You know, India has stolen a lot of US jobs. It seems that most of the call centers employ people who can't speak (or understand) English very well at all -- and yet they're perfectly willing to take a contact doing phone support for Americans! But despite that, I find I have two feelings about India:
I do not like the idea of people dying, even if they are in worldwide competition with us for jobs.
I hope this kind of terrorism is caught each and every time, in every country.
I preferred them between a rock and hard place
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SCO On the Rocks
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· Score: 3, Interesting
What once looked like a mortal threat to Linux appears to be fading. As a result, the suit has become a nonfactor in corporate buying decisions.
Yeah, but... but... I want them to flame out in a huge court loss. I want SCO's finances and future prospects to be devastated. I want a clear and definitive signal that Linux is safe and SCO was stupid to butt heads with Open Source.
This whole "fading" thing sounds like it just leaves too many doors open for other stupid companies to do bad things, because there is no jarring precedent burned into people's minds.
Thanks to heavy cost-cutting, SCO's core Unix-server-software business is generating an operating profit now and will continue to do so in 2005, he says.
Translation: "We pretty much fired everyone except for the accountant. After all, who needs developers on staff when the OSS guys work for free? Right?"
...God bless Daniel Quinlan and people like him. I have had a hell of a time with my daughter's email. A LOT of Web sites for kids have a "mail a friend" option. At one point my daughter wanted to use that option on a few sites. These are kid-oriented sites with privacy statements, so the sites felt trustworthy.
Fast forward to two weeks later, and one of those #@!&^ing sites has sold her email address to every spammer in the nation. My little kid got 196 spams yesterday -- for Viagra, lesbian cheerleader porn, you name it. So I have become heavily interested in every anti-spam product known to man. I've got 'em on the server, and got 'em on the client. Right now, with redundancy, this is 99% accurate, and my daughter gets only messages from friends and family. My biggest problem is not that spam gets through, but that false-positives block a legit message every now & then. That is the area I hope improves the most.
The heads of six major health care organizations testified before Congress that there are hundreds of studies that prove the link.
True. Anyone who has read "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" knows all about suggestability and the Werther's effect. The basic concept -- which works for TV, games, books, anything -- is that the more closely someone can relate to what they see, the more likely they are to mimick that behavior. So a little yellow pac man eating ghosts isn't going to influence anyone to eat ghosts, but a bunch of bunch of Burger King ads featuring black males in their 20s and 30s suddenly makes their sales demographic skew toward black males in their 20s and 30s.
This is why when my daughter sees grandparents in a commercial advertising a drug, she doesn't care. But when she sees an ad featuring 3 9-year-old girls fawning over their cool Bratz journal, she suddenly wants one. Her Amazon wish list is almost a perfect mirror of every ad that has appeared on Nickelodeon in the past 6 months. That's not by mistake. When someone targets your demographic, you can be influenced.
Of course, some people are immune to this stuff. Any free-thinking person who is remotely self-aware can sense when their buttons are getting pressed. But it gets harder to sense manipulation when it's not deliberate. I think games are art. As such, they often do nothing more than hold a mirror up to society, possibly to provide a jarring wake-up call. Or possibly just to be jarring.:) But in any case, as they become hyper-realistic, we get pulled in and influenced. For example, I love Vampire: Bloodlines. My wife and kids have called me a vampire for years -- I love the movies, I love being awake at night and sleeping at day, I think the culture is sexy. When I'm in playing that game, nothing breaks the illusion that I'm in that game world. It feels comfortable. The problem? It completely objectifies women, something I do not get in my real-world life. But there, in the game, it's quite nice. How much carries over into my real-life thinking? Enough that I have to check myself. I don't think the game developers intended for that to happen, it just did.
You can take a jab at me and say that I must have a weak mind if I let that affect me. But I don't mind, it IS in fact a defect that I can be so suggestable. And that's the point. These studies are not about strong-willed Slashdotters who have their shit together. These studies are of the huge number of weak-minded people who have no idea that they are internalizing what they see. Those people are a problem, and there are a lot of them.
My wife is a shrink. About half of her clients' problems are simply that they have surrounded themselves with negative influences for so long that they're stewing in it, and can't see what it's doing. For the other half of her clients, she uses these techniques on THEM. In other words, if a 30-something mom is scared of wide open spaces, my wife will show the her videos of 30-something women enjoying the outdoors. For many people, this stuff seeps into the psyche and changes thinking.
In the end, the point I would make is twofold. First, it is nice to see some Slashdotters understanding this finally. Three years ago when this stuff would come up here, it was always 100% rejected as baloney. Second, while our environment influences us, and what we fill our minds with influences us, it is only the extremely violence-prone who are so susceptible to this that they cross a line. So I do not want to be penalized for their mistakes. I don't know how you work that out, but there must be a way. For example, instead of banning something, make it available only to adults.
I would say the gentleman behind HT Track is an unsung hero. I sent him a bug report with pseudo-code as a guess to how to fix it. The very next day, he had sent me a thank-you email and had released a new version. I also found the Mozilla team to be very responsive to my suggestions here on Slashdot (one post turned into a new Mozilla feature -- pre-fetching). And the HTML-Kit team is very responsive to bug reports and patches too. I like all three teams at the geek level. Their products satisfy an important niche in Web development, they're responsive and accept code patches (even my poorly done offerings, with cleanup of course). I feel quite happy to call them unsung heroes of the OSS movement, and this is my second shot at singing their praises (see previous "unsung heroes of open source" article).
You are right, that probably isn't the actual, exact file that appeared. However, look at the skin of the women: grainy, dithered. Look at the colors of their dresses: large swaths of flat color. In other words, it appears that it was a 256 color GIF at some point, and then was converted to JPEG. Now, it still could be fake on a grander scale, such as perhaps the first photo on the Web was not in fact a photo of the LHC girls. I don't know. But at the very least, this JPEG appears to be crappy enough that it's plausibe it used to be an old-skool GIF. Old browsers could display GIFs.
I definately find myself wishing she were still a womanizer.
It is amazing to me how many people on BSG have lesbians in their professional background. Boomer (Grace Park) played a lesbian on some old TV show -- which wasn't so hot, but then she also played a lesbian strip-club dancer in some Jet Li flick. She was only in the first 5 minutes, I think. But she danced seductively with another woman, tounge-kissed her, even pulled the woman's dress off a little bit. Naughty. Then there is the EXO (EXO? is that right?), who plays the father of a lesbian on The L Word. Then there is Helo, who plays a bartender (I think) on The L Word. I can't remember the fourth person, but someone else on the SciFi forums mentioned more lesbian goodness.
Go figure. Lesbians are where the money is at, I guess.
I think it's ironic that one of the most celebrated sci-fi shows right now is written by a Star Trek writer who gave up on that franchise. Battlestar Galactica is written by Ron Moore (among others), and his background is Trek (DS9, I think). He was clearly disillusioned -- in a video interview on the BSG site, he talks about working on Trek and how he couldn't see any reason to do any more sci-fi, unless he could actually do something new with it. That sounds like a nice high-minded goal -- until you realize the implication is that Trek was driving him nuts with stale storylines.
It's no wonder that BSG has all the elements I loved of the original Star Trek: lots of sex; great space battles; tension and trouble for the crew; sometimes crap technology that makes things difficult or worse for the crew; and real drama. There is so much sex in BSG, I almost half-expect to see a green bellydancer. And it wouldn't surprise me at all to see Starbuck get her in bed. What I like about BSG, and this was also true of Farscape, is that it feels like a space world I can relate to. People act imperfectly. They disagree. Bad things happen. Getting past a bad thing can take more than one episode, and even if it's overcome, people will refer to it and learn from it, in future episodes.
I think the fans should take note: when the writers of Trek leave and start kicking Trek's ass with infinitely better shows, it's time to move on.
You know, some of your points are interesting, but some of your points make me wonder if we're watching the same show. I'll explain as I go.
a) They know they have potential infiltrators but they haven't secured their amories.
You might have a point, maybe not. I haven't heard enough about what happened with the armories after the 3 incidents (water tanks, boomer's ship, suicide bomber). To me, it seems that this may have been fixed and just hasn't been highlighted. If so, I'm fine with that. Also, as we know, Adama is "a soft touch" -- if he's allowing people to slack even after incidents, then he is shaping up to be a poor leader, but that makes the series more believable, not less. Of course, if they just leave things lax without consequence, then I'll agree with your assessment.
b) A doctor of CIS and an education minister don't know that you can burn Hydrogen to get water.
Wow. You may have huge point here. Is there an overabundance of Hydrogen that they could have (should have) used?
I'll skip c & d, as I don't recall mention of what slave circuits are.
e) Cylons capable of infiltration would even bother with conventional weapons.
Now this I find incredibly believable. If it were me, and I was plotting revenge for 40 years, I'd use everything. If I wanted to wipe out every single enemy that existed, I'd plan for huge strikes, to be sure. But I'd also have mop-up crews of every kind. Superior weapons when possible, conventional whenever necessary.
f) They had such pisspoor maintenace practices that a buckle failed due to metal fatigue.
This actually made things more believable to me, but I'll give you a concession in a minute. The reason it made things more believable to me is that this ship was old. From what I could tell, they were turning it into a museum, which would imply antiquity. So to see physical buckles break, just reinforced what I had already observed. These people are in trouble -- the same thing that brought them luck (an old ship free of convenient modernizations, such as the latest greatest viruses) is now what also works against them.
But here's your concession: I hated that entire scene because it seemed unbelievable as a whole -- that crew would continue moving racks while a celebration was happening; that a simple fall would set off a propulsion system; that it would fly right into the hero's face; that after 1 show spanning 2 days, the replacements were flying missions like everyone else (hotdog seems to be the quickest study ever). Here's the thing: they had to do it to set up the whole issue with Adama's son. It was a plot device to set up a chain of events. And as such, it felt forced. So while I liked the buckle, the scene overall rates a "blah" at best.
g) They have any pilots left at all given the attrition rate implied by f.
Well since all the followup scenes were about dealing with finding & training new pilots, I'd say the show addressed that to my satisfaction. I don't mind big damage if the writers/directors are willing to show the struggle to fix things.
They chose to use a level of detail that they clearly aren't up to.
I don't think your facts are compelling enough to drive to that conclusion. At least, not all of them, not for me.
Obviously the restaurant willon forewhen constructed already.
I am not a fool. I majored in English, and while I did not graduate, I have read Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. While many pages were oddly blank, I know enough to see that you, sir, are using a Present Past Subjunctive tense -- in other words, you are from the future! Admit it! Your slip of grammar gives you away!
The real test is going to be a year from now, when it's had more than enough time to spider a good portion of the web.
My God. If it takes MSN a YEAR to index the Web, when Google re-indexes the entire thing every 2-4 weeks, then MSN search is in serious, serious trouble. It will never be able to compete at that rate. MSN search should be fully indexed within weeks of its launch, preferably days if it's any good.
What I will grant you is that over the course of a year, the search algorithms should be refined, resulting in more accurate results. But volume? With concurrent threads and multiple boxes -- which Microsoft, of all companies, should have -- it ought to be sucking down a massive quantity of Web sites right away.
One analyst opines that Mircosoft is appearing to soften its image to become kinder and gentler. 'They don't want people to hate them anymore. They've learned from their mistakes.'
Hmm. They're off to a great start, aren't they?
Re:The music industry must die and be reborn
on
Sony Admits MP3 Error
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
If you think I'm wrong, consider this: poetry. Pretty much nobody makes any money out of poetry. But it still gets written.
Uh, yeah. You know, I went to college to get a degree in poetry, and tried like hell to make a living doing what I loved. I published a magazine, I hosted poetry readings, I did interviews, I got my own work published as much as I could. And you know what? I made so little money that I had to get a career in Web publishing, and now I spend my days doing PHP, SQL, and Perl. Do I like programming? Yes. Do I wish I could spend my days doing poetry? Yes. Do I write as much (or even as well) as I used to? No. And I regret that.
So you can hold up the poetry "industry" as a model you wish you could imitate, but I see that as a way to kill off the hopes and dreams (and output) of a huge number of people. The industry will be limited to the rich (who can afford to hone their craft without pay) and hobbyists (who can never rise to the levels that a dedicated career would foster). Thanks, but no thanks.
...but I didn't find it after reading the 40 highest-rated comments here. And I really was unimpressed with the 3 initial photos they showed (and as of this writing, it's still ALL they are showing). So, after hunting around, I found all the raw images online. The first 6 or 7 pages didn't do much for me, but around page 22, I started to see the landmass (the 2 rightmost images). And around page 27 (again, the rightmost photos) I start to see the horizon shots, with the curve of the moon visible (or possibly it's just the camera lens causing the effect I see), and the landmass stretched out in front of me.
Finally. Some real photos, with land that I can decipher. Cool!
And, uh, too bad there were no critters running around.
This is not to say that these people don't know a great deal, but there is not one person on the planet that can be called an expert.
That's the most ill-reasoned comment I've seen on Slashdot in a long, long time. I don't buy for a second your supporting argument that "there can be no experts because information is not immutable." You have somehow confused "expert" with "God" and the Slashdot moderators gave you a free pass.
I think your post is an excellent summary of Wikipedia's problems, and solutions that it needs to pursue. My major problem is that your post resembles a post I made in January 2003. I don't mean it's a "plagarism" problem on your part -- you clearly wrote your own good comment. Instead, I mean you are stating what was stated TWO YEARS AGO, and none of your steps -- none of my steps -- have been taken. In fact, when I proposed my steps, I got poo-poo'd for it, and dropped out. I haven't contributed or visited since. It's nice to see that one of the co-founders finally cares about the problems, but it's a shame that something so open to community edits is so closed to community improvements.
My fear is that in January 2007, someone will post something similar to what you just wrote, and you will say "hey I wrote almost the same thing TWO YEARS AGO." Wikipedia, for all its hundreds of daily edits, is at a standstill.
They should really look to the model that Scott Kurtz of PVP [pvponline.com] and Epitonic [epitonic.com] - give the content away as a means of promotion, then make your money selling related items such as t-shirts, books, concerts, etc. Sure, books and videos can also be pirated, but until they're as easily accessible as music is via an iPod or something similar, there's still money to be made.
Hmm. That sounds like an argument for intellectual property rights. I say that because what you wrote sounds like a slippery slope, people constantly trying to make money off the next hard-to-reproduce thing, until the day when everything is easy to copy and nobody can profit from any creation.
I'm not an RIAA shill -- I even built a site to combat them -- but I do believe that copyrights, trademarks, and even patents have some legitmate use. If someone wants to copyright an easy-to-reproduce comic strip, or an easy-to-copy song, we should respect that. Telling the artists to move on to selling t-shirts is a lame alternative to simply insisting that copyrights expire quickly. How we in the USA will stop the corps from extending copyright forever, I cannot guess. But that's a better, more ethical solution.
If properly configured, it will return a 304 if you have the most recent version -- however, as many feeds are generated in PHP[1], this header is defaulted off, and you'll end up with your standard 200, or go ahead, code. This single handedly wastes a metric tonne of bandwidth needlessly.
Yes, this is a problem for lots of generated feeds, PHP or otherwise. In fact, in my phpBB Blog tool, this is one of its weaknesses. However, the solution is surprisingly easy: generate the RSS file as an actual.rss file that sits in the filesystem. If you output to the filesystem instead of to the browser, then Apache (or whatever Web server you use) takes over. Apache will serve the file in optimal fashion. This will be a change I make for the next revision of my code, and hopefully many others do the same.
A friend came over to show me Burnout 3, but we couldn't get my PS2 online. I realized that I had left it on overnight, and left it on the hardware screen that allows you to pick the memory cards. I assumed that my 3 year-old son had probably button-mashed the thing. When I checked, everything on the card -- 3 years of saved games -- was gone. I was sooo pissed at my kid. I didn't punish him, as he's not old enough to really know what losing 3 years of play-time means. But he probably wondered why I was sooo curt and grumpy all day. And then the next day I got the card in my mail, realized that I had played that demo disk the night before, and felt like a jerk for blaming my boy.
Awww shit. I just realized, I lost the saved games for Baldur's Gate. I was stuck on that stupid stone-jumping area for WEEKS. I suck at platformers. I will never be able to get past that again. Damn!
My 6 year-old daughter and I had been playing Gauntlet together since she was 4. We were on the 2nd-to-last world. Damn damn!
You know what? I don't care what demos are on that disk. I'm going to go crack it in half. #(&$@#%!!!!
Speaking of which, what kinds of experiences do people on slashdot have with domain registrars?
Reading though this thread, I already am impressed with Joker, as they auto-locked everyone's domains, it appears. Very nice of them. I've used Verisign/Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Dotster, and one other I forget.
Network Solutions is terrible. I admit, they do have customer support, and when I call, I rarely wait more than a minute to talk to someone. That's good. But they drag their feet on anything that will cost them money or lose them money (such as trying to transfer AWAY from them). Because of their long, long agreement (that took days for me to read through properly) and because they took soooo long to automate even the simplest of changes, I just transferred my last domain away from them 2 nights ago. What a mess -- the site was down, so I called and they couldn't do a thing, so I waited for it to come back up and then unlocked the domain myself, but even though it showed unlocked, they kept rejecting my attempts to move the domain! Eventually after more calls and waiting, it finally went through. Ugh.
Dotster was fine, but I moved away from them about 2 years ago. I don't remember the major reason, but it may have been that GoDaddy was just cheaper then.
GoDaddy is similar to Dotster, but with TONS of ads. I mean, so many that it will drive you insane. However, I found the trick: I've listed all my sites privately, so my email and address never appears in a listing. Also, I have no problem saying "no thanks" to all the ads that appear when I order something. And finally, I found all the knobs and switches that disable all the marketing emails, spammy offers, and other lameness that they try to email you. After doing all this, I'm fairly happy. I never get email unless it's something official, I have low rates, and everything seems to be automated. But this solution is not for people with a low tolerance for configuring and tweaking the ads off.
For the company that I cannot remember, all I can say is: stay away from small registrars, especially ones that come with a Web hosting package. I bought a hosting package, needed a domain name, and used their little built-in registrar. What a mess. No features, and the registrar was tightly coupled with the hosting, so moving away was miserable. Stick to the known names you'll see mentioned a lot here.
The US Constitution gives us freedom from "unreasonable searches" -- which typically boils down to probable cause. In other words, if someone stops you at the door because they watched you steal some stuff and they are fairly certain they will catch you with the items down your pants, then they are legally OK. But if they stop everyone just simply because they can, there is no probable cause. So if you are in the USA, you can walk right by them, and sue the hell out of them if they stop you.
This doesn't work for member-only stores, though. For example, Costco members have to sign an agreement that includes agreeing to be stopped at the door. So typically at Costco I stand there and take it, but at Fry's I just walk right by.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, India has stolen a lot of US jobs. It seems that most of the call centers employ people who can't speak (or understand) English very well at all -- and yet they're perfectly willing to take a contact doing phone support for Americans! But despite that, I find I have two feelings about India:
I hope this kind of terrorism is caught each and every time, in every country.
Yeah, but... but... I want them to flame out in a huge court loss. I want SCO's finances and future prospects to be devastated. I want a clear and definitive signal that Linux is safe and SCO was stupid to butt heads with Open Source.
This whole "fading" thing sounds like it just leaves too many doors open for other stupid companies to do bad things, because there is no jarring precedent burned into people's minds.
Translation: "We pretty much fired everyone except for the accountant. After all, who needs developers on staff when the OSS guys work for free? Right?"
...God bless Daniel Quinlan and people like him. I have had a hell of a time with my daughter's email. A LOT of Web sites for kids have a "mail a friend" option. At one point my daughter wanted to use that option on a few sites. These are kid-oriented sites with privacy statements, so the sites felt trustworthy.
Fast forward to two weeks later, and one of those #@!&^ing sites has sold her email address to every spammer in the nation. My little kid got 196 spams yesterday -- for Viagra, lesbian cheerleader porn, you name it. So I have become heavily interested in every anti-spam product known to man. I've got 'em on the server, and got 'em on the client. Right now, with redundancy, this is 99% accurate, and my daughter gets only messages from friends and family. My biggest problem is not that spam gets through, but that false-positives block a legit message every now & then. That is the area I hope improves the most.
True. Anyone who has read "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" knows all about suggestability and the Werther's effect. The basic concept -- which works for TV, games, books, anything -- is that the more closely someone can relate to what they see, the more likely they are to mimick that behavior. So a little yellow pac man eating ghosts isn't going to influence anyone to eat ghosts, but a bunch of bunch of Burger King ads featuring black males in their 20s and 30s suddenly makes their sales demographic skew toward black males in their 20s and 30s.
This is why when my daughter sees grandparents in a commercial advertising a drug, she doesn't care. But when she sees an ad featuring 3 9-year-old girls fawning over their cool Bratz journal, she suddenly wants one. Her Amazon wish list is almost a perfect mirror of every ad that has appeared on Nickelodeon in the past 6 months. That's not by mistake. When someone targets your demographic, you can be influenced.
Of course, some people are immune to this stuff. Any free-thinking person who is remotely self-aware can sense when their buttons are getting pressed. But it gets harder to sense manipulation when it's not deliberate. I think games are art. As such, they often do nothing more than hold a mirror up to society, possibly to provide a jarring wake-up call. Or possibly just to be jarring. :) But in any case, as they become hyper-realistic, we get pulled in and influenced. For example, I love Vampire: Bloodlines. My wife and kids have called me a vampire for years -- I love the movies, I love being awake at night and sleeping at day, I think the culture is sexy. When I'm in playing that game, nothing breaks the illusion that I'm in that game world. It feels comfortable. The problem? It completely objectifies women, something I do not get in my real-world life. But there, in the game, it's quite nice. How much carries over into my real-life thinking? Enough that I have to check myself. I don't think the game developers intended for that to happen, it just did.
You can take a jab at me and say that I must have a weak mind if I let that affect me. But I don't mind, it IS in fact a defect that I can be so suggestable. And that's the point. These studies are not about strong-willed Slashdotters who have their shit together. These studies are of the huge number of weak-minded people who have no idea that they are internalizing what they see. Those people are a problem, and there are a lot of them.
My wife is a shrink. About half of her clients' problems are simply that they have surrounded themselves with negative influences for so long that they're stewing in it, and can't see what it's doing. For the other half of her clients, she uses these techniques on THEM. In other words, if a 30-something mom is scared of wide open spaces, my wife will show the her videos of 30-something women enjoying the outdoors. For many people, this stuff seeps into the psyche and changes thinking.
In the end, the point I would make is twofold. First, it is nice to see some Slashdotters understanding this finally. Three years ago when this stuff would come up here, it was always 100% rejected as baloney. Second, while our environment influences us, and what we fill our minds with influences us, it is only the extremely violence-prone who are so susceptible to this that they cross a line. So I do not want to be penalized for their mistakes. I don't know how you work that out, but there must be a way. For example, instead of banning something, make it available only to adults.
I would say the gentleman behind HT Track is an unsung hero. I sent him a bug report with pseudo-code as a guess to how to fix it. The very next day, he had sent me a thank-you email and had released a new version. I also found the Mozilla team to be very responsive to my suggestions here on Slashdot (one post turned into a new Mozilla feature -- pre-fetching). And the HTML-Kit team is very responsive to bug reports and patches too. I like all three teams at the geek level. Their products satisfy an important niche in Web development, they're responsive and accept code patches (even my poorly done offerings, with cleanup of course). I feel quite happy to call them unsung heroes of the OSS movement, and this is my second shot at singing their praises (see previous "unsung heroes of open source" article).
You are right, that probably isn't the actual, exact file that appeared. However, look at the skin of the women: grainy, dithered. Look at the colors of their dresses: large swaths of flat color. In other words, it appears that it was a 256 color GIF at some point, and then was converted to JPEG. Now, it still could be fake on a grander scale, such as perhaps the first photo on the Web was not in fact a photo of the LHC girls. I don't know. But at the very least, this JPEG appears to be crappy enough that it's plausibe it used to be an old-skool GIF. Old browsers could display GIFs.
It is amazing to me how many people on BSG have lesbians in their professional background. Boomer (Grace Park) played a lesbian on some old TV show -- which wasn't so hot, but then she also played a lesbian strip-club dancer in some Jet Li flick. She was only in the first 5 minutes, I think. But she danced seductively with another woman, tounge-kissed her, even pulled the woman's dress off a little bit. Naughty. Then there is the EXO (EXO? is that right?), who plays the father of a lesbian on The L Word. Then there is Helo, who plays a bartender (I think) on The L Word. I can't remember the fourth person, but someone else on the SciFi forums mentioned more lesbian goodness.
Go figure. Lesbians are where the money is at, I guess.
I think it's ironic that one of the most celebrated sci-fi shows right now is written by a Star Trek writer who gave up on that franchise. Battlestar Galactica is written by Ron Moore (among others), and his background is Trek (DS9, I think). He was clearly disillusioned -- in a video interview on the BSG site, he talks about working on Trek and how he couldn't see any reason to do any more sci-fi, unless he could actually do something new with it. That sounds like a nice high-minded goal -- until you realize the implication is that Trek was driving him nuts with stale storylines.
It's no wonder that BSG has all the elements I loved of the original Star Trek: lots of sex; great space battles; tension and trouble for the crew; sometimes crap technology that makes things difficult or worse for the crew; and real drama. There is so much sex in BSG, I almost half-expect to see a green bellydancer. And it wouldn't surprise me at all to see Starbuck get her in bed. What I like about BSG, and this was also true of Farscape, is that it feels like a space world I can relate to. People act imperfectly. They disagree. Bad things happen. Getting past a bad thing can take more than one episode, and even if it's overcome, people will refer to it and learn from it, in future episodes.
I think the fans should take note: when the writers of Trek leave and start kicking Trek's ass with infinitely better shows, it's time to move on.
You know, some of your points are interesting, but some of your points make me wonder if we're watching the same show. I'll explain as I go.
You might have a point, maybe not. I haven't heard enough about what happened with the armories after the 3 incidents (water tanks, boomer's ship, suicide bomber). To me, it seems that this may have been fixed and just hasn't been highlighted. If so, I'm fine with that. Also, as we know, Adama is "a soft touch" -- if he's allowing people to slack even after incidents, then he is shaping up to be a poor leader, but that makes the series more believable, not less. Of course, if they just leave things lax without consequence, then I'll agree with your assessment.
Wow. You may have huge point here. Is there an overabundance of Hydrogen that they could have (should have) used?
I'll skip c & d, as I don't recall mention of what slave circuits are.
Now this I find incredibly believable. If it were me, and I was plotting revenge for 40 years, I'd use everything. If I wanted to wipe out every single enemy that existed, I'd plan for huge strikes, to be sure. But I'd also have mop-up crews of every kind. Superior weapons when possible, conventional whenever necessary.
This actually made things more believable to me, but I'll give you a concession in a minute. The reason it made things more believable to me is that this ship was old. From what I could tell, they were turning it into a museum, which would imply antiquity. So to see physical buckles break, just reinforced what I had already observed. These people are in trouble -- the same thing that brought them luck (an old ship free of convenient modernizations, such as the latest greatest viruses) is now what also works against them.
But here's your concession: I hated that entire scene because it seemed unbelievable as a whole -- that crew would continue moving racks while a celebration was happening; that a simple fall would set off a propulsion system; that it would fly right into the hero's face; that after 1 show spanning 2 days, the replacements were flying missions like everyone else (hotdog seems to be the quickest study ever). Here's the thing: they had to do it to set up the whole issue with Adama's son. It was a plot device to set up a chain of events. And as such, it felt forced. So while I liked the buckle, the scene overall rates a "blah" at best.
Well since all the followup scenes were about dealing with finding & training new pilots, I'd say the show addressed that to my satisfaction. I don't mind big damage if the writers/directors are willing to show the struggle to fix things.
I don't think your facts are compelling enough to drive to that conclusion. At least, not all of them, not for me.
I am not a fool. I majored in English, and while I did not graduate, I have read Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. While many pages were oddly blank, I know enough to see that you, sir, are using a Present Past Subjunctive tense -- in other words, you are from the future! Admit it! Your slip of grammar gives you away!
My God. If it takes MSN a YEAR to index the Web, when Google re-indexes the entire thing every 2-4 weeks, then MSN search is in serious, serious trouble. It will never be able to compete at that rate. MSN search should be fully indexed within weeks of its launch, preferably days if it's any good.
What I will grant you is that over the course of a year, the search algorithms should be refined, resulting in more accurate results. But volume? With concurrent threads and multiple boxes -- which Microsoft, of all companies, should have -- it ought to be sucking down a massive quantity of Web sites right away.
Hmm. They're off to a great start, aren't they?
Uh, yeah. You know, I went to college to get a degree in poetry, and tried like hell to make a living doing what I loved. I published a magazine, I hosted poetry readings, I did interviews, I got my own work published as much as I could. And you know what? I made so little money that I had to get a career in Web publishing, and now I spend my days doing PHP, SQL, and Perl. Do I like programming? Yes. Do I wish I could spend my days doing poetry? Yes. Do I write as much (or even as well) as I used to? No. And I regret that.
So you can hold up the poetry "industry" as a model you wish you could imitate, but I see that as a way to kill off the hopes and dreams (and output) of a huge number of people. The industry will be limited to the rich (who can afford to hone their craft without pay) and hobbyists (who can never rise to the levels that a dedicated career would foster). Thanks, but no thanks.
...but I didn't find it after reading the 40 highest-rated comments here. And I really was unimpressed with the 3 initial photos they showed (and as of this writing, it's still ALL they are showing). So, after hunting around, I found all the raw images online. The first 6 or 7 pages didn't do much for me, but around page 22, I started to see the landmass (the 2 rightmost images). And around page 27 (again, the rightmost photos) I start to see the horizon shots, with the curve of the moon visible (or possibly it's just the camera lens causing the effect I see), and the landmass stretched out in front of me.
Finally. Some real photos, with land that I can decipher. Cool!
And, uh, too bad there were no critters running around.
That's the most ill-reasoned comment I've seen on Slashdot in a long, long time. I don't buy for a second your supporting argument that "there can be no experts because information is not immutable." You have somehow confused "expert" with "God" and the Slashdot moderators gave you a free pass.
I think your post is an excellent summary of Wikipedia's problems, and solutions that it needs to pursue. My major problem is that your post resembles a post I made in January 2003. I don't mean it's a "plagarism" problem on your part -- you clearly wrote your own good comment. Instead, I mean you are stating what was stated TWO YEARS AGO, and none of your steps -- none of my steps -- have been taken. In fact, when I proposed my steps, I got poo-poo'd for it, and dropped out. I haven't contributed or visited since. It's nice to see that one of the co-founders finally cares about the problems, but it's a shame that something so open to community edits is so closed to community improvements.
My fear is that in January 2007, someone will post something similar to what you just wrote, and you will say "hey I wrote almost the same thing TWO YEARS AGO." Wikipedia, for all its hundreds of daily edits, is at a standstill.
Hmm. That sounds like an argument for intellectual property rights. I say that because what you wrote sounds like a slippery slope, people constantly trying to make money off the next hard-to-reproduce thing, until the day when everything is easy to copy and nobody can profit from any creation.
I'm not an RIAA shill -- I even built a site to combat them -- but I do believe that copyrights, trademarks, and even patents have some legitmate use. If someone wants to copyright an easy-to-reproduce comic strip, or an easy-to-copy song, we should respect that. Telling the artists to move on to selling t-shirts is a lame alternative to simply insisting that copyrights expire quickly. How we in the USA will stop the corps from extending copyright forever, I cannot guess. But that's a better, more ethical solution.
I know! It's so easy and obvious! My 3 year-old son talks to his grandmother about the relationship between power and distance all the time.
Yes, this is a problem for lots of generated feeds, PHP or otherwise. In fact, in my phpBB Blog tool, this is one of its weaknesses. However, the solution is surprisingly easy: generate the RSS file as an actual .rss file that sits in the filesystem. If you output to the filesystem instead of to the browser, then Apache (or whatever Web server you use) takes over. Apache will serve the file in optimal fashion. This will be a change I make for the next revision of my code, and hopefully many others do the same.
A friend came over to show me Burnout 3, but we couldn't get my PS2 online. I realized that I had left it on overnight, and left it on the hardware screen that allows you to pick the memory cards. I assumed that my 3 year-old son had probably button-mashed the thing. When I checked, everything on the card -- 3 years of saved games -- was gone. I was sooo pissed at my kid. I didn't punish him, as he's not old enough to really know what losing 3 years of play-time means. But he probably wondered why I was sooo curt and grumpy all day. And then the next day I got the card in my mail, realized that I had played that demo disk the night before, and felt like a jerk for blaming my boy.
Awww shit. I just realized, I lost the saved games for Baldur's Gate. I was stuck on that stupid stone-jumping area for WEEKS. I suck at platformers. I will never be able to get past that again. Damn!
My 6 year-old daughter and I had been playing Gauntlet together since she was 4. We were on the 2nd-to-last world. Damn damn!
You know what? I don't care what demos are on that disk. I'm going to go crack it in half. #(&$@#%!!!!
Here is what I'm installing.
<ross>
Piv-ot. Piv-OT! PIVOT!!!
</ross>
I'd really prefer they call this "sidesourcing" as it keeps with the theme and has a more general implication.
Reading though this thread, I already am impressed with Joker, as they auto-locked everyone's domains, it appears. Very nice of them. I've used Verisign/Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Dotster, and one other I forget.
Network Solutions is terrible. I admit, they do have customer support, and when I call, I rarely wait more than a minute to talk to someone. That's good. But they drag their feet on anything that will cost them money or lose them money (such as trying to transfer AWAY from them). Because of their long, long agreement (that took days for me to read through properly) and because they took soooo long to automate even the simplest of changes, I just transferred my last domain away from them 2 nights ago. What a mess -- the site was down, so I called and they couldn't do a thing, so I waited for it to come back up and then unlocked the domain myself, but even though it showed unlocked, they kept rejecting my attempts to move the domain! Eventually after more calls and waiting, it finally went through. Ugh.
Dotster was fine, but I moved away from them about 2 years ago. I don't remember the major reason, but it may have been that GoDaddy was just cheaper then.
GoDaddy is similar to Dotster, but with TONS of ads. I mean, so many that it will drive you insane. However, I found the trick: I've listed all my sites privately, so my email and address never appears in a listing. Also, I have no problem saying "no thanks" to all the ads that appear when I order something. And finally, I found all the knobs and switches that disable all the marketing emails, spammy offers, and other lameness that they try to email you. After doing all this, I'm fairly happy. I never get email unless it's something official, I have low rates, and everything seems to be automated. But this solution is not for people with a low tolerance for configuring and tweaking the ads off.
For the company that I cannot remember, all I can say is: stay away from small registrars, especially ones that come with a Web hosting package. I bought a hosting package, needed a domain name, and used their little built-in registrar. What a mess. No features, and the registrar was tightly coupled with the hosting, so moving away was miserable. Stick to the known names you'll see mentioned a lot here.
The US Constitution gives us freedom from "unreasonable searches" -- which typically boils down to probable cause. In other words, if someone stops you at the door because they watched you steal some stuff and they are fairly certain they will catch you with the items down your pants, then they are legally OK. But if they stop everyone just simply because they can, there is no probable cause. So if you are in the USA, you can walk right by them, and sue the hell out of them if they stop you.
This doesn't work for member-only stores, though. For example, Costco members have to sign an agreement that includes agreeing to be stopped at the door. So typically at Costco I stand there and take it, but at Fry's I just walk right by.