I mean, have you seen any BSoD's? Have you seen anybody at an advanced console saying "computer, command prompt tar space hyphen exs vee eff space less than space data's new firmware dot bin greater than slash dev slash data brain pipe execute"?
> In any military I'm aware of, [Worf]'d have
> been let go for 'excessive time in grade.':-)
Ehehe. But don't forget, he is a mover and a shaker in the Klingon government, and the Federation has an enormous interest in keeping up his appearance. Even that absolutely stupid fiasco where he rescues his wife at the expense of rescuing a spy, thus causing the death of millions, wasn't enough to get him fired.
> I used to have a very low opinion of Voyager,
> but recently I started watching a few episodes,
> and I'll be damned if it hasn't greatly
> improved.
It takes a few years. TNG sucked until season three, Q aside, marked largely by the return of Beverly, the enbearding of number one, and the deemphasis of "the boy".
DS9 really picked up, again after 2 years, when it turned into the Quark-and-Kira show.
And of course, Voyager's transition is marked by the insertion of everybody's favorite character, who still has some...implants. Now it's the Seven-and-Janeway show, and that's fine by me. The only problem is the movies never got around to DS9, so Voyager is probably out of the question. And with the new series being set in the past, there's no way Jeri can suddenly appear as a permanent character on it ala Worf and DS9.
That's another giant screwup, in my mind, even worse than massive timetravel. At least that can be written away as being forbidden by the 26th or 29th or whatever timecops. Introducing a way to travel 10,000 light years in a few minutes or even hours or days would allow them to get home within a week or two at worst. The reverse deus-ex-machina about the techonolgy burning out is just too Gilligan's Islandish. Rapid transit also disrupts the whole TNG concept about the borg "finding out" about the Federation and the Federation having two years or so to prepare.
And what happened to "they don't do anything piecemeal. When they come, they come in force."
You will never get a union of programmers. We programmers have big egos, and unions drag the superior down to the mediocre median. Since we're all above the median for programmers, no one wants or needs a union.
I also find that it would be despicable to tell a corporation that they couldn't hire permanent replacements for me.
This reminds me of a story I heard at least 20 years ago, where someone was trying to look at the painted reflections in eyes to see if the painter painted himself or anything else, like the layout of the room, unknowingly, in the reflections.
The story had an eerie feeling in it.
Anyway, at least these people didn't calculate van Gogh as being in the middle of the northern Indian Ocean at 3:15:08 PM 453,667 BC.
Re:I think we'd have more important problems
on
Rebooting The World?
·
· Score: 1
> A hacker would not be "like a fish out of water" at all.
Exactly. Take a hacker and an assembly-line worker and drop them alone in the wilderness. Guess who's dead in a week? Hint: the guy who's life consists of doing nonsentient work others thought up for him.
People don't boil in outer space, much less in the atmosphere of Mars. Nor do they explode from pressure changes (excepting lung damage, perhaps, if you try to hold your breath in.)
> Rather than using formal techniques to ensure
> that code is 100% correct, they would rather
> just sit down and knock something out that sort
> of works. And this has led to the proliferation
> of buggy and insecure software...
...and multibillion-dollar corporations. I wish I had knocked out some buggy, insecure code that made me a billionaire in an overnight IPO.
WordPerfect killed itself by taking way too long to develop a WYSIWYG interface for the PC. All MS had to do was port thier very good, Mac-leading MS Word (which Mac people, including me, loved) over to the PC.
When I joined the "real world" after college, they had PC's with WordPerfect on them, and I couldn't stand the hideousness of that product. When Windows 3.0 came out, MS Word was up and running fine, while WordPerfect was still messing around with the old style of interface. How blind can a corporation be?
> If I as an adult want to watch graphic
> portrayals of sex and violence, why do your
> children get to stop me?
They can't. If I recall correctly (this came up in conjunction with the CDA a couple of years ago) the Supreme Court has ruled that the government cannot do a blanket ban on something "in the name of the children" and that it might only require some level of guarantee that children don't have unrestricted, unchecked access to whatever. In cases of freedom of speech, they can't even require that much.
> Legally they have as much force as the
> Constitution itself.
More, actually, since they override some parts of the Constitution itself (although, of course, said authority for overriding the Constitution resides in the Constitution itself.) Later is presumed to override earlier unless later specifically states otherwise.
> The Bill of Rights says otherwise, but it is a
> completely seperate document that was written a
> decade later.
Well, sort of. There was a huge debate about the Bill of Rights. One side said it was needed to clafiry the unspoken rights retained by the people and the states. The other side said it would be bad because any enumeration of rights might lead future lawmakers and judges to think that if some right wasn't listed, then it didn't count as a protected right. As it turned out, the latter was correct.
Hushed up? Wouldn't the Chinese government want to trumpet that as a triumph of Chines Communist blah blah blah? More likely, it turned out not to be whatever-it-was, and was "silenced" to let the issue die, out of sight, out of mind, rather than admit the embarassing error that it was a mutilated dolphin or whatever.
> You guys are total meatheads if you can't
> differentiate between the two... they're not the
> same thing, not at all.
Well, at what point do they differentiate? What if I typed out, "Hey, go to buycrackhere.com, they illegally sell crack over the Internet" on my web page? That's freedom of speech. Making it a clickable link only slightly eases the ability to go there.
> or that NO programmers except Amazon's could
> have developed the technique.
Not even Amazon's could develop the technique without their owner constantly correcting them!
Of course, any programmer in the world could have done it -- with Amazon's owner constantly correcting their missteps. Of course, after the fact, it seems obvious.
But it was not obvious before the fact. No programmer could have developed it because they kept thinking in multi-step confirmations, (in this case, even with explicit instructions to the contrary.) It required a, ick, "paradigm shift" in user interaction for purchases from all other web sites.
This is NOT like hyperlinks or incremental automatic updates or rapid 3D "frame" generation played back like a movie, all of which WERE obvious "before the fact." Yes, the story that Mr. Yahoo had to keep correcting his programmers may be apocryphal, supported more by their lawyers to give a case for original, non-obvious development than actual development reality, but at least it's a shred of evidence, which those other cases don't have.
A sin function is very well defined for, for example, 2-d angles. It makes no difference if you sit in a 2-d universe, a 3-d one, or a 6-d one, or a no-d one of a singularity.
That was one of the brilliant realizations thousands of years ago. Mathematics lives in its own pure world. It is up to humans to attempt to build abstract models of the real world using mathematics.
The right to link will be preserved by the Supreme Court. It may be illegal to have a crack house on the corner, but it's not illegal for me to tell you there is a crack house on the corner, or how much they illegally sell drugs for inside.
Slashdot Mirror
It occurs to me that TNG is far older now than TOS (The Old Series, get it right) was when I first started watching it in the mid '70's.
I'm an unabashed Periite.
Neither Microsoft nor Unix exist in Star Trek.
I mean, have you seen any BSoD's? Have you seen anybody at an advanced console saying "computer, command prompt tar space hyphen exs vee eff space less than space data's new firmware dot bin greater than slash dev slash data brain pipe execute"?
> (I mean, "Cybil" is meant to be your version of
> "absolutely fabulous"?)
Look, we went to the moon. We did this. A nation such as ours must wear many hats.
> In any military I'm aware of, [Worf]'d have :-)
> been let go for 'excessive time in grade.'
Ehehe. But don't forget, he is a mover and a shaker in the Klingon government, and the Federation has an enormous interest in keeping up his appearance. Even that absolutely stupid fiasco where he rescues his wife at the expense of rescuing a spy, thus causing the death of millions, wasn't enough to get him fired.
> So why not set the next series at the center of
> the star fleet universe, the academy?
Pick a pithy response:
Pithy Response #1: Just like West Point is the center of the military universe? Hardly.
Pithy Response #2: Young Indiana Jones. Jar Jar Binks. Star Fleet Acadamy, The Series. Stop it. Just stop it.
> I used to have a very low opinion of Voyager,
> but recently I started watching a few episodes,
> and I'll be damned if it hasn't greatly
> improved.
It takes a few years. TNG sucked until season three, Q aside, marked largely by the return of Beverly, the enbearding of number one, and the deemphasis of "the boy".
DS9 really picked up, again after 2 years, when it turned into the Quark-and-Kira show.
And of course, Voyager's transition is marked by the insertion of everybody's favorite character, who still has some...implants. Now it's the Seven-and-Janeway show, and that's fine by me. The only problem is the movies never got around to DS9, so Voyager is probably out of the question. And with the new series being set in the past, there's no way Jeri can suddenly appear as a permanent character on it ala Worf and DS9.
That's another giant screwup, in my mind, even worse than massive timetravel. At least that can be written away as being forbidden by the 26th or 29th or whatever timecops. Introducing a way to travel 10,000 light years in a few minutes or even hours or days would allow them to get home within a week or two at worst. The reverse deus-ex-machina about the techonolgy burning out is just too Gilligan's Islandish. Rapid transit also disrupts the whole TNG concept about the borg "finding out" about the Federation and the Federation having two years or so to prepare.
And what happened to "they don't do anything piecemeal. When they come, they come in force."
A 100% salary over a year period to keep you from competing, well, I'd like to see any company do that.
Let's see, I could either work for 100% salary over the next year, or take a year off at 100% salary, then go to work somewhere else.
You will never get a union of programmers. We programmers have big egos, and unions drag the superior down to the mediocre median. Since we're all above the median for programmers, no one wants or needs a union.
I also find that it would be despicable to tell a corporation that they couldn't hire permanent replacements for me.
This reminds me of a story I heard at least 20 years ago, where someone was trying to look at the painted reflections in eyes to see if the painter painted himself or anything else, like the layout of the room, unknowingly, in the reflections.
The story had an eerie feeling in it.
Anyway, at least these people didn't calculate van Gogh as being in the middle of the northern Indian Ocean at 3:15:08 PM 453,667 BC.
> A hacker would not be "like a fish out of water" at all.
Exactly. Take a hacker and an assembly-line worker and drop them alone in the wilderness. Guess who's dead in a week? Hint: the guy who's life consists of doing nonsentient work others thought up for him.
People don't boil in outer space, much less in the atmosphere of Mars. Nor do they explode from pressure changes (excepting lung damage, perhaps, if you try to hold your breath in.)
> Rather than using formal techniques to ensure
> that code is 100% correct, they would rather
> just sit down and knock something out that sort
> of works. And this has led to the proliferation
> of buggy and insecure software...
...and multibillion-dollar corporations. I wish I had knocked out some buggy, insecure code that made me a billionaire in an overnight IPO.
Or compress any two bytes by one byte, for that matter, on average. Or one bit.
Or one petabyte by one bit, on average, for that matter.
WordPerfect killed itself by taking way too long to develop a WYSIWYG interface for the PC. All MS had to do was port thier very good, Mac-leading MS Word (which Mac people, including me, loved) over to the PC.
When I joined the "real world" after college, they had PC's with WordPerfect on them, and I couldn't stand the hideousness of that product. When Windows 3.0 came out, MS Word was up and running fine, while WordPerfect was still messing around with the old style of interface. How blind can a corporation be?
> If I as an adult want to watch graphic
> portrayals of sex and violence, why do your
> children get to stop me?
They can't. If I recall correctly (this came up in conjunction with the CDA a couple of years ago) the Supreme Court has ruled that the government cannot do a blanket ban on something "in the name of the children" and that it might only require some level of guarantee that children don't have unrestricted, unchecked access to whatever. In cases of freedom of speech, they can't even require that much.
> Legally they have as much force as the
> Constitution itself.
More, actually, since they override some parts of the Constitution itself (although, of course, said authority for overriding the Constitution resides in the Constitution itself.) Later is presumed to override earlier unless later specifically states otherwise.
> The Bill of Rights says otherwise, but it is a
> completely seperate document that was written a
> decade later.
Well, sort of. There was a huge debate about the Bill of Rights. One side said it was needed to clafiry the unspoken rights retained by the people and the states. The other side said it would be bad because any enumeration of rights might lead future lawmakers and judges to think that if some right wasn't listed, then it didn't count as a protected right. As it turned out, the latter was correct.
Hushed up? Wouldn't the Chinese government want to trumpet that as a triumph of Chines Communist blah blah blah? More likely, it turned out not to be whatever-it-was, and was "silenced" to let the issue die, out of sight, out of mind, rather than admit the embarassing error that it was a mutilated dolphin or whatever.
> you are aware that non-judeo-christians also
> circumsize....so explain that.
The perverted desire to mutilate a child's sex organs without their consent for ritualistic religious reasons is universal?
> You guys are total meatheads if you can't
> differentiate between the two... they're not the
> same thing, not at all.
Well, at what point do they differentiate? What if I typed out, "Hey, go to buycrackhere.com, they illegally sell crack over the Internet" on my web page? That's freedom of speech. Making it a clickable link only slightly eases the ability to go there.
> or that NO programmers except Amazon's could
> have developed the technique.
Not even Amazon's could develop the technique without their owner constantly correcting them!
Of course, any programmer in the world could have done it -- with Amazon's owner constantly correcting their missteps. Of course, after the fact, it seems obvious.
But it was not obvious before the fact. No programmer could have developed it because they kept thinking in multi-step confirmations, (in this case, even with explicit instructions to the contrary.) It required a, ick, "paradigm shift" in user interaction for purchases from all other web sites.
This is NOT like hyperlinks or incremental automatic updates or rapid 3D "frame" generation played back like a movie, all of which WERE obvious "before the fact." Yes, the story that Mr. Yahoo had to keep correcting his programmers may be apocryphal, supported more by their lawyers to give a case for original, non-obvious development than actual development reality, but at least it's a shred of evidence, which those other cases don't have.
A sin function is very well defined for, for example, 2-d angles. It makes no difference if you sit in a 2-d universe, a 3-d one, or a 6-d one, or a no-d one of a singularity.
That was one of the brilliant realizations thousands of years ago. Mathematics lives in its own pure world. It is up to humans to attempt to build abstract models of the real world using mathematics.
The right to link will be preserved by the Supreme Court. It may be illegal to have a crack house on the corner, but it's not illegal for me to tell you there is a crack house on the corner, or how much they illegally sell drugs for inside.