Why program sockets when HTTP is 100 times slower?
(a) that's a substantial exageration. My estimate usually places tunneling a protocol over HTTP at being about 6-10 times slower, depending on what you're trying to do.
(b) because many places only have HTTP proxy access to the internet. Duh!
Finally the one about re-usable objects. Maybe sourceforge and open source projects like Apache are as close as we can get. In 94 I remember everyone figures there'd be online libraries where one could download whatever component was needed. Hah!
There are plenty of archives of re-usable objects. Admittedly, not many of them are free, but without such archives, languages like Visual BASIC and its ilk would be approximately useless. Technologies like COM, ActiveX and Java Beans exist to support this kind of reuse, and they are very important technologies used extensively by a very significant proportion of programmers.
If I use a patented method to create a product without properly licensing that patent from the owner don't you think the owner of that patent would be able to get an injunction against me from producing my product?
If the media is pre-formatted it means the manufacturer of the media is using a method covered by one of those patents to create the filesystem and thus the patents would still be applicable regardless of whether the media itself is capable of manipulating the filesystem.
1. I have a valid license. It came with my copy of Windows that I use to perform the operation. Why would I need another one?
2. Do they have a patent on using 'dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/dev/weird-usb-thing' ?
In the case of hardware devices such as cameras that read/write the FAT filesystem it is obvious that they are covered by the patents.
As one poster already mentioned, the patents in question are actually referring to VFAT which supports long and short filenames (thus the innovation over FAT). As long as you aren't implementing VFAT you aren't covered by these patents.
Yeah, I accept both of those points, although neither are really relevant, and MS don't make the latter clear in their propoganda^Wannouncement.
A license for removable solid state media manufacturers to preformat the media, such as compact flash memory cards, to the Microsoft FAT file system format, and to preload data onto such preformatted media using the Microsoft FAT file system format. Pricing for this license is US$0.25 per unit with a cap on total royalties of $250,000 per manufacturer.
Now, I'm not a patent lawyer, but what possible grounds could they have for requiring a license to distribute media, which by definition do not perform file system functions and therefore cannot violate a patent relating to methods used to manipulate the file system?
LAME seems to use this idea; everyone knows LAME Aint an MP3 Encoder, it just so happens that by pure coincidence the files it outputs are compatible in an mp3 decoder.
That wasn't the intention behind that name. LAME is so called because when first started, it wasn't an MP3 encoder. It was a set of patches that improved the performance of another MP3 encoder...
This is just one of the reasons why e-mail preview panes are evil and should be removed from all e-mail clients. Opening an e-mail should require positive action, especially if the e-mail may be encoded using HTML or another similarly capable format that can cause your computer to take actions automatically (eg downloading an image, sending a receipt back to the sender, installing a worm...).
. Now a college graduate will probably make at least $20,000 a year more than a non-college graduate on avarage, and probably much more later in life as they advance in their careers. If government taxed 20% of this extra $20,000 a year, then government would get $140,000 back over the next 35 years
This is a fallacy - you're failing to see the wider picture. Graduates only earn more money because being a graduate enables them to rise to the top of the pile. If there were less graduates, the same positions, paying the same money, would be occupied by non-graduates. If there were more graduates, there would be more competition for these places, so fewer (proportionally) of the graduates would achieve higher earnings. (This happened in the UK in the '90s: throughout the 80s, Thatcher pushed for a higher proportion of people to go into higher education. Her goals were nearly achieved, but they were _way_ too high. The UK is now full of graduates with worthless degrees.)
Yes, there is a small difference: a better educated workforce frequently increases the efficiency of industry, and sometimes enables new industries to be built (e.g. through research and development of new products). But I believe the effects of these two differences are substantially smaller in magnitude to what you suggest.
In quantum, by looking at the cars, you can affect their positions!
Or, perhaps more relevantly, by not looking you can make them both there and not there at the same time. So when you cross the road, there is a possibility that you will be killed and a possibility that you won't be. By arranging the situation so that you will only be observed once you reach the other side, you will get there.
Unfortunately, merely giving your theory a ridiculous name doesn't seem to count... neither it would appear are there any points for making wild, hyperbolic and ultimately meaningless statements, comparing one's intellect to god (!)
I haven't read all of it, but I get:
1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false. Just 2... suggesting that the world has 4 different days at the same time seems clearly fallatious to me, as there is a smooth progression between them, so it must be either 1 or infinite, and calling me a 'mindless dumb ass', which is clearly not true. 2 points.
2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous. When you come down to it, this site doesn't say much. It just states it over and over again in slightly different ways. I'll say we stick with just 10 of these. 20 points.
3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent I'm not going to go into this one... there's a certain warped logic to the entire thing, if you believe the original premise. OK, so the original premise is totally illogical, but it doesn't seem to be inconsistent...
5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment. Well, the entire thing is a thought experiment, and it clearly contradicts everyone's understanding of the world... 5 points
5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards). I count 20. However the list was written for USENET which is a text-only medium, so I want to add inappropriate use of colour, font styling and underlines to this, and bring the count up to 40. 200 points.
5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann". 10 points
10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school, as if this were evidence of sanity. I will count 'I have lectured at MIT' as fulfilling this. 10 points
10 points for offering prize money to anyone who proves and/or finds any flaws in your theory. 10 points
10 points for each new term you invent and use without properly defining it. Only 10 points, by the look of it.
20 points for defending yourself by bringing up (real or imagined) ridicule accorded to your past theories. He only brings up this theory... but he does it so many times we have to count it. 20 points.
40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to Nazis, stormtroopers, or brownshirts. 40 points (Nazis)
40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a "conspiracy" to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike. Yep. 40 points
50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions. Yep.
I would *strongly* recommend doing a backup before trying any of the code from the ext2fsd project on sourceforge.
I'd also strongly recommend fscking your disk before trying it. I've had _very_ bizarre behaviour out of it on corrupted disks, including immediate reboots without going to blue screen. There is a version of e2fsck that can run on NT floating around somewhere...
If you don't know how to type the characters necessary to access the web site, chances are you won't be able to read the content anyway. So I think it's a moot point.
Huh? Are you joking? I can read French fairly easily, and Spanish not quite so easily. It would probably take me a lot more effort to figure out how to type \'e or \~n or any of the other non-ASCII characters that are used in either of those languages. I would probably have to resort to finding them in Windows' "character map" (which isn't installed by default on all systems, I've noticed in the past, so I may have to install it for the purpose) and copying and pasteing them into the address bar. This isn't ideal...
The solution here is to not use domain names for verification rather then trying to force the whole world to use Latin characters for naming internet sites. As you mentioned, there are already problems with using Latin. A bank system should already have a digital certificate, and that's mostly what we're worried about.
You don't get it, do you?
The point is that this would allow people to create two different domain names that looked, when displayed, so close to identical as to be impossible to distinguish from each other. But they could refer to two different sites. How would a user know which one was which? How would a user know which one to use?
Also, you could create domains which do seem to be identical. Unicode has many symbols which are actually identical and equivalent to each other in all senses, but which are defined in multiple places in the code.
Furthermore, you say a digital certificate should do the job. But what do digital certificates guarantee? At present, they tend to give a good degree of confidence that the person operating the site you are communicating with is the person who owns the domain name it is running on, because that is the information that is checked by the issuer, and that is the information in the CN field which your browser verifies matches what it expects. Therefore, even with digital certificates, you're still relying on being able to distinguish different organisations via their domain name.
The reason not to use Unicode is that it won't be backwards compatable with the old DNS standard, which was meant to be compatable across ASCII and non-ascii systems.
That, of course, is also a good reason. But it doesn't invalidate the first...
What is "a news automated system" if not an obscure and difficult to understand way of describing a CMS?
It's an open source project loosely based on the/. concept
I hate to point this out, but/. is very similar to most blogs I've read; they generally take the form of a chronologically ordered list of articles (sometimes separated out into topics) to which other people can often add comments, just like slashdot. Of course slashdot has article submission and comment moderation which most blogs don't have, but that just makes it an enhanced blog as far as I'm concerned. I'm fairly sure there are people out there using slashcode to run blogs.
It's only the existance of other methods of sharing that have become the norm that stops BT from becoming a major means of trafficing copyrighted works.
No, what really prevents it is the fact that there is no integrated search mechanism. This turns off all the MP3 traders because they don't want to have to use web sites that will get periodically shut down, ISP blocked, etc. in order to find the torrents for the files they want to download...
Look at the english railways - for a long time, seperate companies used their own parallel rail network, often running different gage track (different width) and having to step around one anothers infrastructure, creating clumsy and non user friendly railway stations and services.
Eventually rail regulation came in, standardising all rail networks to one standard gage, allowing rolling stock and engines to work on any rail companies track and making the whole exercise better for customers and more profitable for the companies.
Sooner or later, p2p filesharing (and maybe chat client) protocol will become standardised, and it will simply be a matter of which piece of software you use to connect to a complete network.
And it'll be a sorry day when it does. And we can see why, thanks to your analogy. There were, in fact, two standard track sizes used in English railways before the business was nationalised, if my history isn't failing me... those were 4'8.5" and 7' (which was only used by GWR, I think).
Of course, when everything was standardised, everyone had to come down to the smallest of the two standards, because existing tracks can be made smaller much more easily than they can be made larger.
Which is a damned shame. Because trains built on 7' tracks can run faster due to the more evenly spread power load (I'm not an engineer, but I have been told by one that this is the case...), are less likely to be derailed by damaged tracks, and can carry more passengers for the same mass of train, so are more fuel-efficient.
I can see that we are all going to converge on KaZaA, despite the fact that there are file sharing protocols out there that are much better at detecting corrupted downloads, finding files to download, enabling community activities like rating the quality of a file, and working against adverse network conditions, simply because KaZaA is the lowest common denominator that we'll all have to come down to in the name of standardisation.
Unlike Star Trek, Farscape, and Battlestar Galactica, there was no sound in outer space.
Good one. But I think Babylon 5 got there first (discounting the shadow-ship noise, which is explained suitably in one of the later episodes).
But I'll give you something else to think about. If you ever try to write fiction at a serious level, you will come up against the following again and again: THERE ARE NO NEW IDEAS. So we just have to do our best with what's already been done.
We take a situation which has been done before (i.e. a universe with numerous worlds in which some are technologically backwards while others are highly advanced), fill in some arbitrary backplot (there's been a civil war recently), create some characters (this is the interesting bit, and this is where firefly really shone, IMO), and give them some problems (being fugitives from justice is hardly original, but it works well... and that's just the beginning!). Then, for a TV series, throw them into more specific problems with each episode.
This is standard plot construction. Its how almost everything is done. No, there is no single aspect of the show that is utterly original. But the combined result is...
As an aside, a lot of similar shows, whether in the SF genre or others, seem to miss out the stage about giving the characters their own intrinsic problems. I'm thinking of shows like Star Trek (although a lot of the later ST episodes and the later series fixed this problem, think of the early TNG episodes and the original series...), a lot of police dramas or similar... basically anything where the same group of people go up against a different problem each episode. The examples in each genre that shine through do so because, I think, they have characters that have their own problems as well. Maybe something any aspiring TV producers need to think about.
It is too bad about "Firefly" not receiving the support it needed from Fox, because I've noticed something about ALL of Whedon's series. The first season is just the setup.
Absolutely. But I heard a rumour that he'd got funding to make a movie of it. So we might at least see some of where he wanted to go with it...
The word 'niggardly' is in relatively common usage in the UK. I certainly didn't have to look it up to know what it meant when I first saw it in this context, so I must have been exposed to the use of the word in the past. I'm not entirely certain, but I think that's probably on many occasions. Words I've only seen used once I tend to forget again after looking them up.
I think you misread his post. 'When' in that context isn't asking "how long needs to pass after slavery was abolished" as I think you read it, judging by your comment, but rather "in what particular situations", which is a substantially different and altogether more interesting question.
Apprentices aren't slaves. At least not in the majority of cases. Admittedly, they're underpaid and maltreated a lot, but they always have the choice to walk out. It may not be a sensible thing to do, but that doesn't change the fact that it is possible and totally legal for them to do so.
I see that most actresses seem to be "actors" now. But they still have a separate Oscar. If they were consistent, there'd just be one Oscar for "Best Actor". It's not like muscles and sexual organs have much to do with acting ability after all.
No, but in order to perform well as an actor, you need to have a good, challenging role to play. Almost all roles are assigned to somebody of a gender which was predetermined before they auditioned, so it could be unfair to one gender group in a particular year if all of the good roles are given to the opposite group.
Re:They're not talking about used ads.
on
Recycling TV Ads
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· Score: 1
[please ignore previous post; slashdot ate half of it]
In the UK, implied contract terms have no legal standing AFAIK. But in general, if the sums involved are small (less than 5000 pounds, or about 8000 euros), the court will settle things on what seems sensible.
If you wanted to sell an item at auction, then it would not be sensible to expect to do so without paying some kind of fee, so in this case, yes the auctioneer would probably get his money.
However, bizarre terms and conditions on the use of a photograph (stuff like 'this photograph may be scanned for use on one web site only, which must be operated by [name of client] and may not be transferred to any third party; it may not be reproduced in print without the photographer's permission') can't be described as sensible because there is no real reason why a photographer has to operate in this fashion... and some don't, so a photographer would have to make such conditions clear.
Of course, there are other conditions he doesn't necessarily have to make clear. For instance, he doesn't have to state that he retains all rights until he has been paid; that's only sensible. Unless he has stated otherwise he doesn't have to provide negatives. And so on.
If you're dealing with things worth more than 5000 pounds the rules change because you have to go to a different court to settle disputes that large. At that point, you'd better have a watertight written contract, because anything less and things could get very messy...
Re:They're not talking about used ads.
on
Recycling TV Ads
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· Score: 1
In the UK, implied contract terms have no legal standing AFAIK. But in general, if the sums involved are small ( and may not be transferred to any third party; it may not be reproduced in print without the photographer's permission') can't be described as sensible because there is no real reason why a photographer has to operate in this fashion... and some don't, so a photographer would have to make such conditions clear.
Of course, there are other conditions he doesn't necessarily have to make clear. For instance, he doesn't have to state that he retains all rights until he has been paid; that's only sensible. Unless he has stated otherwise he doesn't have to provide negatives. And so on.
If you're dealing with things worth more than 5000 the rules change because you have to go to a different court to settle disputes that large. At that point, you'd better have a watertight written contract, because anything less and things could get very messy...
Slashdot Mirror
Why program sockets when HTTP is 100 times slower?
(a) that's a substantial exageration. My estimate usually places tunneling a protocol over HTTP at being about 6-10 times slower, depending on what you're trying to do.
(b) because many places only have HTTP proxy access to the internet. Duh!
Finally the one about re-usable objects. Maybe sourceforge and open source projects like Apache are as close as we can get. In 94 I remember everyone figures there'd be online libraries where one could download whatever component was needed. Hah!
There are plenty of archives of re-usable objects. Admittedly, not many of them are free, but without such archives, languages like Visual BASIC and its ilk would be approximately useless. Technologies like COM, ActiveX and Java Beans exist to support this kind of reuse, and they are very important technologies used extensively by a very significant proportion of programmers.
'Fraid not. Pretty much everything has one, but most allow you to switch them off, which I would strongly recommend. Mozilla is pretty good, IME.
If I use a patented method to create a product without properly licensing that patent from the owner don't you think the owner of that patent would be able to get an injunction against me from producing my product?
If the media is pre-formatted it means the manufacturer of the media is using a method covered by one of those patents to create the filesystem and thus the patents would still be applicable regardless of whether the media itself is capable of manipulating the filesystem.
1. I have a valid license. It came with my copy of Windows that I use to perform the operation. Why would I need another one?
2. Do they have a patent on using 'dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/dev/weird-usb-thing' ?
In the case of hardware devices such as cameras that read/write the FAT filesystem it is obvious that they are covered by the patents.
As one poster already mentioned, the patents in question are actually referring to VFAT which supports long and short filenames (thus the innovation over FAT). As long as you aren't implementing VFAT you aren't covered by these patents.
Yeah, I accept both of those points, although neither are really relevant, and MS don't make the latter clear in their propoganda^Wannouncement.
From the article:
A license for removable solid state media manufacturers to preformat the media, such as compact flash memory cards, to the Microsoft FAT file system format, and to preload data onto such preformatted media using the Microsoft FAT file system format. Pricing for this license is US$0.25 per unit with a cap on total royalties of $250,000 per manufacturer.
Now, I'm not a patent lawyer, but what possible grounds could they have for requiring a license to distribute media, which by definition do not perform file system functions and therefore cannot violate a patent relating to methods used to manipulate the file system?
LAME seems to use this idea; everyone knows LAME Aint an MP3 Encoder, it just so happens that by pure coincidence the files it outputs are compatible in an mp3 decoder.
That wasn't the intention behind that name. LAME is so called because when first started, it wasn't an MP3 encoder. It was a set of patches that improved the performance of another MP3 encoder...
You obviously don't have clients that send you colour-coded lists of requests...
This is just one of the reasons why e-mail preview panes are evil and should be removed from all e-mail clients. Opening an e-mail should require positive action, especially if the e-mail may be encoded using HTML or another similarly capable format that can cause your computer to take actions automatically (eg downloading an image, sending a receipt back to the sender, installing a worm...).
. Now a college graduate will probably make at least $20,000 a year more than a non-college graduate on avarage, and probably much more later in life as they advance in their careers. If government taxed 20% of this extra $20,000 a year, then government would get $140,000 back over the next 35 years
This is a fallacy - you're failing to see the wider picture. Graduates only earn more money because being a graduate enables them to rise to the top of the pile. If there were less graduates, the same positions, paying the same money, would be occupied by non-graduates. If there were more graduates, there would be more competition for these places, so fewer (proportionally) of the graduates would achieve higher earnings. (This happened in the UK in the '90s: throughout the 80s, Thatcher pushed for a higher proportion of people to go into higher education. Her goals were nearly achieved, but they were _way_ too high. The UK is now full of graduates with worthless degrees.)
Yes, there is a small difference: a better educated workforce frequently increases the efficiency of industry, and sometimes enables new industries to be built (e.g. through research and development of new products). But I believe the effects of these two differences are substantially smaller in magnitude to what you suggest.
In quantum, by looking at the cars, you can affect their positions!
Or, perhaps more relevantly, by not looking you can make them both there and not there at the same time. So when you cross the road, there is a possibility that you will be killed and a possibility that you won't be. By arranging the situation so that you will only be observed once you reach the other side, you will get there.
Truly magnificent!
Unfortunately, merely giving your theory a ridiculous name doesn't seem to count... neither it would appear are there any points for making wild, hyperbolic and ultimately meaningless statements, comparing one's intellect to god (!)
I haven't read all of it, but I get:
1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false. Just 2... suggesting that the world has 4 different days at the same time seems clearly fallatious to me, as there is a smooth progression between them, so it must be either 1 or infinite, and calling me a 'mindless dumb ass', which is clearly not true. 2 points.
2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous. When you come down to it, this site doesn't say much. It just states it over and over again in slightly different ways. I'll say we stick with just 10 of these. 20 points.
3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent I'm not going to go into this one... there's a certain warped logic to the entire thing, if you believe the original premise. OK, so the original premise is totally illogical, but it doesn't seem to be inconsistent...
5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment. Well, the entire thing is a thought experiment, and it clearly contradicts everyone's understanding of the world... 5 points
5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards).
I count 20. However the list was written for USENET which is a text-only medium, so I want to add inappropriate use of colour, font styling and underlines to this, and bring the count up to 40. 200 points.
5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann". 10 points
10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school, as if this were evidence of sanity. I will count 'I have lectured at MIT' as fulfilling this. 10 points
10 points for offering prize money to anyone who proves and/or finds any flaws in your theory. 10 points
10 points for each new term you invent and use without properly defining it. Only 10 points, by the look of it.
20 points for defending yourself by bringing up (real or imagined) ridicule accorded to your past theories. He only brings up this theory... but he does it so many times we have to count it. 20 points.
40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to Nazis, stormtroopers, or brownshirts. 40 points (Nazis)
40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a "conspiracy" to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike. Yep. 40 points
50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions. Yep.
I make that -5 + 395 = 390.
I would *strongly* recommend doing a backup before trying any of the code from the ext2fsd project on sourceforge.
I'd also strongly recommend fscking your disk before trying it. I've had _very_ bizarre behaviour out of it on corrupted disks, including immediate reboots without going to blue screen. There is a version of e2fsck that can run on NT floating around somewhere...
If you don't know how to type the characters necessary to access the web site, chances are you won't be able to read the content anyway. So I think it's a moot point.
Huh? Are you joking? I can read French fairly easily, and Spanish not quite so easily. It would probably take me a lot more effort to figure out how to type \'e or \~n or any of the other non-ASCII characters that are used in either of those languages. I would probably have to resort to finding them in Windows' "character map" (which isn't installed by default on all systems, I've noticed in the past, so I may have to install it for the purpose) and copying and pasteing them into the address bar. This isn't ideal...
The solution here is to not use domain names for verification rather then trying to force the whole world to use Latin characters for naming internet sites. As you mentioned, there are already problems with using Latin. A bank system should already have a digital certificate, and that's mostly what we're worried about.
You don't get it, do you?
The point is that this would allow people to create two different domain names that looked, when displayed, so close to identical as to be impossible to distinguish from each other. But they could refer to two different sites. How would a user know which one was which? How would a user know which one to use?
Also, you could create domains which do seem to be identical. Unicode has many symbols which are actually identical and equivalent to each other in all senses, but which are defined in multiple places in the code.
Furthermore, you say a digital certificate should do the job. But what do digital certificates guarantee? At present, they tend to give a good degree of confidence that the person operating the site you are communicating with is the person who owns the domain name it is running on, because that is the information that is checked by the issuer, and that is the information in the CN field which your browser verifies matches what it expects. Therefore, even with digital certificates, you're still relying on being able to distinguish different organisations via their domain name.
The reason not to use Unicode is that it won't be backwards compatable with the old DNS standard, which was meant to be compatable across ASCII and non-ascii systems.
That, of course, is also a good reason. But it doesn't invalidate the first...
What is "a news automated system" if not an obscure and difficult to understand way of describing a CMS?
/. concept
/. is very similar to most blogs I've read; they generally take the form of a chronologically ordered list of articles (sometimes separated out into topics) to which other people can often add comments, just like slashdot. Of course slashdot has article submission and comment moderation which most blogs don't have, but that just makes it an enhanced blog as far as I'm concerned. I'm fairly sure there are people out there using slashcode to run blogs.
It's an open source project loosely based on the
I hate to point this out, but
It's only the existance of other methods of sharing that have become the norm that stops BT from becoming a major means of trafficing copyrighted works.
No, what really prevents it is the fact that there is no integrated search mechanism. This turns off all the MP3 traders because they don't want to have to use web sites that will get periodically shut down, ISP blocked, etc. in order to find the torrents for the files they want to download...
Look at the english railways - for a long time, seperate companies used their own parallel rail network, often running different gage track (different width) and having to step around one anothers infrastructure, creating clumsy and non user friendly railway stations and services.
Eventually rail regulation came in, standardising all rail networks to one standard gage, allowing rolling stock and engines to work on any rail companies track and making the whole exercise better for customers and more profitable for the companies.
Sooner or later, p2p filesharing (and maybe chat client) protocol will become standardised, and it will simply be a matter of which piece of software you use to connect to a complete network.
And it'll be a sorry day when it does. And we can see why, thanks to your analogy. There were, in fact, two standard track sizes used in English railways before the business was nationalised, if my history isn't failing me... those were 4'8.5" and 7' (which was only used by GWR, I think).
Of course, when everything was standardised, everyone had to come down to the smallest of the two standards, because existing tracks can be made smaller much more easily than they can be made larger.
Which is a damned shame. Because trains built on 7' tracks can run faster due to the more evenly spread power load (I'm not an engineer, but I have been told by one that this is the case...), are less likely to be derailed by damaged tracks, and can carry more passengers for the same mass of train, so are more fuel-efficient.
I can see that we are all going to converge on KaZaA, despite the fact that there are file sharing protocols out there that are much better at detecting corrupted downloads, finding files to download, enabling community activities like rating the quality of a file, and working against adverse network conditions, simply because KaZaA is the lowest common denominator that we'll all have to come down to in the name of standardisation.
Yeuch.
Unlike Star Trek, Farscape, and Battlestar Galactica, there was no sound in outer space.
Good one. But I think Babylon 5 got there first (discounting the shadow-ship noise, which is explained suitably in one of the later episodes).
But I'll give you something else to think about. If you ever try to write fiction at a serious level, you will come up against the following again and again: THERE ARE NO NEW IDEAS. So we just have to do our best with what's already been done.
We take a situation which has been done before (i.e. a universe with numerous worlds in which some are technologically backwards while others are highly advanced), fill in some arbitrary backplot (there's been a civil war recently), create some characters (this is the interesting bit, and this is where firefly really shone, IMO), and give them some problems (being fugitives from justice is hardly original, but it works well... and that's just the beginning!). Then, for a TV series, throw them into more specific problems with each episode.
This is standard plot construction. Its how almost everything is done. No, there is no single aspect of the show that is utterly original. But the combined result is...
As an aside, a lot of similar shows, whether in the SF genre or others, seem to miss out the stage about giving the characters their own intrinsic problems. I'm thinking of shows like Star Trek (although a lot of the later ST episodes and the later series fixed this problem, think of the early TNG episodes and the original series...), a lot of police dramas or similar... basically anything where the same group of people go up against a different problem each episode. The examples in each genre that shine through do so because, I think, they have characters that have their own problems as well. Maybe something any aspiring TV producers need to think about.
It is too bad about "Firefly" not receiving the support it needed from Fox, because I've noticed something about ALL of Whedon's series. The first season is just the setup.
Absolutely. But I heard a rumour that he'd got funding to make a movie of it. So we might at least see some of where he wanted to go with it...
It really was an interesting show, a departure from the typical StarTrek/Babylon5 mushy sci-fi.
I largely agree with you. But you can call B5 many things, and 'mushy' ain't one of them.
The word 'niggardly' is in relatively common usage in the UK. I certainly didn't have to look it up to know what it meant when I first saw it in this context, so I must have been exposed to the use of the word in the past. I'm not entirely certain, but I think that's probably on many occasions. Words I've only seen used once I tend to forget again after looking them up.
I think you misread his post. 'When' in that context isn't asking "how long needs to pass after slavery was abolished" as I think you read it, judging by your comment, but rather "in what particular situations", which is a substantially different and altogether more interesting question.
Apprentices aren't slaves. At least not in the majority of cases. Admittedly, they're underpaid and maltreated a lot, but they always have the choice to walk out. It may not be a sensible thing to do, but that doesn't change the fact that it is possible and totally legal for them to do so.
I see that most actresses seem to be "actors" now. But they still have a separate Oscar. If they were consistent, there'd just be one Oscar for "Best Actor". It's not like muscles and sexual organs have much to do with acting ability after all.
No, but in order to perform well as an actor, you need to have a good, challenging role to play. Almost all roles are assigned to somebody of a gender which was predetermined before they auditioned, so it could be unfair to one gender group in a particular year if all of the good roles are given to the opposite group.
[please ignore previous post; slashdot ate half of it]
In the UK, implied contract terms have no legal standing AFAIK. But in general, if the sums involved are small (less than 5000 pounds, or about 8000 euros), the court will settle things on what seems sensible.
If you wanted to sell an item at auction, then it would not be sensible to expect to do so without paying some kind of fee, so in this case, yes the auctioneer would probably get his money.
However, bizarre terms and conditions on the use of a photograph (stuff like 'this photograph may be scanned for use on one web site only, which must be operated by [name of client] and may not be transferred to any third party; it may not be reproduced in print without the photographer's permission') can't be described as sensible because there is no real reason why a photographer has to operate in this fashion... and some don't, so a photographer would have to make such conditions clear.
Of course, there are other conditions he doesn't necessarily have to make clear. For instance, he doesn't have to state that he retains all rights until he has been paid; that's only sensible. Unless he has stated otherwise he doesn't have to provide negatives. And so on.
If you're dealing with things worth more than 5000 pounds the rules change because you have to go to a different court to settle disputes that large. At that point, you'd better have a watertight written contract, because anything less and things could get very messy...
In the UK, implied contract terms have no legal standing AFAIK. But in general, if the sums involved are small ( and may not be transferred to any third party; it may not be reproduced in print without the photographer's permission') can't be described as sensible because there is no real reason why a photographer has to operate in this fashion... and some don't, so a photographer would have to make such conditions clear.
Of course, there are other conditions he doesn't necessarily have to make clear. For instance, he doesn't have to state that he retains all rights until he has been paid; that's only sensible. Unless he has stated otherwise he doesn't have to provide negatives. And so on.
If you're dealing with things worth more than 5000 the rules change because you have to go to a different court to settle disputes that large. At that point, you'd better have a watertight written contract, because anything less and things could get very messy...