And camping. I highly recommend the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. I've been to the Black Hills, the Rockies, both oceans and the Gulf, all over this US of A, and they all have their beauty and charms, but the BWCA on the Minnesota-Ontario border is the most beautiful place I know. Just make sure to bring the mosquito repellent.;)
You're right, although in a couple of places you're falling into the false dilemma trap that the original poster was clearly caught in; the false dilemma in this case being the illogical assertion that a show has to choose between action and character development. You cite Wrath of Khan, which is a wonderful example since it was one of the movies richest in both.
This always struck me as consistent with the American views on the Soviets, so much so that it could hardly be a coincidence.
Definitely not a coincidence. There's also an episode where the Federation and the Klingons are fighting a proxy war in a blatant parody of US/Soviet Cold War actions in third world nations.
The Romulans... you may be stretching things there, but then, the Romulans are so sparse in TOS it's hard to be sure. Mostly the episode where they show up is one of several that takes a dig at racist notions, played out as more ignorant crewmembers treating Spock differently because of how he looks.
The utility of a rootkit on a machine is unrelated to whether the machine is virtual or not. Same functionality in either case.
It'll be open just as long as the user needs to open some legacy app,
Every time I walk by an office-mates computer who has a VM, that Windows start bar is across the bottom of their screens. It would appear that most VM users (all that I've seen) run it pretty much the whole time their computer is on.
won't have access to their file system, except what documents they choose to copy over temporarily
Not true on any VM I've seen.
...and may or may not have internet access
Never seen one that didn't. Frankly, these days, that would make it useless. Certainly at my job.
Running Windows in a VM is actually the ideal solution. Do all your net connected stuff via a secure OS like Linux, then open up a few ports for the VM to run games or whatever.
Indeed, it is ideal, which is why people do it. Of course, at our offices, we're not running it for games.
Err, no. What you refered to as "a crude sort of science" was really a crude sort of technology. The bees were not bought to North America as part of a scientific experiment from which they escaped. They were brought for specific commercial purpose, and that purpose wasn't to expand our knowledge of how the world works (in other words, not for science). So, no, science did not create the problem you cite, either. People did, but they were not scientists nor were they in any way doing science, nor was science in any way involved.
Not really all that suspicious. Populations expand and contract all the time naturally, and have been doing so for millions of years. Long before humans invented science, they noticed both dramatic increases and dramatic collapses in populations of many organisms. It seems highly unlikely that science had anything to do with it this time, save that in ancient times we didn't understand why this sort of thing happened, and now we know about the constant arms races between various organisms and the microorganisms that can plague them.
The notion that you could detect these signals from an exoplanet lightyears away - given that we can't, at the moment, detect light from such planets at all - strikes me as somewhere between far fetched and complete bullshit.
This would be where you're "I'm not an astronomer" is showing. In fact, we can and have detected light from exoplanets. We've even done spectral analysis on some of them to discover their atmospheric composition. So, there's nothing at all far fetched about this.
Right. In fact, it's an interesting system. There's a planet in it that we have seen by the light reflected off of it, but that planet is not in the habitable zone. There's also a planet in the habitable zone, but we detected that one by more indirect means. So, close, but no banana...
We're getting close, though, to getting all those parameters to line up. So it's nice that we have this new test ready for when we finally find a good candidate to use it on.
So, this would be evidence against the notion that life was created by the FSM. Perhaps the "research" is part of a plot by evil pirates. Or would that be evil ninjas?
It's not that one set is discarded, it's just never assembled to begin with. The GP is clearly talking out his ass with the "selective pressures" thing. The fact of the matter is, most molecules used by life forms are assembled by life forms, going back to the original replicator molecules that were the progenitors of life today. When replicator molecules replicate, they make copies with the same handedness as themselves. So, if the progenitors of life on Earth were left-handed molecules, all life on Earth will be made from evolved versions of those left-handed molecules. In order for there to be both left and right handed life, life would have to had arisen at least twice, independently, and the two forms of life would be utterly unrelated to each other evolutionarily. The fact that all life on Earth is left-handed is one of the best pieces of evidence for the notion that life only arose on Earth once, and all life today is descended from that. It's possible it arose twice and both happened to be left-handed, of course...
Not really relevant but adding multiple infinities is perfectly acceptable and sometimes useful. I take it you've never had an advanced Calculus class.
I take it you're badly in need of a remedial reading class. GP never said adding infinities was unacceptable or not useful, he was talking about the human capacity to comprehend levels of high/low. People can add trillions, too, and it's frequently required in economics. It's still a number too large to really comprehend, in the way one can grasp a dozen or a hundred. Taking an advanced Calculus class does nothing to change this, so assuming GP hadn't taken calculus would seem to indicate you simply failed to grasp what he was saying...
Not sure if that would have saved it. There has to be a reason for me to care, or giant robots smashing each other is just boring. Something unexpected happening would have been helpful, too, but when a movie is so utterly predictable, has no real compelling story or reason to care about what is happening in it... giant robots, well rendered, fighting each other, would make a cool few minutes for a short of some sort. After a few minutes, even that gets boring if there's nothing else...
It's not possible to do any good novel justice in a movie. A two hour movie can do justice to a short story. A miniseries can do justice to a novella. A good novel requires a series, and probably two or three seasons. It's not a question of whether a movie is going to bastardize the book it's based on, the question is just, how badly?
No, not all "spending" is economic stimulus. Not even Democrats truly believe this. Why else would they still be bashing Bush for the money spent on the Iraq war? Hey, it's STIMULUS, unless a Republican does it, then it's a deficit buster!
Nice straw man argument. Point in fact, military spending is and always has been acknowledged as significant economic stimulus. Even by Democrats, and not just the ones with military bases in their districts. The question is, is it the best use for the money, and which country is seeing the benefit from the spending? Pouring the same amount of money into an expanded Medicare would see far more economic stimulus and other positive effects at home than pouring it into military contractors and building infrastructure in Iraq. But it is economic stimulus either way, just not equally beneficial either way.
Guess what, there is going to be a major, devastating earthquake in California very soon. Though I'm pretty much guaranteed to be right, should I expect everyone to leave CA until it happens?
No, but you also shouldn't expect the the police to show up at your doorstep and threaten to imprison you for saying that. If you want to predict it, and try to make a case before the public with what evidence you have, you should be allowed to do so.
Seriously, how about we stop eating the BS they feed us and doing a little analytical thinking for ourselves for a change? Anyone?
Okay.
Why would any nation want to isolate itself the way the DPRK is isolated?
This question is nonsensical. It's the kind of rhetorical fodder to feed those who are incapable of actually engaging in logical analysis and thinking for themselves. Anyone who does so would immediately note that a nation cannot want anything, as it is a non-physical abstraction incapable of independent thought. Possibly you mean, "why would the leader of a nation want..." or "why would the party leadership want..." or "why would the man on the street want...", but of course the answers to all these questions are likely to be different. Making the question nonsensical forces the reader to rationalize it in their own manner, and thus causes the largest number of readers to act as if this is a sensible question, and treat what you're saying with a "yeah, man, you're right" attitude even when you're not saying anything. This is why questions like this one you're asking here are so powerful tools against people who don't actually analyze very well, they even repeat them without noticing they are contentless rhetorical tools.
The real problem for you here is, if you actually make a sensible question out of this, no matter which way you go, it either has a sensible answer, or it's immediately obvious that it's not a relevant question. It's easy to come up with reasons why a dictator would want to isolate a country (and the DPRK is not the only example of this, see Burma, for example, or any number of isolationist regimes of many nations over the years). It's maybe not to easy to see why the man on the street would want it, but then it hardly matters what they want in a non-democratic country.
US-DPRK relations are an artifact of the cold war,
...as is much of the current world power structure and even a number of nations, yes.
...and unlike the USSR, no state large enough to actually compete with the US emerged there, so the tiny country is being stomped on for no good reason other than for siding with the losing superpower from the twentieth century.
...as did a large number of countries at one time or another, which are not similarly isolated. This would indicate that the reasons for the isolation are more complex than this rather facile treatment. Without even going into details, it's apparent from even a cursory bit of logical analysis that most of what you've said here is wrong, incomplete, or meaningless (indeed, I would say the majority of what you posted was, in fact, "not even wrong").
Reading and thinking analytically, it's actually pretty hard to form a rebuttal to what you said, since you in fact said almost nothing. You asked a bunch of questions that were mostly vague and nonsensical, but to the extent you did say or at least imply anything, it would appear to be poorly thought out or ill-informed.
So they went from being the Linux with the best package manager to being the BSD with the worst package manager?
They didn't go from anywhere to anywhere. It was the Debian operating system, and it remains the Debian operating system. They now support a different kernel for whatever reasons (some kernels support some hardware or some applications better than others), but as the kernel is a fairly small and minor part of an operating system, it's an interesting bit of news, but they remains the same OS they always were.
BTW, what OSes with BSD support also have a package manager? I take it from your comment that FreeBSD does, but do any of the others? I've used both NetBSD and OpenBSD, and neither had a package manager, just a "ports" automatic source-compiling system. And if, unlike any of the other BSD's I've tried, FreeBSD actually has package management, what makes it better than APT?
And what's wrong with having a good plot and good acting to drive a movie instead of the hyped up gore and sex?
There's nothing wrong with that, although your comment could be (possibly mis-)interpreted as implying the false dilemma. There's nothing wrong with good plot and good acting, and there's nothing wrong with gore and sex. No reason to eschew either, certainly no reason to say you have to choose between them choosing one "instead of" the other, rather than in addition to.
Slashdot Mirror
And camping. I highly recommend the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. I've been to the Black Hills, the Rockies, both oceans and the Gulf, all over this US of A, and they all have their beauty and charms, but the BWCA on the Minnesota-Ontario border is the most beautiful place I know. Just make sure to bring the mosquito repellent. ;)
Really, really cold, definitely, but why are you seeing swarms of mosquitoes in the server room? o.O
How Meyer could write both Wrath of Khan AND the snoozefest that was "The Day After", I do not know.
Actually, he didn't. "The Day After" was written by Edward Hume. Meyer was just the director.
Shazbot!
You are old... :p
You're right, although in a couple of places you're falling into the false dilemma trap that the original poster was clearly caught in; the false dilemma in this case being the illogical assertion that a show has to choose between action and character development. You cite Wrath of Khan, which is a wonderful example since it was one of the movies richest in both.
This always struck me as consistent with the American views on the Soviets, so much so that it could hardly be a coincidence.
Definitely not a coincidence. There's also an episode where the Federation and the Klingons are fighting a proxy war in a blatant parody of US/Soviet Cold War actions in third world nations.
The Romulans... you may be stretching things there, but then, the Romulans are so sparse in TOS it's hard to be sure. Mostly the episode where they show up is one of several that takes a dig at racist notions, played out as more ignorant crewmembers treating Spock differently because of how he looks.
So... the people who decide what technology and software gets purchased? Wow, you're right, MS is really missing the boat here!
What good is a rootkit in a VM?
The utility of a rootkit on a machine is unrelated to whether the machine is virtual or not. Same functionality in either case.
It'll be open just as long as the user needs to open some legacy app,
Every time I walk by an office-mates computer who has a VM, that Windows start bar is across the bottom of their screens. It would appear that most VM users (all that I've seen) run it pretty much the whole time their computer is on.
won't have access to their file system, except what documents they choose to copy over temporarily
Not true on any VM I've seen.
...and may or may not have internet access
Never seen one that didn't. Frankly, these days, that would make it useless. Certainly at my job.
Running Windows in a VM is actually the ideal solution. Do all your net connected stuff via a secure OS like Linux, then open up a few ports for the VM to run games or whatever.
Indeed, it is ideal, which is why people do it. Of course, at our offices, we're not running it for games.
I remember when some dumbass said that the honeybees were being killed off by cell phones and WiFi internet.
It's true. They catch this fungus from using cell phones (which haven't be disinfected).
Err, no. What you refered to as "a crude sort of science" was really a crude sort of technology. The bees were not bought to North America as part of a scientific experiment from which they escaped. They were brought for specific commercial purpose, and that purpose wasn't to expand our knowledge of how the world works (in other words, not for science). So, no, science did not create the problem you cite, either. People did, but they were not scientists nor were they in any way doing science, nor was science in any way involved.
Not really all that suspicious. Populations expand and contract all the time naturally, and have been doing so for millions of years. Long before humans invented science, they noticed both dramatic increases and dramatic collapses in populations of many organisms. It seems highly unlikely that science had anything to do with it this time, save that in ancient times we didn't understand why this sort of thing happened, and now we know about the constant arms races between various organisms and the microorganisms that can plague them.
The notion that you could detect these signals from an exoplanet lightyears away - given that we can't, at the moment, detect light from such planets at all - strikes me as somewhere between far fetched and complete bullshit.
This would be where you're "I'm not an astronomer" is showing. In fact, we can and have detected light from exoplanets. We've even done spectral analysis on some of them to discover their atmospheric composition. So, there's nothing at all far fetched about this.
Right. In fact, it's an interesting system. There's a planet in it that we have seen by the light reflected off of it, but that planet is not in the habitable zone. There's also a planet in the habitable zone, but we detected that one by more indirect means. So, close, but no banana...
We're getting close, though, to getting all those parameters to line up. So it's nice that we have this new test ready for when we finally find a good candidate to use it on.
So, this would be evidence against the notion that life was created by the FSM. Perhaps the "research" is part of a plot by evil pirates. Or would that be evil ninjas?
It's not that one set is discarded, it's just never assembled to begin with. The GP is clearly talking out his ass with the "selective pressures" thing. The fact of the matter is, most molecules used by life forms are assembled by life forms, going back to the original replicator molecules that were the progenitors of life today. When replicator molecules replicate, they make copies with the same handedness as themselves. So, if the progenitors of life on Earth were left-handed molecules, all life on Earth will be made from evolved versions of those left-handed molecules. In order for there to be both left and right handed life, life would have to had arisen at least twice, independently, and the two forms of life would be utterly unrelated to each other evolutionarily. The fact that all life on Earth is left-handed is one of the best pieces of evidence for the notion that life only arose on Earth once, and all life today is descended from that. It's possible it arose twice and both happened to be left-handed, of course...
Not really relevant but adding multiple infinities is perfectly acceptable and sometimes useful. I take it you've never had an advanced Calculus class.
I take it you're badly in need of a remedial reading class. GP never said adding infinities was unacceptable or not useful, he was talking about the human capacity to comprehend levels of high/low. People can add trillions, too, and it's frequently required in economics. It's still a number too large to really comprehend, in the way one can grasp a dozen or a hundred. Taking an advanced Calculus class does nothing to change this, so assuming GP hadn't taken calculus would seem to indicate you simply failed to grasp what he was saying...
Not sure if that would have saved it. There has to be a reason for me to care, or giant robots smashing each other is just boring. Something unexpected happening would have been helpful, too, but when a movie is so utterly predictable, has no real compelling story or reason to care about what is happening in it... giant robots, well rendered, fighting each other, would make a cool few minutes for a short of some sort. After a few minutes, even that gets boring if there's nothing else...
We could always rehash Shakespeare a few more times. He did a really good job rehashing Greek tragedies...
It's not possible to do any good novel justice in a movie. A two hour movie can do justice to a short story. A miniseries can do justice to a novella. A good novel requires a series, and probably two or three seasons. It's not a question of whether a movie is going to bastardize the book it's based on, the question is just, how badly?
No, not all "spending" is economic stimulus. Not even Democrats truly believe this. Why else would they still be bashing Bush for the money spent on the Iraq war? Hey, it's STIMULUS, unless a Republican does it, then it's a deficit buster!
Nice straw man argument. Point in fact, military spending is and always has been acknowledged as significant economic stimulus. Even by Democrats, and not just the ones with military bases in their districts. The question is, is it the best use for the money, and which country is seeing the benefit from the spending? Pouring the same amount of money into an expanded Medicare would see far more economic stimulus and other positive effects at home than pouring it into military contractors and building infrastructure in Iraq. But it is economic stimulus either way, just not equally beneficial either way.
Guess what, there is going to be a major, devastating earthquake in California very soon. Though I'm pretty much guaranteed to be right, should I expect everyone to leave CA until it happens?
No, but you also shouldn't expect the the police to show up at your doorstep and threaten to imprison you for saying that. If you want to predict it, and try to make a case before the public with what evidence you have, you should be allowed to do so.
Seriously, how about we stop eating the BS they feed us and doing a little analytical thinking for ourselves for a change? Anyone?
Okay.
Why would any nation want to isolate itself the way the DPRK is isolated?
This question is nonsensical. It's the kind of rhetorical fodder to feed those who are incapable of actually engaging in logical analysis and thinking for themselves. Anyone who does so would immediately note that a nation cannot want anything, as it is a non-physical abstraction incapable of independent thought. Possibly you mean, "why would the leader of a nation want..." or "why would the party leadership want..." or "why would the man on the street want...", but of course the answers to all these questions are likely to be different. Making the question nonsensical forces the reader to rationalize it in their own manner, and thus causes the largest number of readers to act as if this is a sensible question, and treat what you're saying with a "yeah, man, you're right" attitude even when you're not saying anything. This is why questions like this one you're asking here are so powerful tools against people who don't actually analyze very well, they even repeat them without noticing they are contentless rhetorical tools.
The real problem for you here is, if you actually make a sensible question out of this, no matter which way you go, it either has a sensible answer, or it's immediately obvious that it's not a relevant question. It's easy to come up with reasons why a dictator would want to isolate a country (and the DPRK is not the only example of this, see Burma, for example, or any number of isolationist regimes of many nations over the years). It's maybe not to easy to see why the man on the street would want it, but then it hardly matters what they want in a non-democratic country.
US-DPRK relations are an artifact of the cold war,
...as is much of the current world power structure and even a number of nations, yes.
...and unlike the USSR, no state large enough to actually compete with the US emerged there, so the tiny country is being stomped on for no good reason other than for siding with the losing superpower from the twentieth century.
...as did a large number of countries at one time or another, which are not similarly isolated. This would indicate that the reasons for the isolation are more complex than this rather facile treatment. Without even going into details, it's apparent from even a cursory bit of logical analysis that most of what you've said here is wrong, incomplete, or meaningless (indeed, I would say the majority of what you posted was, in fact, "not even wrong").
Reading and thinking analytically, it's actually pretty hard to form a rebuttal to what you said, since you in fact said almost nothing. You asked a bunch of questions that were mostly vague and nonsensical, but to the extent you did say or at least imply anything, it would appear to be poorly thought out or ill-informed.
So they went from being the Linux with the best package manager to being the BSD with the worst package manager?
They didn't go from anywhere to anywhere. It was the Debian operating system, and it remains the Debian operating system. They now support a different kernel for whatever reasons (some kernels support some hardware or some applications better than others), but as the kernel is a fairly small and minor part of an operating system, it's an interesting bit of news, but they remains the same OS they always were.
BTW, what OSes with BSD support also have a package manager? I take it from your comment that FreeBSD does, but do any of the others? I've used both NetBSD and OpenBSD, and neither had a package manager, just a "ports" automatic source-compiling system. And if, unlike any of the other BSD's I've tried, FreeBSD actually has package management, what makes it better than APT?
So what is the part of the gnu userland that makes it important enough to use in the title of the OS? Compiler?
It's not a matter of "what part", it's a matter of "most of the parts". There's no "seat of the soul" for an OS...
And what's wrong with having a good plot and good acting to drive a movie instead of the hyped up gore and sex?
There's nothing wrong with that, although your comment could be (possibly mis-)interpreted as implying the false dilemma. There's nothing wrong with good plot and good acting, and there's nothing wrong with gore and sex. No reason to eschew either, certainly no reason to say you have to choose between them choosing one "instead of" the other, rather than in addition to.