That's not entirely true. When you are a member of a Super Group, you can play in SG mode -- basically, wearing the colors and insignia of the group to 'show the flag' as you defeat heroes/villains. In SG mode, you get a reduced amount of influence/infamy (the 'currency' of the game for buying enhancements for your character), but acquire Prestige for your group, which can be used to build or expand your group's base -- and you occasionally collect Salvage of various kinds (weapons, armor fragments, etc.) that can be reworked at crafting workbenches in your base into other components, which can be made into equipment for your base. So there's no crafting that directly affects your character, but you can craft things that will benefit your group, which will help you acquire Items of Power, which provide in-game bonuses to everyone in the group (having Items of Power in your base does, however, make you vulnerable to having your base raided by other groups trying to take them; some of the things you can build for your base are improved defenses).
Yeah! And on some special websites, you can read the same news several days in a row! Sometimes after months!
And some headlines can not only be recycled, but are redundant; how many times can you print "Politician opens mouth, lies" before people stop paying attention to the tautology?
Yeah, lawyers who zealously represent their cllients even when they personally disagree are like those scumbag doctors who'll treat just about anyone. I mean, wouldn't the world be a better place if Christian doctors refused to treat homosexuals, and liberal doctors refused to treat Republicans? Of course not. And just like medical care, the legal system only works if everyone has the best counsel available to them.
Or pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth-control pills?
Whatever their sold on does not excuse the complete and utter crap that are the recording contracts. It's the same with my employee agreements. They're crap, I know they're crap, but the choice between unemployed/homeless vs. employed/getting screwed isn't much of a choice at all.
Some time ago, I listened to a piece on NPR about independent music publishing. One musician had produced an album for one of the big record houses, but was told, after her album had sold more than 200,000 copies (at ~$19 retail), that the record company 'had not yet recovered its costs', and that she would not be receiving any royalties from the album until the record company's costs were recovered. She went on to describe an album that she produced with an independent publishing house, which had sold some 15,000 copies at ~$10, from which she received $5/sale, and had made more from the independent-published album than she had made from the advance she got from the major publishing house.
Additionally, it's not the records that are the big moneymakers for musicians; it's the ticket and merchandise sales from tours. Recently, though, the big music houses have recognized that they're not squeezing as many eggs out of the goose as they can, and have started 'offering' contracts that give the music house a percentage of the ticket and merchandise sales from tours.
Ask them [members of the younger generation] HOW the things work, and they have no idea. They are really riding on the backs of the 'old folks' like us that built the goodies they enjoy. Like the old saying goes... "If I've seen farther than others, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants."
"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." -- Hal Abelson, MIT
The "sexy friend" has cat ears and a tail. What kind of perversion is this?
And Princess Kahm has horns, and Geobaldi's a canid or ursine. They're aliens.At least it's better justification than the comment I heard in passing at a San Diego Comic-Con many years ago from someone who was with one of the (then) major anime houses -- "He's got turquoise hair because he's Mexican."
Under the "We're going to call a show SF if it incorporates anything that could not happen in the normal, mundane, day-to-day world, and then we're going to pick fifty shows from that definition according to our prejudices toward normal, mundane character dramas" premise, then I suppose that Tales from the Crypt would be ranked higher. Of course, that premise is roughly equivalent to generating a '50 Best Dog Breeds' list by defining dogs as any domesticated four-legged mammal that slobbers, and picking winners on the basis of providing hair for weaving -- we shouldn't be surprised that we get camels, llamas, alpacas, and the like in with the occasional St. Bernard, Great Dane, and bulldog.
Let me throw The Starlost onto your list. Earthship Ark has got to be the largest vessel built by humans on any TV show.
Yes, and if you read Harlan Ellison's original screenplay, or the novelization he did with Edward Bryant, Phoenix Without Ashes, the size of the ship as described at that website grossly overstates what the series actually described. In Ellison's original screenplay, the domes were supposed to be 50 miles across; in the series, they were five miles across. When Ellison visited the production studio, he found them building the bridge set -- which wouldn't be needed until the final episode (their rationale? "He still has to find the back-up bridge"). Ellison got so fed up with the idiocies of the production that he divorced himself from it and made them use one of his pen names, 'Cordwainer Bird', as the author of the screenplay (his way of 'giving the bird' to them). The Starlost could not, in my opinion, even approach the top 50.
This is not a low gravity experiment. Technically the best you could call it is a virtual low gravity. The water is actually within the same gravity well as the plane is and is falling to the earth at the same speed. The difference is that it is enclosed in an atmosphere that is also falling at the same speed, or being forced to fall at the same speed. This does not necessarily remove all of the effects of gravity upon the fluid. The results might be similar in a real low gravity environment, but not the same. All this experiment shows is what happens if you fall to the earth at the same speed as the water and air is not whipping around the the water blob to cause deformation. It is important to remember the difference here.
You can make exactly the same statement about the same experiment conducted in a chamber orbiting 100 miles, up, 23,000 miles up, or 240,000 miles up. All orbits are, by definition, free fall, where the orbiting chamber and everything in it would be "within the same gravity well, and is falling to the earth at the same speed". The only difference is that, in orbit, the tangential velocity is such that this free fall will never strike the earth's surface. Aside from tidal effects, there is no observable difference in results from the experiment performed in a DC-9 in free fall and the experiment performed in an orbiting chamber.
Re:This is not news!
on
Ice Lake on Mars
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Not a joke, still from the Astronomy Picture of the Day site, is this picture, which according to the page text, was actually taken back in February, and reported in the June 2005 issue of Nature. So while it's news, it's not new news.
...can flutter her eyelids, move her hands like a human and even appears to breathe. She can only sit though at present, so we're a long way from Blade Runner yet.
As far as I'm concerned, she doesn't even have to sit. She just has to lie there, hold still, and keep moving those hands and fluttering those eyelids. Maybe breathe a little harder too.
And given the predilections of the stereotypical geek, standing up or walking around isn't high on the list of the postures that they would be wanting a gynoid to assume...
I also went to a Subway in Saint-Petersburg on Nevsky Prospect; there are definitely a lot of american fastfoods in Russia nowadays. One of the few places where some of the cashiers speak english actually -- which made us prefer the aventure of typical russian restaurants with no ways to communicate with the waitress.
Or, you could take the advice of Robert Heinlein, from when he and his wife visited the Soviet Union, and rely on a single-word question to find the best food -- "boof-yet?" (and yes, it does mean what it sounds like, you're asking about the buffet. If you get 'nyet' in response, go to another restaurant).
It's normally written with the function shorthand, a holdover from when MUMPS was implemented on machines that were seriously limited in memory/storage, and since the shorthand versions took up fewer bytes, they were more effecient.
The Xecute command there in the middle is a programming trick; normally, MUMPS will take everything from the FOR command to the end of the line as being part of a FOR statement, so forcing a subset to be executed separately lets you limit what is brought inside the loop. Broken up more readably, with the current block-structuring features, you'd get something like this (again, the underlines functioning as spaces, and commented a lot more heavily than older MUMPS code would be):
; iterate p through 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, etc. (every odd number) forever FOR p=2,3:2 DO . SET q=1 . ; for every odd number f from 3 to the square root of p . FOR f=3:2 quit:f*f>p!'q__DO . ; if f divides p evenly, not a prime, so loop can exit . . SET q=p#f . ; end FOR . ; if no divisor found, write out the number in columns . WRITE:q p,?$x\8+1*8 ; end FOR
Xecute takes a string and evaluates it as if it were MUMPS code, which lets you, for example, store the formatting function for a database field in a global as part of that global, rather than having to define it in each function that references the global.
f p=2,3:2 s q=1 x "f f=3:2 q:f*f>p!'q s q=p#f" w:q p,?$x\8+1*8
Unfortunately, that line of code has an error in it as posted; it has to have two spaces between the 'q' and the 's' inside the execute string (as I discovered, slashdot eats any attempt to format it properly, so it's not the poster's fault; take the underscores below and change them to spaces (and ignore the fact that the underscore is a MUMPS function, too; it's not used in this example):
f p=2,3:2 s q=1 x "f f=3:2 q:f*f>p!'q__s q=p#f" w:q p,?$x\8+1*8
You get a 'Quit without value expected to terminate context' error on the inner loop otherwise. For more readability, you can also spell out the commands, and get (again, having to use underscores to show a doubled space:
for p=2,3:2 set q=1 xecute "for f=3:2 quit:f*f>p!'q__set q=p#f" write:q p,?$x\8+1*8
Given that DHCP/Vista has been around since long before Microsoft began developing Windows XP, much less Longhorn, as well as the fact that trying to sue the Veteran's Administration would be a PR debacle, I don't think that Bill Gates would be stupid enough to try -- going into court and having the VA produce decade-old documents demonstrating the prior use of the name would get the case dismissed with prejudice, and Microsoft would probably lose all rights to the name and have to put off their OS release for another five years while they pick a new one.
Well, you could use MUMPS (aka 'M Technology'), which sorts array indices automatically. However, it alpha-sorts after numbers, and while '1' is a proper number, '01' isn't, so you get 1, 2, 12, 20, 01, 02, "Ralph", "Samuel", etc.
On a different point, a couple of seed/hybridization/GM companies are looking into making corn varieties designed for maximum ethanol production. They're predicting something like a 25% increase in about five years.
By which time, the people to whom genetic engineering is some demonic conspiracy will likely have rammed through legislation making it illegal to plant genetically-engineered corn anywhere in the US because it might contaminate 'natural' corn...
Broadcasters have expressed concerns that those without subscription television services will see blank screens unless they buy new units.
More accurately, "After the impending end-of-2006 deadline for cutover to all-digital broadcasting impels broadcasters to pressure legislators to let them continue business as usual for an additional three years before they have to actually do anything, continue to repeat their whine that over-the-air viewers (12% of all households with TVs, according to a CEA study) will be unreasonably impacted by the change." This despite the fact that a process for conversion to digital broadcasting by 2006 had been established back in 1997 (obviously, nine years isn't enough time to prepare), and that as of January 22, 2001, there were 177 stations transmitting DTV signals in 61 markets (serving nearly 67 percent of U.S. TV households), according to an NAB survey -- every day a broadcaster can avoid replacing their analog equipment with digital is one more day that they don't have to take a hit against their profits.
Heh. I wonder how many people are confused when they use UBB code on/.?
It makes it easier for the people writing the forum software to be able to parse out HTML tags and force the use of tags in a different format in order to control what posters can do in their posts; they can strip out all HTML tags, rather than making the parser smart enough to be able to identify malicious or subcompetent HTML coding. Of course, you then wind up with making people switch between thinking in HTML tags and thinking in your tag format. But if the rest of your functionality is good enough, people will use it -- and the ones who are good enough to be writing HTML directly into a text editor should be good enough to make the mental switch.
And, of course, if you don't bother to preview your post and actually look at it to make sure it looks like you think it should, then you deserve to look silly if you screwed something up.
Slashdot Mirror
Judging from the conditions inside and outside the Ziggurat, Arachnos set up them the bomb.
That's not entirely true. When you are a member of a Super Group, you can play in SG mode -- basically, wearing the colors and insignia of the group to 'show the flag' as you defeat heroes/villains. In SG mode, you get a reduced amount of influence/infamy (the 'currency' of the game for buying enhancements for your character), but acquire Prestige for your group, which can be used to build or expand your group's base -- and you occasionally collect Salvage of various kinds (weapons, armor fragments, etc.) that can be reworked at crafting workbenches in your base into other components, which can be made into equipment for your base. So there's no crafting that directly affects your character, but you can craft things that will benefit your group, which will help you acquire Items of Power, which provide in-game bonuses to everyone in the group (having Items of Power in your base does, however, make you vulnerable to having your base raided by other groups trying to take them; some of the things you can build for your base are improved defenses).
And some headlines can not only be recycled, but are redundant; how many times can you print "Politician opens mouth, lies" before people stop paying attention to the tautology?
Go to Gorilla Design Studios: Using the Hosts File and read their explanation of how to use a HOSTS file to block out unwanted sites.
Or pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth-control pills?
Some time ago, I listened to a piece on NPR about independent music publishing. One musician had produced an album for one of the big record houses, but was told, after her album had sold more than 200,000 copies (at ~$19 retail), that the record company 'had not yet recovered its costs', and that she would not be receiving any royalties from the album until the record company's costs were recovered. She went on to describe an album that she produced with an independent publishing house, which had sold some 15,000 copies at ~$10, from which she received $5/sale, and had made more from the independent-published album than she had made from the advance she got from the major publishing house.
Additionally, it's not the records that are the big moneymakers for musicians; it's the ticket and merchandise sales from tours. Recently, though, the big music houses have recognized that they're not squeezing as many eggs out of the goose as they can, and have started 'offering' contracts that give the music house a percentage of the ticket and merchandise sales from tours.
"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders."
-- Hal Abelson, MIT
And Princess Kahm has horns, and Geobaldi's a canid or ursine. They're aliens.At least it's better justification than the comment I heard in passing at a San Diego Comic-Con many years ago from someone who was with one of the (then) major anime houses -- "He's got turquoise hair because he's Mexican."
Under the "We're going to call a show SF if it incorporates anything that could not happen in the normal, mundane, day-to-day world, and then we're going to pick fifty shows from that definition according to our prejudices toward normal, mundane character dramas" premise, then I suppose that Tales from the Crypt would be ranked higher. Of course, that premise is roughly equivalent to generating a '50 Best Dog Breeds' list by defining dogs as any domesticated four-legged mammal that slobbers, and picking winners on the basis of providing hair for weaving -- we shouldn't be surprised that we get camels, llamas, alpacas, and the like in with the occasional St. Bernard, Great Dane, and bulldog.
If we've got Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, and Stingray, then we should also have Fireball XL5 and Supercar, too.
Yes, and if you read Harlan Ellison's original screenplay, or the novelization he did with Edward Bryant, Phoenix Without Ashes, the size of the ship as described at that website grossly overstates what the series actually described. In Ellison's original screenplay, the domes were supposed to be 50 miles across; in the series, they were five miles across. When Ellison visited the production studio, he found them building the bridge set -- which wouldn't be needed until the final episode (their rationale? "He still has to find the back-up bridge"). Ellison got so fed up with the idiocies of the production that he divorced himself from it and made them use one of his pen names, 'Cordwainer Bird', as the author of the screenplay (his way of 'giving the bird' to them). The Starlost could not, in my opinion, even approach the top 50.
"We had to destroy your freedom in order to save it."
You can make exactly the same statement about the same experiment conducted in a chamber orbiting 100 miles, up, 23,000 miles up, or 240,000 miles up. All orbits are, by definition, free fall, where the orbiting chamber and everything in it would be "within the same gravity well, and is falling to the earth at the same speed". The only difference is that, in orbit, the tangential velocity is such that this free fall will never strike the earth's surface. Aside from tidal effects, there is no observable difference in results from the experiment performed in a DC-9 in free fall and the experiment performed in an orbiting chamber.
Not a joke, still from the Astronomy Picture of the Day site, is this picture, which according to the page text, was actually taken back in February, and reported in the June 2005 issue of Nature. So while it's news, it's not new news.
And given the predilections of the stereotypical geek, standing up or walking around isn't high on the list of the postures that they would be wanting a gynoid to assume...
Apparently J. Michael Straczynski is now contracting out the Narn Bat Squad...
Does it really matter what the restaurant is? All the signs look like 'KAOPECTATE', anyway...
(Seriously, though, for many years restaurants weren't allowed to put up anything other than 'PECTOPAH' for signage.)
Or, you could take the advice of Robert Heinlein, from when he and his wife visited the Soviet Union, and rely on a single-word question to find the best food -- "boof-yet?" (and yes, it does mean what it sounds like, you're asking about the buffet. If you get 'nyet' in response, go to another restaurant).
It's normally written with the function shorthand, a holdover from when MUMPS was implemented on machines that were seriously limited in memory/storage, and since the shorthand versions took up fewer bytes, they were more effecient.
The Xecute command there in the middle is a programming trick; normally, MUMPS will take everything from the FOR command to the end of the line as being part of a FOR statement, so forcing a subset to be executed separately lets you limit what is brought inside the loop. Broken up more readably, with the current block-structuring features, you'd get something like this (again, the underlines functioning as spaces, and commented a lot more heavily than older MUMPS code would be):
; iterate p through 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, etc. (every odd number) forever
FOR p=2,3:2 DO
. SET q=1
. ; for every odd number f from 3 to the square root of p
. FOR f=3:2 quit:f*f>p!'q__DO
. ; if f divides p evenly, not a prime, so loop can exit
. . SET q=p#f
. ; end FOR
. ; if no divisor found, write out the number in columns
. WRITE:q p,?$x\8+1*8
; end FOR
Xecute takes a string and evaluates it as if it were MUMPS code, which lets you, for example, store the formatting function for a database field in a global as part of that global, rather than having to define it in each function that references the global.
Unfortunately, that line of code has an error in it as posted; it has to have two spaces between the 'q' and the 's' inside the execute string (as I discovered, slashdot eats any attempt to format it properly, so it's not the poster's fault; take the underscores below and change them to spaces (and ignore the fact that the underscore is a MUMPS function, too; it's not used in this example):
f p=2,3:2 s q=1 x "f f=3:2 q:f*f>p!'q__s q=p#f" w:q p,?$x\8+1*8
You get a 'Quit without value expected to terminate context' error on the inner loop otherwise. For more readability, you can also spell out the commands, and get (again, having to use underscores to show a doubled space:
for p=2,3:2 set q=1 xecute "for f=3:2 quit:f*f>p!'q__set q=p#f" write:q p,?$x\8+1*8
Given that DHCP/Vista has been around since long before Microsoft began developing Windows XP, much less Longhorn, as well as the fact that trying to sue the Veteran's Administration would be a PR debacle, I don't think that Bill Gates would be stupid enough to try -- going into court and having the VA produce decade-old documents demonstrating the prior use of the name would get the case dismissed with prejudice, and Microsoft would probably lose all rights to the name and have to put off their OS release for another five years while they pick a new one.
Well, you could use MUMPS (aka 'M Technology'), which sorts array indices automatically. However, it alpha-sorts after numbers, and while '1' is a proper number, '01' isn't, so you get 1, 2, 12, 20, 01, 02, "Ralph", "Samuel", etc.
By which time, the people to whom genetic engineering is some demonic conspiracy will likely have rammed through legislation making it illegal to plant genetically-engineered corn anywhere in the US because it might contaminate 'natural' corn...
More accurately, "After the impending end-of-2006 deadline for cutover to all-digital broadcasting impels broadcasters to pressure legislators to let them continue business as usual for an additional three years before they have to actually do anything, continue to repeat their whine that over-the-air viewers (12% of all households with TVs, according to a CEA study) will be unreasonably impacted by the change." This despite the fact that a process for conversion to digital broadcasting by 2006 had been established back in 1997 (obviously, nine years isn't enough time to prepare), and that as of January 22, 2001, there were 177 stations transmitting DTV signals in 61 markets (serving nearly 67 percent of U.S. TV households), according to an NAB survey -- every day a broadcaster can avoid replacing their analog equipment with digital is one more day that they don't have to take a hit against their profits.
It makes it easier for the people writing the forum software to be able to parse out HTML tags and force the use of tags in a different format in order to control what posters can do in their posts; they can strip out all HTML tags, rather than making the parser smart enough to be able to identify malicious or subcompetent HTML coding. Of course, you then wind up with making people switch between thinking in HTML tags and thinking in your tag format. But if the rest of your functionality is good enough, people will use it -- and the ones who are good enough to be writing HTML directly into a text editor should be good enough to make the mental switch.
And, of course, if you don't bother to preview your post and actually look at it to make sure it looks like you think it should, then you deserve to look silly if you screwed something up.