You're last bullet point was against "statements", if not for that I would recommend Ursula LeGuin, but she does get political at times.
The first time I read Ursula LeGuin, it was in a college philosophy class. "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" was in the Professor's textbook as part of the section on Ethics, specifically regarding Utilitarianism. I didn't know the term, but had you asked me before I took the class to define right and wrong, I would have given the Utilitarian definition. After reading that story (and one other), I decided I must not be a Utilitarian after all...
This can be worked around. You move to a new core, and you toss out all the backwards compatibility crap. THEN, you add a backwards compatibility layer or module for the code that still needs it. Surely it would be easier for X than it was for, say, Apple, when they made apps designed for System 6 on an m68k processor successfully run under System 7 on a PowerPC processor. Thus you can get your brand new spiffy clean core with all the latest features while retaining legacy support. You just need to lose the idea that legacy support needs to be maintained at the core...
Battery technology can be taken no further??????? Haven't they learned to never make predictions like that!
Current battery technology probably can't. Most specific technologies plateau within a decade or two of invention, only tiny refinements ("tweaking") occuring after that until a new technology comes along that replaces it. In a quarter century, it's not that we won't have something we call "batteries", but they'll only be the same thing from a "black box" point of view. Anyone who looks inside the box will see they only have a functional resemblance to what we call "batteries" today, they'll really be something entirely different...
this was told to me by a physical trainer, so i don't know how accurate it is
Neither does he...
We know you can survive on much less that this, and we know you can drink much more without ill effect. But we really have no idea what an optimal level would be.
In short, if you're one of the people who drinks much less than this, don't sweat it...
That was definately true in the System 6 and 7 says, but frankly with OS X I think it's truer (truer? or more true?) now than it ever was. Still really great for beginners, totally awesome for Unix wonks, and leaving intermediate users wanting more than they get as beginners but not savvy enough to deal with the dark underbelly of Unix...
I liked the original spider-sense better than the bullet-time spider sense. It used to be a subconcious thing, a feeling, an urge, a reflex. Now its just his conciousness speeding up, I find that less interresting and much more mundane.
Actually, that's not true. If you don't feeling like rewatching the original movie, just watch this trailer. The spider-sense is definately still there as a subconscious feeling/reflex. The fact that he also has the ability to think in "bullet-time" does not replace the vital, near-psychic spider-sense -- it's just something additional to it.
It's Monday, so I guess we like the MPAA today. We'll hate them tomorrow when there is some P2P story.
Indeed. People who aren't one dimensional tend to have both good and bad feelings on any topic of significance. And we often feel the deepest hatred for those who we love the most...
...and they would be correct. Tolkein wrote The Lord of the Rings as one big book -- the publisher insisted on breaking it into three volumes. So TTT and RotK are not technically sequels, they're the second and third volumes of a single work.
It should be noted that the first great work of western literature was the Iliad, by Homer. The second great work of western literature was the Odyssey, a sequel (and better than the original, IMNSHO). What did you expect?
He was the 20th Century's best science fiction author, and he's on the front page of Slashdot because Malda and crew are interested in him (it's amazing how many people still haven't figured out that Slashdot is, always has been, and probably always will be "News that interests Malda and friends").
Personal recommendation: Read "The Past Through Tomorrow" as an intro into the Heinlein universe, then go read "Time Enough for Love", probably the best science fiction book ever written (although a lot of people dispute that and say it was "Stranger in a Strange Land"...)
How about XModem? Or YModem? There protocols are both post Kermit and pre ZModem.
Incorrect. First of all, Xmodem predates Kermit. Xmodem may not be the original transfer protocol, but it was the starting point of a line of development, and not a refinement -- I don't believe Ward Christensen was trying to improve on any existing tool, he was trying to get a job done and did it from scratch. Ymodem was a fairly simple improvement on Xmodem (it's simply Xmodem with 1K blocks instead of 128-byte blocks -- an additional refinement allowed filenames to be transmitted as well, allowing batch transfers), and Zmodem was not really direct refinement of it, but was developed in response to the problems in Xmodem/Ymodem.
Kermit, like Zmodem, was not a refinement of Xmodem, but it was created to address problems that Xmodem couldn't handle (it won't work over 7-bit communications links, for example), so it wasn't a refinement on Xmodem, but it was an improvement.
Kermit was a 7 bit protocol (only capable of uppercase characters)
Oops, sorry, I was treating your previous comments too seriously. I didn't realize you were THAT ignorant.
(For our less technical readers, the entire ASCII char set, including all upper case, lower case, digits, symbols, and control characters, is only seven bits. You'd need to drop to six bits, and change the coding a bit, to be "only capable of uppercase characters".)
"Even though Microsoft's recently announce they would not be issuing any new patches for the month of December, the boys at Redmond were scrambling today to figure out why some systems are being patched. The reason? They haven't got a clue."
So, are you saying they haven't got a clue what the reason is, or that the reason is that they haven't got a clue?;)
Well, if 2.3 million people have only processed one or two packets, that's still (let's say) 3.5 million packets processed. No reason to exclude them when they thank the 4.7 million people who have processed more than zero packets...
Sorry for the double post, just thought of a better analogy: It's extremely easy to tell the difference between an unformatted disk and a disk that contains compressed and encrypted data. We're not likely to mistake the one for the other. Writing random bits to every byte of every sector on your disk will still leave in a state quite obviously and easily detectably different from an unformatted state.
An encrypted transmission is like a formatted disk containing encrypted data. Impossible to decipher, but patently obviously not natural.
compressed and encrypted data would just look like noise and probably wouldn't stand out.
This is false, and a confusion of data from transmission. Compressed data does in fact look fairly random (in fact, the less random it looks, the poorer your compression is). However, the only way to get the random data is to decipher the transmission, which is bloody obvious and would stand out like a sore thumb. Assuming what you're saying is true, we'll receive signals we have no hope of deciphering, but they will not look natural by any means. The data is random, but the transmission that carries that random data will look quite unlike white noise or anything of the sort.
Look at it this way: if an ancient civilization had stopped chiseling plain text on stone tablets and started chiseling compressed data streams, we would look at the compressed data and have no hope of ever understanding the message. But we wouldn't look at the symbols chiselled on the rock and say, "I don't understand this message, it must be natural phenomenon."
If you broadcast compressed and encrypted data by radio, or heck, if your broadcast a stream of random bits, it's still every bit as obvious as the chiseled stone tablets. Your "small 'hearable' window" is in fact huge. We would be able to hear the transmissions just fine. We just won't understand what they're saying.
But at that point, we just send them an unencrypted, easy to understand signal, and wait for a response. (We might even get one before they get ours, as they may be doing the same thing we are and have already detected our untranslatable babble and want clarification...)
Indeed -- the original poster you're replying to is incoherent. He's claiming the probability is incalculable, and therefore we should declare they don't exist. But in order to declare they don't exist with and reasonable sense of security, we'd need to have calculated the odds, and calculated that they are quite low. Lacking calculable odds, one cannot reasonably assume one way or the other -- the only reasonable thing to do in that case is suspend judgement. In your response, though, you bring up an interesting point:
But we already have the evidence for one (marginally) intelligent species in the universe. Ergo, they exist, and we know the prerequisites for intelligent life also exist.
That brings up an interesting question: do singletons exist in nature? It may be that every snowflake is unique, but there are many snowflakes. Same for anything else I can think of. Have we ever discovered anything that was really the only one of something?
This proves nothing, but it seems to me claiming anything is the only one of something is a rather extraordinary claim -- where's the extraordinary proof? Lacking that, it seems silly to assume our uniqueness. Indeed, even with incalculable odds, this observation would seem to mean that it's more reasonable to assume they do exist than that they don't. Every other time in nature, after we've first discovered something, some trait for example that we've never seen in any other species, when we then looked further we discovered there were others that had it. We lack any good reason, I think, to assume this case is different...
The search for alien civilization is akin to a search for Yeti, angels, or ley lines -- insofar that the belief in all these is a psychological panacea for weak-minded and/or desperate people grasping for something to believe in.
It would be as stupid to believe in the non-existence of alien civilizations as it would be to believe in their existence, given present evidence. I prefer the more intelligent response: lacking evidence one way or the other, suspend judgement. Do they exist? I don't know. Do they not exist? I don't know.
Now let's take the scientific leap: how do we find out? Hey, I have an idea, let's look!
That's SETI in a nutshell. Unlike you, a lot of people think the best way to answer these questions is to take a look at the world and see what the evidence is, rather than make baseless asumptions one way or the other...
Needless to say, I do not like David Weber, nor do I like the Honor Harrington books. I am deeply distrustful of anyone who does.
In other words, my opinion is right, and if you disagree with me, there must be something wrong with you.
The statement after "in other words" has nothing to do with the text quoted before it. How do you get that out of that?
When I don't like a particular author or series, and a friend who loves that author recommends a different author or book, not being an utter moron, I'm distrustful of that recommendation. I know his tastes are very different from mine, and therefore his insistence that this is a book I'll love is not to be trusted! This is a pretty simple conclusion. I don't think there's something wrong with him at all, he just has different tastes -- but I'd be an idiot to trust his opinion on whether I'll love the book or not, because, after all, he has very different tastes! I'm not calling him an idiot or saying something's wrong with him simply by pointing out I'm quite distrustful of Dave's opinions on these things...
In other words, the reviewer did not call you an idiot -- he stated some pretty simple common sense wisdom about reviews from people who obviously have different tastes than you. OTOH, if you think he called you an idiot by saying this, you probably are...
So? So were graphical user interfaces. So was C++ (as opposed to C and Unix which were designed in the 60's). What determines whether something is a good or bad decision has everything to do with the features and pitfalls and nothing at all whatsoever to do with the date it was invented.
"Harlequin always wins, Harlequin can do anything and everything" And I've argued that this takes away from the game. It's not even a fair playing field.
This depends on your view of the game. If you view role-playing games as a type of wargaming, you're quite right. If you view role-playing games as a type of collective storytelling, you're dead wrong.
Personally, I think the best RPG I've ever played was the Amber Diceless Role-Playing Game, particularly when you followed the designer's advice and threw away the rules. Dice are an abomination -- what decides if an action does or doesn't succeed? The dramatic possibilities, of course -- and a good storyteller who can adjust when the players (as they inevitably do) present the obstacles, that is, opportunities, to take the plot in new directions.
Fair playing field? Bah -- I prefer a bit more realism in my RPGs -- I like a bit of fantasy, but you can go too far, and stretch credulity too thin. A reasonably mature role player can't swallow the existence of anything so wildly unlikely as a fair playing field...:)
It's the same guy, and this particular character of his is, IIRC, "Irene the Infirm". She has no equipment at all, and simply "banks" all the skill and attribute points she gets (she's a sorceress, incidently). She gets a rogue merc after quest 2 and likewise does not equip her with anything at all. AFAIK, he hasn't tried taking her beyond Act I yet -- he never expected, starting out, he'd make it to, much less beat, Andariel. It'll be interesting to see if he continues her quest...
Slashdot Mirror
Not only is it realistic, it happens to be a true story -- it actually happened to Douglas Adams, who then just had to stick it into his next book.
You're last bullet point was against "statements", if not for that I would recommend Ursula LeGuin, but she does get political at times. The first time I read Ursula LeGuin, it was in a college philosophy class. "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" was in the Professor's textbook as part of the section on Ethics, specifically regarding Utilitarianism. I didn't know the term, but had you asked me before I took the class to define right and wrong, I would have given the Utilitarian definition. After reading that story (and one other), I decided I must not be a Utilitarian after all...
This can be worked around. You move to a new core, and you toss out all the backwards compatibility crap. THEN, you add a backwards compatibility layer or module for the code that still needs it. Surely it would be easier for X than it was for, say, Apple, when they made apps designed for System 6 on an m68k processor successfully run under System 7 on a PowerPC processor. Thus you can get your brand new spiffy clean core with all the latest features while retaining legacy support. You just need to lose the idea that legacy support needs to be maintained at the core...
Current battery technology probably can't. Most specific technologies plateau within a decade or two of invention, only tiny refinements ("tweaking") occuring after that until a new technology comes along that replaces it. In a quarter century, it's not that we won't have something we call "batteries", but they'll only be the same thing from a "black box" point of view. Anyone who looks inside the box will see they only have a functional resemblance to what we call "batteries" today, they'll really be something entirely different...
Neither does he...
We know you can survive on much less that this, and we know you can drink much more without ill effect. But we really have no idea what an optimal level would be.
In short, if you're one of the people who drinks much less than this, don't sweat it...
That was definately true in the System 6 and 7 says, but frankly with OS X I think it's truer (truer? or more true?) now than it ever was. Still really great for beginners, totally awesome for Unix wonks, and leaving intermediate users wanting more than they get as beginners but not savvy enough to deal with the dark underbelly of Unix...
Actually, that's not true. If you don't feeling like rewatching the original movie, just watch this trailer. The spider-sense is definately still there as a subconscious feeling/reflex. The fact that he also has the ability to think in "bullet-time" does not replace the vital, near-psychic spider-sense -- it's just something additional to it.
An excellent question. One must assume, given the evidence, that the average media exec is mononeurocellular...
Hehe exactly -- you've all seen Mystery Men, right? Never underestimate the power of glasses...
Indeed. People who aren't one dimensional tend to have both good and bad feelings on any topic of significance. And we often feel the deepest hatred for those who we love the most...
...and they would be correct. Tolkein wrote The Lord of the Rings as one big book -- the publisher insisted on breaking it into three volumes. So TTT and RotK are not technically sequels, they're the second and third volumes of a single work.
It should be noted that the first great work of western literature was the Iliad, by Homer. The second great work of western literature was the Odyssey, a sequel (and better than the original, IMNSHO). What did you expect?
Personal recommendation: Read "The Past Through Tomorrow" as an intro into the Heinlein universe, then go read "Time Enough for Love", probably the best science fiction book ever written (although a lot of people dispute that and say it was "Stranger in a Strange Land"...)
Incorrect. First of all, Xmodem predates Kermit. Xmodem may not be the original transfer protocol, but it was the starting point of a line of development, and not a refinement -- I don't believe Ward Christensen was trying to improve on any existing tool, he was trying to get a job done and did it from scratch. Ymodem was a fairly simple improvement on Xmodem (it's simply Xmodem with 1K blocks instead of 128-byte blocks -- an additional refinement allowed filenames to be transmitted as well, allowing batch transfers), and Zmodem was not really direct refinement of it, but was developed in response to the problems in Xmodem/Ymodem. Kermit, like Zmodem, was not a refinement of Xmodem, but it was created to address problems that Xmodem couldn't handle (it won't work over 7-bit communications links, for example), so it wasn't a refinement on Xmodem, but it was an improvement.
Kermit was a 7 bit protocol (only capable of uppercase characters)
Oops, sorry, I was treating your previous comments too seriously. I didn't realize you were THAT ignorant.
(For our less technical readers, the entire ASCII char set, including all upper case, lower case, digits, symbols, and control characters, is only seven bits. You'd need to drop to six bits, and change the coding a bit, to be "only capable of uppercase characters".)
So, are you saying they haven't got a clue what the reason is, or that the reason is that they haven't got a clue? ;)
Well, if 2.3 million people have only processed one or two packets, that's still (let's say) 3.5 million packets processed. No reason to exclude them when they thank the 4.7 million people who have processed more than zero packets...
An encrypted transmission is like a formatted disk containing encrypted data. Impossible to decipher, but patently obviously not natural.
This is false, and a confusion of data from transmission. Compressed data does in fact look fairly random (in fact, the less random it looks, the poorer your compression is). However, the only way to get the random data is to decipher the transmission, which is bloody obvious and would stand out like a sore thumb. Assuming what you're saying is true, we'll receive signals we have no hope of deciphering, but they will not look natural by any means. The data is random, but the transmission that carries that random data will look quite unlike white noise or anything of the sort.
Look at it this way: if an ancient civilization had stopped chiseling plain text on stone tablets and started chiseling compressed data streams, we would look at the compressed data and have no hope of ever understanding the message. But we wouldn't look at the symbols chiselled on the rock and say, "I don't understand this message, it must be natural phenomenon."
If you broadcast compressed and encrypted data by radio, or heck, if your broadcast a stream of random bits, it's still every bit as obvious as the chiseled stone tablets. Your "small 'hearable' window" is in fact huge. We would be able to hear the transmissions just fine. We just won't understand what they're saying.
But at that point, we just send them an unencrypted, easy to understand signal, and wait for a response. (We might even get one before they get ours, as they may be doing the same thing we are and have already detected our untranslatable babble and want clarification...)
But we already have the evidence for one (marginally) intelligent species in the universe. Ergo, they exist, and we know the prerequisites for intelligent life also exist.
That brings up an interesting question: do singletons exist in nature? It may be that every snowflake is unique, but there are many snowflakes. Same for anything else I can think of. Have we ever discovered anything that was really the only one of something?
This proves nothing, but it seems to me claiming anything is the only one of something is a rather extraordinary claim -- where's the extraordinary proof? Lacking that, it seems silly to assume our uniqueness. Indeed, even with incalculable odds, this observation would seem to mean that it's more reasonable to assume they do exist than that they don't. Every other time in nature, after we've first discovered something, some trait for example that we've never seen in any other species, when we then looked further we discovered there were others that had it. We lack any good reason, I think, to assume this case is different...
It would be as stupid to believe in the non-existence of alien civilizations as it would be to believe in their existence, given present evidence. I prefer the more intelligent response: lacking evidence one way or the other, suspend judgement. Do they exist? I don't know. Do they not exist? I don't know.
Now let's take the scientific leap: how do we find out? Hey, I have an idea, let's look!
That's SETI in a nutshell. Unlike you, a lot of people think the best way to answer these questions is to take a look at the world and see what the evidence is, rather than make baseless asumptions one way or the other...
In other words, my opinion is right, and if you disagree with me, there must be something wrong with you.
The statement after "in other words" has nothing to do with the text quoted before it. How do you get that out of that?
When I don't like a particular author or series, and a friend who loves that author recommends a different author or book, not being an utter moron, I'm distrustful of that recommendation. I know his tastes are very different from mine, and therefore his insistence that this is a book I'll love is not to be trusted! This is a pretty simple conclusion. I don't think there's something wrong with him at all, he just has different tastes -- but I'd be an idiot to trust his opinion on whether I'll love the book or not, because, after all, he has very different tastes! I'm not calling him an idiot or saying something's wrong with him simply by pointing out I'm quite distrustful of Dave's opinions on these things...
In other words, the reviewer did not call you an idiot -- he stated some pretty simple common sense wisdom about reviews from people who obviously have different tastes than you. OTOH, if you think he called you an idiot by saying this, you probably are...
So? So were graphical user interfaces. So was C++ (as opposed to C and Unix which were designed in the 60's). What determines whether something is a good or bad decision has everything to do with the features and pitfalls and nothing at all whatsoever to do with the date it was invented.
I see they have debs, is this on any archive we can stuff in our apt sources.list yet (official or otherwise)?
This depends on your view of the game. If you view role-playing games as a type of wargaming, you're quite right. If you view role-playing games as a type of collective storytelling, you're dead wrong.
Personally, I think the best RPG I've ever played was the Amber Diceless Role-Playing Game, particularly when you followed the designer's advice and threw away the rules. Dice are an abomination -- what decides if an action does or doesn't succeed? The dramatic possibilities, of course -- and a good storyteller who can adjust when the players (as they inevitably do) present the obstacles, that is, opportunities, to take the plot in new directions.
Fair playing field? Bah -- I prefer a bit more realism in my RPGs -- I like a bit of fantasy, but you can go too far, and stretch credulity too thin. A reasonably mature role player can't swallow the existence of anything so wildly unlikely as a fair playing field... :)
It's the same guy, and this particular character of his is, IIRC, "Irene the Infirm". She has no equipment at all, and simply "banks" all the skill and attribute points she gets (she's a sorceress, incidently). She gets a rogue merc after quest 2 and likewise does not equip her with anything at all. AFAIK, he hasn't tried taking her beyond Act I yet -- he never expected, starting out, he'd make it to, much less beat, Andariel. It'll be interesting to see if he continues her quest...