Whether it's textbooks, or other reliable resources, we need SOMETHING to offset the conceptual damage that stackexchange does to all kinds of technical learning.
Some textbooks are much better than others. The same is going to be true of software and digital resources. The vast majority of software that's out there for learning is not nearly as good as what you might want it to be. Does the format have some potential advantages? Absolutely. But it's easier to implement and distribute really bad digital resources than it is to distribute (at least printed) textbooks of any sort. And, it's easier to put together websites and videos of small bits of concept one at a time than it is to put together a whole coherent textbook -- whether good or bad, in either case.
In the linked Cosmos article there is this quote from one of the authors:
The situation is reminiscent to the problem Galileo had with the Catholic priests of his time – most refused to look through his telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter.
Obviously, this doesn't prove anything, but I like to say that "everybody who's wrong thinks he's Galileo". Referring to the Galileo affair is among science crackpoterry something like Godwin's law in Internet discussions
Stephen Hawking was at Caltech in the 1990s giving a public talk when he conceded this bet. He visited Caltech for a semester twice while I was in grad school there between 1990 and 1996. I remember one physics colloquium; I understood about the first five minutes of the talk. This was in the middle of an ongoing theoretical project where both of them were trying to answer the question: could an arbitrarily advanced civilization, constrained only by physics but not by financial or engineering considerations, construct a traversible wormhole? The question came about when Carl Sagan called up Kip to ask that question. (This was reported by Kip when he was giving a talk about black holes to the intro Physics course at Caltech; I was a TA at the time.) In the physics colloquium that Stephen was giving, he and Kip got into a bit of an argument at the end during questions, and I remember Stephen saying something along the lines of "even somebody as tough and powerful as you, Kip, wouldn't survive that".
Each time he visited, Stephen also gave a public talk, which was *extremely* well attended. Indeed, at at least one of them, I didn't make it into the auditorium where the talk itself happened, but into another auditorium on campus where they were (what we would today call) live streaming the talk. At the end, when Stephen was taking questions, it would take him a couple of minutes to compose the reply on his keypad thingy. To keep everybody from getting restless, Kip would talk to the audience. During one of these questions, Kip was telling everybody about the bet. When Stephen's answer came out, he'd decided not to answer the question, but instead conceded the bet to Kip. It was quite fun to watch.
Many people were there to see this; I'd be surprised if there weren't others reading this thread who had seen it.....
It is telling that all papers by this author and his collaborators seem to be in a closed ecosystem of citation where they only are cited each other. I am not familiar with the "Galaxies" journal. At least one of these papers is from A&A, which *is* a real peer-reviewed journal.
There are many red herrings here. First of all, the whole "we have a model that can explain galaxy rotation curves without dark matter" is not nearly as meaningful as some seem to say it is. There is a whole host of observations explained by dark matter, in detail, and with precision. Explaining just one of them doesn't do much if you can't explain all of the rest of the observations.
Likewise, the Big Bang model has a host of observations that support it, in detail, and with numerical precision.
The "electric universe" is not something that is worth paying attention to.
For popular-level information about the problems with the whole electric universe business, see this site: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/...
I can't tell if this is meant as humor/sarcasm, or is presented as an honest opinion.
Just in case it's not humor, and I didn't miss the point: ever heard of the 1%? On the oversimple left-right political axis, guess where most of them fall?
Ever heard of neoliberalism? Even though it's associated with the Democratic party, ultimately it's an extension of Reagan-style economics, and towards the political/economic right (even in the USA).
People towards the right are in control of the vast amount of the USA. They have all the money, and they dominate the attention of the lawmakers.
It's sad that it's getting increasingly hard to stand against them without finding that your community has endorsed highly restrictive and ultimately illiberal things like the new FreeBSD speech codes.
Conservative and Liberal are insufficient tags nowadays.
If you identify yourself as a liberal, you probably nowadays think of conservative as meaning (perhaps not self-acknowledge) white supremacy and Trumpism.
If you identify yourself as a conservative, you probably nowadays think of liberal as meaning in favor of the kind of identity politics that leads to speech codes and censorship that begins to be reminiscent of Mao's cultural revolution.
The thing is, there are people who would at least have traditionally identified themselves with both labels who aren't either of this, but still actually possess the ability to reason. Sadly, the current climate is allowing the white supremists to come out of the woodwork and go mainstream, and that in turn is convincing people who should otherwise know better to endorse the extremes of identity politics censorship.
At the moment, the national liberal party in the US (the Democratic party) hasn't been caught up in the craziness of the left (i.e. overarching speech policies that consider saying "*hugs*" a form of agression), whereas the Republican party has at least partially been caught up in the craziness of the right (i.e. not recoiling from Trump). If anything, this makes the extremes of identity politics all the more insidious and dangerous. There need to be ways for people to stand up and point to the excesses of that without having to be identified with, or feel that perhaps they even must share a lot of values with, the jingoistic Trumpists of the world.
Consider this: one person says that they are disappointed that something in the code won't be accepted because it conflicts with something else that needs to be there. A second person says, "*hugs*" as an expression of sympathy in response. That second person is now on warning for violating community standards.
Is THAT something you want in your community?
This policy goes way beyond "don't be a jerk". This is the problem with speech restrictions like this. People point to "don't be a racist" and ask what's so bad about that. Yes, being racist is bad, and expressing it is a good reason for a community to ask you to step away! But that's not the only thing in here-- especially when you realize that terms like "reinforce systematic oppression" are easily interpreted to squelch very broad ranges of speech.
Avoiding offense is a two-way street. It's not just those who speak having to avoid saying outrageous and offensive things. It's also those who listen having enough resilience to not need strict speech codes to avoid being offended, and to be able to put in context what others say to understand that there's no offense there.
Also, since he links to the partially-good-argument, partially-prevarication "systemd Biggest Myths" article, it's also worth linking to this few-years-old "biggest fallacies" article.
"[b]It is best not to blame systemd for problems that go away when you stop using systemd.[/b]"
Do I [i]know[/i] that systemd was the problem? Nope. Have I had things go much more smoothly for me since I moved away from an extremely popuar distribution that uses systemd? Yep.
What's more, the argument that everybody is using systemd based on its merits is specious. That's the same as the argument that Windows and Word and the like is what's most used in the corporate world on its merits. When your octopus wraps its tentacles around so many different things, it eventually gets impossible to ignore your octopus. You can keep trying to move away, but sooner or later it's just easier to give in and deal with it, rather than keep trying to fight it. This is what happened with Internet Explorer back when it had loads of incompatible extensions that sellers of corporate software would use; you had no [i]choice[/i] but to use it. And now that systemd has sucked in so many subsystems, it's become more effort to try to keep using versions of those subsystems than it is to just give in and use systemd. That's not giving in to systemd based on its merits. It's giving in to a company who has used embrace and extend as a bully tactic based on its strength and control over key things in the ecosystem.
The GUI has "completely" replaced the command line in the last 20 years. And, yet, there are still a lot of us (very few proportionally speaking, but a lot in an absolute sense) who use the command line either as a large fraction, or even a primary way, of controlling their computers. Despite the fact that the GUI is easier to just pick up and use, the command line remains more powerful if you're willing to take them time to learn it, and makes it possible to do obscure things.
It also remains an important way of interacting with some programs where having enough GUI elements would get in the way of what the display is really supposed to do, i.e. *displaying* stuff . So, Blender, for example, is largely GUI, but probably almost everybody still hits space and types some commands every now and again.
The keyboard isn't going anywhere. Yeah, it may become less of a "primary" interface device. But we'll find that gesture-based control isn't nearly as expressive as using a mouse and a keyboard, and we'll find that having a keyboard to tune up the text that we spoke is going to be essential. (Sure, you can say "go back, respell, add a comma", etc... but it will be way more efficient just to hit a few keys and put in what you want! Hell, even when talking to *people* right now, it's sometimes more efficient to just show what you mean by typing it.)
The race to make everything a touch screen right now, in my opinion, is a kind of a mass insanity that has gripped us all. Yes, it has some advantages. But I find it far easier to get a computer to do what I want it to do with a keyboard and a mouse than with a touchscreen. And, sometimes, a touchscreen is just not a good idea. For instance, the heater/air controls on my car are all on a touchscreen now. On my older car, I can operate them entirely by feel, because the three knobs are tactile and I can tell where I'm turning them. With the touch screen, I *have* to look at them... which means looking away from the road. The touch screen is not the cure-all that device manufacturers seem to think it is. Likewise, whatever input system we use instead of a keyboard is probably going to drive a few of us nuts all the time, and will drive everybody nuts enough of the time that we'll still have a keyboard for at *least* decades to come.
(1) Inertia. For years, it wasn't even possible to stream on Linux (at least without some clumsy Wine shenanigans), and my TV box is a linux box. Now I think the Linux browsers do support it, but, eh.
(2) DRM. Yeah, I know, DVDs have it too, but it's long been cracked, so to my mind that makes it a lesser evil. No, I don't pirate the DVDs or keep copies of the content. But, technically, I have to violated the DMCA to play legally obtained DVDs on my own computer, since I need to download DeCSS. Still, I don't want to support DRM-based models if I can avoid it, and I'm not happy that all streaming is DRM-encumbered.
(3) Watching offline. If I want to go back and rewatch a scene, it doesn't use extra bandwidth. If the Internet glitches while I'm watching, I don't have pauses or glitches in may playback. Yeah, sometimes a disk is damaged, and that's annoying. But, I've got far more control over the disk while I have it than I would over a stream. *IF* we could download streams for later watching offline, I would consider a streaming service.
(4) Streaming service selections are ridiculous. You have to subscribe to a whole bunch of them if you want to be able to get everything; this quickly becomes prohibitively expensive. I'm not going to pay $10/month *JUST* to watch Star Trek Discovery without commercials. Hell, it would be more economical to wait a year or two and buy the DVD boxed set! There really needs to be a massive collapse of the streaming market as people buying it realize that they're paying way much for the few things they watch on any given service. On the other hand, Netflix DVDs have many things, the big gap being recent TV series, particularly series that are tied to streaming services.
Devuan is a fork of Debian that eschews systemd. It works well for me; indeed, I've been using Devuan testing, and my network of nfs-using machines have been more stable and less trouble than they were under Ubuntu. I recommend it. The more people who use systemd-free distros, the less likely systemd is to take over everything.
I've heard that argument before. The student caught copying someone else's work first denies, then pleads, then goes into "lawyer" mode, trying to argue that what he or she did wasn't really cheating because the syllabus was either badly worded, or didn't specifically say not to do it.
"Nowhere in your syllabus did it say we couldn't make up our data."
Actual quote from a student in my astronomy lab class, after he got past the denial (I didn't cheat!) and pleading (I took some of the data, I thought it was OK to use our knowledge to fill in the other points) stages.
(The attempt to kiss ass with the "use our knowledge" was pathetic. Mostly because the cheating was done so poorly that it was clear that he didn't have any actual knowledge.)
As I understand it, one of the stated goals was to speed up boot times. It's had exactly the opposite effect on my Ubuntu system -- that is, when the boot doesn't die altogether when I try to mount NFS shares. (Also, thanks to systemd, I can't even *reboot* or shut down the machine when there's a hung NFS process. I am forced to hard-reset it.)
For years, warning flags have been raised about systemd. It more or less seems that we're bringing all the disadvantages of the Windows architecture to Linux, without any of the advantages of running WIndows.
Remember when Jurassic Park came out, how impressed we all were with the dinosaurs?
Remember when T2 came out, how impressive the liquid metal man was?
The problem isn't that CGI is "bad". It's just a technique, that can be used well or poorly like anything else. It's mature enough now that you can use it a whole lot. But there's nothing intrinsic about it that makes it less impressive or less verisimilitudinous or less worthwhile to watch than other filmic techniques.
The real problem is that "lots of things moving at once look at the spectacle!" is no longer novel. We have scads of movies every year come out that show us that. So, when Jurassic Park had cool dinosaurs, it was *the* movie that had that. When Return of the Jedi had fighters flying all over the place in a massive space battle that upped the ante from the previous two Star Wars movies, it was fresh and cool and new.
Nowadays, that's just same old, same old. You can no longer impress by having lots of specatcle out there, because audiences have been there and seen that. it doesn't matter how you accomplish it -- CGI or otherwise. CGI only gets blamed because that's how people usually accomplish it nowadays. Maybe you can blame CGI because that's what made it cheap engouh to be overused so much. But it's not CGI itself.
Done well, it still entertains. Somebody else has already mentioned Mad Max. As another example, the speedster running through the exploding house scene from [i]X-Men: Apocalypse[/i] was a lot of fun, because there was more to it than just spectacle. The same movie at the end had lots of crap flying all over the places in a special effects spectacular, and it was kind of boring, because it was just gratuitous spectacle for the sake of spectacle, and that's old hat.
This is nothing new. The administration has been saying this all along, and the stupidity of it has been pointed out by the people they lionize as having "done it right" in the past.
..and he got terminated from all of his positions.
If it stopped at him being mocked, that would be fine. Still an overreaction, because his comments were taken out of context and completely not understood (perhaps *willfully* misunderstood, as was the case with may who piled on Justine Sacco). But, whatever.
But he also got fired. And that's why this is a serious problem.
Indeed, in these kinds of class action lawsuits, there is only one big winner, and that is the lawyers who are litigating it.
I'm all for class action lawsuits in principle; companies that do things that are bad for soceity should face some sort of consequences for their actions, and people who were inconvenienced or harmed by the actions of companies should have some sort of recompence. In practice, however, usually what happens is that the people nominally benefitting get just a few dollars (probably not worth the paperwork of making it happen), the charge to the company is perhaps not trivial, but an easily absorbed cost of doing business, and it's a bonanza for the lawyers involved. The rewards system encourages litigous behavior for the sake of litigation, not good behavior on the part of companies nor does it provide any real recompense for people harmed.
And how, exactly, is she supposed to put her knees in any other position? The seats are not very wide. Unless she has an empty seat next to her (and, frankly, that's about the only way I can stand to fly any more), if she tries to bend her legs so that her knees aren't right in front of her, parts of them are going to be spilling over into and annoying the person next to her, or sticking out into the aisle and getting run over by the carts that the flight attendants drive trhough trying to get people to buy stupid duty free stuff.
The problem is not inconsiderate assholes. The problem is that 6'2" people are stuck in plane seats that they simply don't fit in. The problem is that airlines have designed coach seats to work for the bottom 30% of the population in terms of size, and are trying to squeeze the entire population into it. Something somewhere's gotta give. The person in back can blame the person in front for reclining their seat (as we've seen in this thread), or the person in front can blame the person in back for having knees (as we've seen in this thread), but *somebody* is going to be unhappy, because the situation is set up so that somebody has to be.
The problem is coach seating. It's just become too small.
The front-page warning says "However, we want to be clear that this edition is only free to read online, and this posting does not transfer any right to download all or any portion of The Feynman Lectures on Physics for any purpose. "
I wonder how they expect people to read it in their browsers without the text of the document being transferred down to the computer on which the browser is running...?
I remember getting one of those when I was 10 or 11. First generation. All excited to finally have a computer. But I couldn't leave it on for more than an hour or two before it would just crash because it had overheated. Too frustrating to use. We sent it back before the necessary 10 days had passed.
I was sad.
Later (within the year? I don't remember) I got a Vic-20; a couple of years later, a Commodore 64. Then, in college, a Commodore 128. Those guys worked much better for me than the Sinclair ZX ever did.
You don't have health insurance, eh? Do you also have legal documents signed that the system does not need to help you and pay for the care you'll need if an unexpected condition or accident arises? Or are you assuming that if something like that happens that no non-ultra-rich person could handle, the system will back you up?
If you don' t have all the "let me suffer" documents signed, by not having health insurance you're a worse freeloader than any smoker.
Slashdot Mirror
"There are too many different and diverse desktops."
"What should we do to solve the problem?"
"Create another one!"
Whether it's textbooks, or other reliable resources, we need SOMETHING to offset the conceptual damage that stackexchange does to all kinds of technical learning.
Some textbooks are much better than others. The same is going to be true of software and digital resources. The vast majority of software that's out there for learning is not nearly as good as what you might want it to be. Does the format have some potential advantages? Absolutely. But it's easier to implement and distribute really bad digital resources than it is to distribute (at least printed) textbooks of any sort. And, it's easier to put together websites and videos of small bits of concept one at a time than it is to put together a whole coherent textbook -- whether good or bad, in either case.
The real question is, with Red Hat a core contributor : how long before systemd becomes a required dependency?
In the linked Cosmos article there is this quote from one of the authors:
The situation is reminiscent to the problem Galileo had with the Catholic priests of his time – most refused to look through his telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter.
Obviously, this doesn't prove anything, but I like to say that "everybody who's wrong thinks he's Galileo". Referring to the Galileo affair is among science crackpoterry something like Godwin's law in Internet discussions
Stephen Hawking was at Caltech in the 1990s giving a public talk when he conceded this bet. He visited Caltech for a semester twice while I was in grad school there between 1990 and 1996. I remember one physics colloquium; I understood about the first five minutes of the talk. This was in the middle of an ongoing theoretical project where both of them were trying to answer the question: could an arbitrarily advanced civilization, constrained only by physics but not by financial or engineering considerations, construct a traversible wormhole? The question came about when Carl Sagan called up Kip to ask that question. (This was reported by Kip when he was giving a talk about black holes to the intro Physics course at Caltech; I was a TA at the time.) In the physics colloquium that Stephen was giving, he and Kip got into a bit of an argument at the end during questions, and I remember Stephen saying something along the lines of "even somebody as tough and powerful as you, Kip, wouldn't survive that".
Each time he visited, Stephen also gave a public talk, which was *extremely* well attended. Indeed, at at least one of them, I didn't make it into the auditorium where the talk itself happened, but into another auditorium on campus where they were (what we would today call) live streaming the talk. At the end, when Stephen was taking questions, it would take him a couple of minutes to compose the reply on his keypad thingy. To keep everybody from getting restless, Kip would talk to the audience. During one of these questions, Kip was telling everybody about the bet. When Stephen's answer came out, he'd decided not to answer the question, but instead conceded the bet to Kip. It was quite fun to watch.
Many people were there to see this; I'd be surprised if there weren't others reading this thread who had seen it.....
In what way is this relevant?
It is telling that all papers by this author and his collaborators seem to be in a closed ecosystem of citation where they only are cited each other. I am not familiar with the "Galaxies" journal. At least one of these papers is from A&A, which *is* a real peer-reviewed journal.
There are many red herrings here. First of all, the whole "we have a model that can explain galaxy rotation curves without dark matter" is not nearly as meaningful as some seem to say it is. There is a whole host of observations explained by dark matter, in detail, and with precision. Explaining just one of them doesn't do much if you can't explain all of the rest of the observations.
Likewise, the Big Bang model has a host of observations that support it, in detail, and with numerical precision.
The "electric universe" is not something that is worth paying attention to.
For popular-level information about the problems with the whole electric universe business, see this site: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/...
I can't tell if this is meant as humor/sarcasm, or is presented as an honest opinion.
Just in case it's not humor, and I didn't miss the point: ever heard of the 1%? On the oversimple left-right political axis, guess where most of them fall?
Ever heard of neoliberalism? Even though it's associated with the Democratic party, ultimately it's an extension of Reagan-style economics, and towards the political/economic right (even in the USA).
People towards the right are in control of the vast amount of the USA. They have all the money, and they dominate the attention of the lawmakers.
It's sad that it's getting increasingly hard to stand against them without finding that your community has endorsed highly restrictive and ultimately illiberal things like the new FreeBSD speech codes.
Conservative and Liberal are insufficient tags nowadays.
If you identify yourself as a liberal, you probably nowadays think of conservative as meaning (perhaps not self-acknowledge) white supremacy and Trumpism.
If you identify yourself as a conservative, you probably nowadays think of liberal as meaning in favor of the kind of identity politics that leads to speech codes and censorship that begins to be reminiscent of Mao's cultural revolution.
The thing is, there are people who would at least have traditionally identified themselves with both labels who aren't either of this, but still actually possess the ability to reason. Sadly, the current climate is allowing the white supremists to come out of the woodwork and go mainstream, and that in turn is convincing people who should otherwise know better to endorse the extremes of identity politics censorship.
At the moment, the national liberal party in the US (the Democratic party) hasn't been caught up in the craziness of the left (i.e. overarching speech policies that consider saying "*hugs*" a form of agression), whereas the Republican party has at least partially been caught up in the craziness of the right (i.e. not recoiling from Trump). If anything, this makes the extremes of identity politics all the more insidious and dangerous. There need to be ways for people to stand up and point to the excesses of that without having to be identified with, or feel that perhaps they even must share a lot of values with, the jingoistic Trumpists of the world.
Consider this: one person says that they are disappointed that something in the code won't be accepted because it conflicts with something else that needs to be there. A second person says, "*hugs*" as an expression of sympathy in response. That second person is now on warning for violating community standards.
Is THAT something you want in your community?
This policy goes way beyond "don't be a jerk". This is the problem with speech restrictions like this. People point to "don't be a racist" and ask what's so bad about that. Yes, being racist is bad, and expressing it is a good reason for a community to ask you to step away! But that's not the only thing in here-- especially when you realize that terms like "reinforce systematic oppression" are easily interpreted to squelch very broad ranges of speech.
Avoiding offense is a two-way street. It's not just those who speak having to avoid saying outrageous and offensive things. It's also those who listen having enough resilience to not need strict speech codes to avoid being offended, and to be able to put in context what others say to understand that there's no offense there.
Also, since he links to the partially-good-argument, partially-prevarication "systemd Biggest Myths" article, it's also worth linking to this few-years-old "biggest fallacies" article.
"[b]It is best not to blame systemd for problems that go away when you stop using systemd.[/b]"
Do I [i]know[/i] that systemd was the problem? Nope. Have I had things go much more smoothly for me since I moved away from an extremely popuar distribution that uses systemd? Yep.
What's more, the argument that everybody is using systemd based on its merits is specious. That's the same as the argument that Windows and Word and the like is what's most used in the corporate world on its merits. When your octopus wraps its tentacles around so many different things, it eventually gets impossible to ignore your octopus. You can keep trying to move away, but sooner or later it's just easier to give in and deal with it, rather than keep trying to fight it. This is what happened with Internet Explorer back when it had loads of incompatible extensions that sellers of corporate software would use; you had no [i]choice[/i] but to use it. And now that systemd has sucked in so many subsystems, it's become more effort to try to keep using versions of those subsystems than it is to just give in and use systemd. That's not giving in to systemd based on its merits. It's giving in to a company who has used embrace and extend as a bully tactic based on its strength and control over key things in the ecosystem.
...cold, dead, fingers, etc.
The GUI has "completely" replaced the command line in the last 20 years. And, yet, there are still a lot of us (very few proportionally speaking, but a lot in an absolute sense) who use the command line either as a large fraction, or even a primary way, of controlling their computers. Despite the fact that the GUI is easier to just pick up and use, the command line remains more powerful if you're willing to take them time to learn it, and makes it possible to do obscure things.
It also remains an important way of interacting with some programs where having enough GUI elements would get in the way of what the display is really supposed to do, i.e. *displaying* stuff . So, Blender, for example, is largely GUI, but probably almost everybody still hits space and types some commands every now and again.
The keyboard isn't going anywhere. Yeah, it may become less of a "primary" interface device. But we'll find that gesture-based control isn't nearly as expressive as using a mouse and a keyboard, and we'll find that having a keyboard to tune up the text that we spoke is going to be essential. (Sure, you can say "go back, respell, add a comma", etc... but it will be way more efficient just to hit a few keys and put in what you want! Hell, even when talking to *people* right now, it's sometimes more efficient to just show what you mean by typing it.)
The race to make everything a touch screen right now, in my opinion, is a kind of a mass insanity that has gripped us all. Yes, it has some advantages. But I find it far easier to get a computer to do what I want it to do with a keyboard and a mouse than with a touchscreen. And, sometimes, a touchscreen is just not a good idea. For instance, the heater/air controls on my car are all on a touchscreen now. On my older car, I can operate them entirely by feel, because the three knobs are tactile and I can tell where I'm turning them. With the touch screen, I *have* to look at them... which means looking away from the road. The touch screen is not the cure-all that device manufacturers seem to think it is. Likewise, whatever input system we use instead of a keyboard is probably going to drive a few of us nuts all the time, and will drive everybody nuts enough of the time that we'll still have a keyboard for at *least* decades to come.
Several reasons.
(1) Inertia. For years, it wasn't even possible to stream on Linux (at least without some clumsy Wine shenanigans), and my TV box is a linux box. Now I think the Linux browsers do support it, but, eh.
(2) DRM. Yeah, I know, DVDs have it too, but it's long been cracked, so to my mind that makes it a lesser evil. No, I don't pirate the DVDs or keep copies of the content. But, technically, I have to violated the DMCA to play legally obtained DVDs on my own computer, since I need to download DeCSS. Still, I don't want to support DRM-based models if I can avoid it, and I'm not happy that all streaming is DRM-encumbered.
(3) Watching offline. If I want to go back and rewatch a scene, it doesn't use extra bandwidth. If the Internet glitches while I'm watching, I don't have pauses or glitches in may playback. Yeah, sometimes a disk is damaged, and that's annoying. But, I've got far more control over the disk while I have it than I would over a stream. *IF* we could download streams for later watching offline, I would consider a streaming service.
(4) Streaming service selections are ridiculous. You have to subscribe to a whole bunch of them if you want to be able to get everything; this quickly becomes prohibitively expensive. I'm not going to pay $10/month *JUST* to watch Star Trek Discovery without commercials. Hell, it would be more economical to wait a year or two and buy the DVD boxed set! There really needs to be a massive collapse of the streaming market as people buying it realize that they're paying way much for the few things they watch on any given service. On the other hand, Netflix DVDs have many things, the big gap being recent TV series, particularly series that are tied to streaming services.
Devuan is a fork of Debian that eschews systemd. It works well for me; indeed, I've been using Devuan testing, and my network of nfs-using machines have been more stable and less trouble than they were under Ubuntu. I recommend it. The more people who use systemd-free distros, the less likely systemd is to take over everything.
I've heard that argument before. The student caught copying someone else's work first denies, then pleads, then goes into "lawyer" mode, trying to argue that what he or she did wasn't really cheating because the syllabus was either badly worded, or didn't specifically say not to do it.
"Nowhere in your syllabus did it say we couldn't make up our data."
Actual quote from a student in my astronomy lab class, after he got past the denial (I didn't cheat!) and pleading (I took some of the data, I thought it was OK to use our knowledge to fill in the other points) stages.
(The attempt to kiss ass with the "use our knowledge" was pathetic. Mostly because the cheating was done so poorly that it was clear that he didn't have any actual knowledge.)
Systemd, WTF???
As I understand it, one of the stated goals was to speed up boot times. It's had exactly the opposite effect on my Ubuntu system -- that is, when the boot doesn't die altogether when I try to mount NFS shares. (Also, thanks to systemd, I can't even *reboot* or shut down the machine when there's a hung NFS process. I am forced to hard-reset it.)
For years, warning flags have been raised about systemd. It more or less seems that we're bringing all the disadvantages of the Windows architecture to Linux, without any of the advantages of running WIndows.
So, again: systemd, wtf???
Remember when Jurassic Park came out, how impressed we all were with the dinosaurs?
Remember when T2 came out, how impressive the liquid metal man was?
The problem isn't that CGI is "bad". It's just a technique, that can be used well or poorly like anything else. It's mature enough now that you can use it a whole lot. But there's nothing intrinsic about it that makes it less impressive or less verisimilitudinous or less worthwhile to watch than other filmic techniques.
The real problem is that "lots of things moving at once look at the spectacle!" is no longer novel. We have scads of movies every year come out that show us that. So, when Jurassic Park had cool dinosaurs, it was *the* movie that had that. When Return of the Jedi had fighters flying all over the place in a massive space battle that upped the ante from the previous two Star Wars movies, it was fresh and cool and new.
Nowadays, that's just same old, same old. You can no longer impress by having lots of specatcle out there, because audiences have been there and seen that. it doesn't matter how you accomplish it -- CGI or otherwise. CGI only gets blamed because that's how people usually accomplish it nowadays. Maybe you can blame CGI because that's what made it cheap engouh to be overused so much. But it's not CGI itself.
Done well, it still entertains. Somebody else has already mentioned Mad Max. As another example, the speedster running through the exploding house scene from [i]X-Men: Apocalypse[/i] was a lot of fun, because there was more to it than just spectacle. The same movie at the end had lots of crap flying all over the places in a special effects spectacular, and it was kind of boring, because it was just gratuitous spectacle for the sake of spectacle, and that's old hat.
This is nothing new. The administration has been saying this all along, and the stupidity of it has been pointed out by the people they lionize as having "done it right" in the past.
Read this: http://www.theguardian.com/com...
..and he got terminated from all of his positions.
If it stopped at him being mocked, that would be fine. Still an overreaction, because his comments were taken out of context and completely not understood (perhaps *willfully* misunderstood, as was the case with may who piled on Justine Sacco). But, whatever.
But he also got fired. And that's why this is a serious problem.
Indeed, in these kinds of class action lawsuits, there is only one big winner, and that is the lawyers who are litigating it.
I'm all for class action lawsuits in principle; companies that do things that are bad for soceity should face some sort of consequences for their actions, and people who were inconvenienced or harmed by the actions of companies should have some sort of recompence. In practice, however, usually what happens is that the people nominally benefitting get just a few dollars (probably not worth the paperwork of making it happen), the charge to the company is perhaps not trivial, but an easily absorbed cost of doing business, and it's a bonanza for the lawyers involved. The rewards system encourages litigous behavior for the sake of litigation, not good behavior on the part of companies nor does it provide any real recompense for people harmed.
And how, exactly, is she supposed to put her knees in any other position? The seats are not very wide. Unless she has an empty seat next to her (and, frankly, that's about the only way I can stand to fly any more), if she tries to bend her legs so that her knees aren't right in front of her, parts of them are going to be spilling over into and annoying the person next to her, or sticking out into the aisle and getting run over by the carts that the flight attendants drive trhough trying to get people to buy stupid duty free stuff.
The problem is not inconsiderate assholes. The problem is that 6'2" people are stuck in plane seats that they simply don't fit in. The problem is that airlines have designed coach seats to work for the bottom 30% of the population in terms of size, and are trying to squeeze the entire population into it. Something somewhere's gotta give. The person in back can blame the person in front for reclining their seat (as we've seen in this thread), or the person in front can blame the person in back for having knees (as we've seen in this thread), but *somebody* is going to be unhappy, because the situation is set up so that somebody has to be.
The problem is coach seating. It's just become too small.
The front-page warning says "However, we want to be clear that this edition is only free to read online, and this posting does not transfer any right to download all or any portion of The Feynman Lectures on Physics for any purpose. "
I wonder how they expect people to read it in their browsers without the text of the document being transferred down to the computer on which the browser is running...?
I remember getting one of those when I was 10 or 11. First generation. All excited to finally have a computer. But I couldn't leave it on for more than an hour or two before it would just crash because it had overheated. Too frustrating to use. We sent it back before the necessary 10 days had passed.
I was sad.
Later (within the year? I don't remember) I got a Vic-20; a couple of years later, a Commodore 64. Then, in college, a Commodore 128. Those guys worked much better for me than the Sinclair ZX ever did.
You don't have health insurance, eh? Do you also have legal documents signed that the system does not need to help you and pay for the care you'll need if an unexpected condition or accident arises? Or are you assuming that if something like that happens that no non-ultra-rich person could handle, the system will back you up?
If you don' t have all the "let me suffer" documents signed, by not having health insurance you're a worse freeloader than any smoker.