whiz-bang graphics. Of course, believing in such a future may take more imagination (or self-delusion) than believing either Tron movie is any good.
If you want to make a sysadmin's life easier (as if any programmer ever wants to do that), you can start by making your error and status messages 1.) plentiful and 2.) easy to understand. Also, provide several logging levels so we can drill down as needed, and make sure the logging levels are meaningful. Too many programmers put just two log levels: one which shows nothing useful, and another that spews out indecipherable hex dumps of every call it makes.
Face up to the fact that no matter how awesome your software is, it's going to fail. Not only that, but it's going to fail in ways you never thought possible at the worst possible times. Make sure we have enough information to figure out what happened. Otherwise, stuff like this happens:
Program: *crash for no apparent reason*
Sysadmin: Why did you crash?
Program: Because something went wrong.
Sysadmin: What went wrong?
Program: Something.
Sysadmin: I need more detail. Increasing log level.
Program: Something bad went wrong.
Sysadmin: I need more than that. Increasing log level again.
Program: Fuck you. Here's a 16GB hex dump of system memory. Figure it out yourself jackass.
Sysadmin: *picks up a crowbar and goes off to find the programmer*
Even in English it becomes less of a concern at the upper levels. At that level, your thesis and how well you express it is more important than whether or not you misspelled a couple of words. Honestly, this sort of thing would make very little difference in the grades most people receive even if bad spelling was docked before, because people who don't take the time to spell things correctly are usually deficient in other areas such as grammar and writing clarity. People who write high school essays with the same sentence structure and grammatical constructs as you would find in a first grade paper are going to flunk even if they spelled every word correctly.
It's not whether or not people should learn how to spell, it's whether or not spelling should be a graded component of that particular exam. If exam takers would normally be docked points for spelling things incorrectly, then spell check should be forbidden. If spelling is not intended to be part of what's graded, then it makes no difference if a student uses spell check or not.
Having said that, saying the exam doesn't at least in part test keyboarding skills, or that using spell checker somehow removes that component, is nonsense. If the test is timed, people who can type faster with more accuracy will have an advantage because they'll have more time to collect their thoughts and more time to revise their tests before the time runs out. Of course, back in the old days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and tests were written out by hand, people who could write faster with better penmanship had an advantage in a similar way.
What would you suggest we do? Preemptively attack? While China isn't exactly in love with North Korea, NK does serve as a valuable buffer zone for them and they aren't going to take any aggression from us in their backyard lightly. We must find a way to neutralize North Korea that China can get behind or we're in for World War III, or at the very least massive trade disruptions that would crater our economy, given how dependent we are on China.
Even regardless of the China factor, it's hard to come up with a way we could neutralize North Korea, even with the element of surprise, that wouldn't end up being devastating to South Korea. By most estimates, for example, NK could completely level Seoul in about 2 hours with their massive artillery force. It's hard to come up with a way to stop that without irradiating the entire peninsula, which obviously would be bad for SK as well.
Even assuming we could somehow find ways around those problems, you still have the North Korean people to deal with, who have been indoctrinated from birth to believe their Dear Leader is a god who is the only thing keeping them from being devoured by the rest of the world. These people, of all ages, have literally been training for a war with the US for almost 60 years. We wouldn't exactly be greeted as liberators by the vast majority of them.
If this was an easy problem to solve, it would have been solved by now.
If none of these work, register an account with a throwaway email address (mailinator etc.) and share it on bugmenot and its clones.
This seems like a good idea in theory, but it can backfire. For example, I used to use a particular email address for certain...less reputable sites. Since those sites occasionally do various email verification things, I had to check that email address every so often so I couldn't just throw it away. Over time, I started to use that address for more and more sites until I eventually remembered that address better than my actual email address. After that, it wasn't long before I instinctively started using is for *everything*.
Anyway, long story short my primary email address is now midgetgrannyhorseporn@donttellmywife.org.
Nonsense. Nobody working for this site has ever been a good enough perl coder to pull that off.
In general, a movie's quality is inversely correlated to how heavily it's marketed. Tron has been so heavily marketed, with almost all of the marketing concentrating on the eye candy special effects, that I would be absolutely shocked if it turned out to be a really good movie.
I was also struck by how basically every country left in the "sick and poor" category is in Africa. A sixth of the world's population lives on the African continent, and it has, aside from being exploited virtually continuously by wealthier nations, been largely left behind.
We're the most technologically advanced civilization that ever was, and we still have city-destroying floods even in industrialized nations with some regularity. Before the invention of modern irrigation and damming, massive flooding was even more common and more devastating. Given this, and the fact that basically every ancient civilization has myths involving massive floods, I doubt you could really point to any single event as the origin of any given flood myth with any degree of certainty.
That's sort of the point though. All of these forks have happened based mostly on fears of what *might* happen and a general lack of communication from Oracle. People feared what Oracle would do, and since Oracle has, to this point, done nothing to either confirm or deny those fears, people are deciding those fears were well-founded and jumping ship, even though Oracle has not done anything much different than Sun did before.
One wonders what would have happened if, say, RedHat had bought Sun (leaving aside the financial impossibility of such a thing) and simply been silent for this long. I somehow doubt so many forks would have been created. Right or wrong, the impetus for most of this activity on the community's side has been based primarily on Oracle's pre-existing reputation rather than its actions.
This is what really puzzles me about this whole thing. Now that Sun has been acquired by the Evil Empire (tm), everybody acts like Sun was some paragon of Open Source virtue. Sun always approached open source very timidly, and only ever seemed to make the bare minimum gestures toward open source, just enough to generate some good press about it. None of Sun's "open source" licenses have been anywhere near what most people would consider really "open". Open Source has always been more about marketing than philosophy with Sun.
Given this, all Oracle has really done so far is explicitly state some of the restrictions on the software that were basically already in place, just not actually in writing, with Sun. However, since Sun was a "good" company and Oracle is a "bad" company, everyone is suddenly abandoning ship. Oracle is likely to keep all of this software, especially Java, just as "open" as it ever was (that being not very open at all). However, since Sun was a techie darling and Oracle has long been seen as a villain within the community, everyone is acting like everything's changed even though very little actually has.
Until we can figure out artificial gravity, I would think you would want to have as little space as possible between you and the walls, since the only real way to maneuver is to push off of something. This would lead to a design with a lot of small rooms connected by narrow corridors, such as you see in the ISS.
The taxpayers had no choice but to give their tax money to the state. The state has chosen to use this money to fund a theme park with the clear motivation of putting forth a particular set of religious beliefs. Hence, the taxpayer is being forced to fund religious teachings that he may or may not believe in. This is in violation of both the US Constitution and the Kentucky Constitution.
The 14th Amendment has been widely interpreted by the courts to mean that the Bill of Rights is applicable to the states, so the prohibitions in the first amendment apply to state legislatures as well.
If that's not enough for you, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that a religious college couldn't keep money given to it by the General Assembly because it was supported by a religious institution, even though the money was not going to be used for anything specifically religious.
If that's still not enough for you, Section 5 of the Kentucky Constitution states (in part) "nor shall any person be compelled to attend any place of worship, to contribute to the erection or maintenance of any such place, or to the salary or support of any minister of religion". Using taxpayer money to erect a religious theme park seems pretty squarely at odds with this provision.
To be fair, there's no evidence at all that evolution has ever occurred in Kentucky.
Seems to be something funky going on with Slashdot's mod system today. I had mod points earlier today and when I moderated comments, it would increment the total score, but wouldn't show the moderation I gave it, even though it had always done so in the past. Probably the Slashdot admins running test code on the production server again.
Now add to that merger a chair, toilet, and sex robot and you'll have office equipment that will really sell.
In fact, forget the chair, toilet, and desk.
On the contrary, it would appear that a lack of shit is the problem. "More shit!" would be a more appropriate response.
Sure, then the district disciplines this teacher for excessive nuttery and everyone goes back to their day to day lives. Several weeks later, some kid stabs another kid with a pencil on the way to school and the victim ends up with a piece of graphite permanently lodged under his skin. Now you have someone with a PERMANENT DISFIGUREMENT because this teacher's sage warning wasn't heeded. That kid becomes a poster child for our schools' failure to keep our children safe, and before you know it we have the TSA moving in and strip-searching the kids to look for pencils before they can enter the school building. Meanwhile, the disciplined teacher goes on to a successful career as a security consultant working with the Department of Homeland Security to help prevent future attacks using graphite-based WMDs (Writing implements of Minor Disturbance). After that, it's only a matter of time before the Department of Education gets absorbed into the DHS.
All of this could have been avoided if we had just taken this warning seriously and immediately banned all sharp writing implements from schools. All pencils and pens should be replaced with nice blunt magic markers. For math classes or other times when frequent erasing is needed, they can use an Etch-a-Sketch (tm). This seems like a minor sacrifice to ensure the safety of our children.
Everyone knows pumpkin pies are sluts.
It's an English translation made by the Chinese government of a press release put out by...the Chinese government. Why would the English translation be any more or less suspect than the original Chinese document? It's not like there aren't any bilingual Chinese/English speakers out there who could translate it independently, so there would be no purpose to making the text different in any meaningful way.
Also, calling China a "tin-pot dictatorship" is silly. A tin-pot dictator is one who, despite delusions of grandeur, is ultimately of little significance to the world at large. However you might choose to characterize China, "of little significance to the world at large" it is not.
They seem to be referring to competitors of Windows 1.0 specifically, not just any old Windows. OS/2 wasn't a competitor of Windows 1.0, if was supposed to be the successor to Windows, developed by IBM and Microsoft jointly. OS/2 didn't really become a competitor to Windows until around Windows 3.0/3.11 after IBM and Microsoft parted ways on the project.
Terrorism was a police matter when it was Timothy McVeigh blowing up a federal building. The police investigated, tracked him down, and a jury of his peers convicted him. At no point did we put up checkpoints near buildings and grope anyone who wanted to get in. At no point did we have the government pull over and search every vehicle large enough to carry a fertilizer bomb.
Terrorism is a criminal act and it should be treated as such. When we elevate it to an act of war we not only give the perpetrators far more legitimacy than they deserve, we also fight it with the worst possible tools for the job.
I'm more concerned with the reports of "enhanced patdowns" used on underage children. Having an image like that on some government computer is nasty, but unlikely to cause any lasting harm to the kid as long as it never leaks out into the wild (which is a real possibility, I'll grant).
However, what does it tell the child when a government employee is allowed to touch them in areas their parents have been telling them all their lives no one but the doctor is allowed to touch them? While the parents stand by powerless to do anything about it? In full view of hundreds of other people? Are we supposed to amend what we tell our children to "no one can touch you there, unless they happen to have some kind of perceived authority over you or if they're wearing a uniform"?