The structures aren't fixed. The basic idea is, though, that the most fuel-efficient way to get to another planet/moon is not just to wait until it's reached it's closest point and blast off, but to calculate when and where the gravity wormholes offer the most aid/least resistance.
They are akin to the Lagrange points between the earth and the moon, where the pulls from the two sources create an area where the least resistance still keeps an object in place, sort of like a patch of dirt on an icy surface. (That's an analogy for what happens, not how it happens.)
The thing about the wormholes is, though, that they're governed by non-linear dynamics, and are therefore extremely convoluted and difficult to calculate. But that doesn't imply that they're static, just that they're usually not the shortest distance between points A and B.
And if Arwen kills the King Nazgul in the third movie, which I think they're trying to build up to, I'm gonna kick somebody.
Um...did you see the blonde girl in this one? The one who has about twice the screen time as Liv Tyler? That's Eowyn. Why do you think they're building her up?
Only someone with "bookish tendencies" would think of/participate in the world's largest scavenger hunt. And sell DVDs under the name "Periphrastic Films."
You say you "absolutly loath vi" after having read this book. Did you like it before? Because I find vi to be an excellent editor; it lets me keep my fingers on the keyboard where they belong and gets a lot of work done with relatively few keystrokes. And if you also liked it before reading the book, I would think it's sad to change your opinion just because a book told you so.
My impression of second-semester CS classes was, "okay, you all learned Pascal--now you're going to have to unlearn all those bad habits to program in C." Perhaps this is an unfair characterization of Pascal, but it appears to be pretty widespread. It has been spoken of as a language (and I'm paraphrasing a few sources here) that "enforces it's creator's impression of what a programming language should be, without the corrupting influences of real-world problems to solve."
I wonder (and I really do wonder, I'm not an OS hacker at all) if Minix might not have suffered from the same limitations--i.e., it's designed for teaching, but are it's lessons the ones people use in the real world?.
I'm sorry, this is wrong. The "free beer/free speech" analogy is at work here.
No business in their right mind is going to help a competitor take their market share.
Doesn't matter. If I buy a car from General Motors, GM has no right to tell me I can't taxi Ford workers to and from their workplace. That's "helping a competitor" with a product I bought from them, and if they don't like it, tough. This EULA is trying to prohibit an analogous freedom.
And as far as the "Slashdot hippies" crack and non-free software goes: this isn't about cost, as most of us (not all, but most) didn't complain about Linus using Bitkeeper in the first place. Non-free software prevents what you can do to that software; that's a choice Linus made. But even makers of non-free software don't have the right to tell you what to do with the software. Microsoft has no legal power to stop me from writing an anti-MS diatribe using MS Word, not with a (hypothetical) copy I bought from them. It's mine, that's that.
Tis a shame to single out a man for damnation on the basis of one slip when damnation is the default case.
This was not a slip. This was a lie. Scientists do not, by default, distrust one another's ethics. Peer review is meant to weed out misunderstanding and overgeneralization, not fraud. That's not "damnation," that's just healthy skepticism.
Due to the Joint Operating Agreement signed a decade ago, both the Detroit News and the Free Press publish their Sunday editions together. It's called, yes, the Detroit News-Free Press. Which is how most of us think about both papers anyhow.
I wonder what the reception to this would be if the programmers had all used Literate Programming. It's one documentation technique that's intended* to make source code and comments more expressive and meaningful, and (hopefully) lead to better code. It seems to me that the artsy crowd might respond favorably to a literate program.Google will tell you a little bit more.
(*Note thatI said intended; I don't know anyone personally who uses it, but the examples I've seen are pretty interesting.)
Categorization seems like nothing more advanced than Google's "Directory" feature. And searching on Google's main page with "Michael.Jordan -basketball" pulled up a Michael I. Jordan, professor of computer science at U Cal. Berkeley, as the first hit.
Meanwhile, entering "Michael Jordan" in vivisimo gets me: sports, NBA, Posters, Pictures, Bulls-Chicago, Air, Tribute, Space Jam, Shoes... the list goes on and on, but no computer science. Even using "NOT basketball" still brings up basketball references exclusively.
Putting "computer scientists" in vivisimo, I get: research, engineers, interest, American, mathematics, study, issue, history, memory, life, and "more." None of these give me any indication that they hold information about anyone named Michael Jordan. Even clicking a few levels deeper on the directories didn't do it.
So the score is: Google getting it on the first try vs. vivisimo never finding it. We should all be "doomed" like that.
I agree with what you say, but I have to point out a couple of things about how you said it.
"Modularity". "Data Hiding". "Strong type-checking". "Interface Abstraction". The list of buzzwords is long.
"Buzzwords" has the connotation of empty talk, but the concepts behind these terms are very strong. In fact, you yourself argue for them in the preceding paragraph:
The key to successful programming is isolation. Single-mindedly chopping the problem into tiny pieces and walling them off from each other, then putting a few tiny holes in their individual prisons to let in and out ONLY the things they need to know and manipulate.
You've just succinctly described "modularity", "data hiding," and "interface abstraction." It appears as though you're trying to diss these concepts at the same time you're defending them.
In most Hollywood productions, the writer usually has little or no control over what finally makes it onto the screen. The producer can add or subtract anything he wants, because he's paying the bills. And producers don't revise for clarity or coherence, they make business decisions. (Well, most. Some break this mold, but they're usually the writer/producer/director auteurs.)Directors and A-list stars also have enough clout to change things around, depending on what their contract says.
Also, stuff that looks good on paper or in the mind's eye might not be practical to shoot (for whatever reasons), or just not look as good when it comes out. Someone might decide that the odd Gilbert & Sullivan reference was just a little too cute to be the crucial clue that solves the puzzle, or that the attacking mushroom people looked cool, but not cool enough to divert the Enterprise to their homeworld.
That's not to say what gets cut just to make it PG-13. Take one exploding head out, and you might have to rewrite every scene that character was in.
So a writer who's aware of that will add stuff that will make a four-hour movie, knowing that not all of it will be shot, and knowing that not all of it that gets shot will make it past the cutting floor. When you get down to it, the plot is almost like the music, in that composers don't write symponies for movies, they write themes and bits that can be inserted into the movie at numerous points. The long and the short of it is, draft screenplays are almost always different, and often radically so, from the final product.
(P.S., didn't I read somewhere that Lucas rewrote the light saber fight between Obi-wan and Vader after shooting had begun? The original had him survive, and Guinness fought against having him sacrifice himself. Of course, George is one who'll rewrite a movie twenty years after releasing it, so maybe that's not the best example.)
Albuquerque's average daily high in February is around 55, and the low is around 28. You're right, I didn't check my facts. Still, let's assume it's halfway between the high and low, say 42 degrees. Still hardly finger-numbing weather. And that also doesn't let McDonald's off the hook.
Funny--if you'd bothered to follow the link and read the piece, you'd see that even McDonald's didn't believe that people waited for the coffee to cool down, and that folks wanted something they could down in their cars while on the go. Note how they also admitted that most places served coffee at about 140 degrees, not 190, so the woman had a reasonable expectation based on common practice that her drink wouldn't cause third-degree burns if spilled. They'd also received hundreds of similar complaints over the years, and done nothing to change their practices. So no, McDonald's was not being a "good company" because they flat-out SAID this wasn't what their customers wanted. It was just easier for them to brew that way, customers be damned.
The number of people who comment on this case without even looking up the most easily-found facts is staggering. It's not like it's an ink-blot test where you can make up whatever shit springs to mind. But let's make a list of your assumptions:
Putting cream and sugar in coffee will lower the temperature by fifty degrees. (Ten degrees, I'll take. Fifty, no. Besides, she didn't get a chance to put anything in the coffee before it burned her.)
McDonald's thought people would wait for their coffee to cool down. (They already stated that that's not what most people did.)
February mornings are so cold in Albuquerque that people regularly warm their hands on a cup full of scalding beverage. (Albuquerque is roughly the same latitude as Phoenix and Amarillo, so unless they'd been experiencing an uncommonly cold spell, it wouldn't have been below fifty at the lowest.)
The woman "gulped" her coffee. (No. As I said before, it spilled before she even got a chance to find out how hot it was.)
The woman put "creamy butter" on her hands before opening the lid. (Oh--that was an attempt at being witty. Sorry. I'll ignore that one.)
So, stripped of your flights of fancy, the fact remains that McDonald's knew this was, not only an accident waiting to happen, but an accident that had already happened to other people. They just sat on their hands, refusing to do anything until a case got so severe that they couldn't ignore it. That's "takeing" care of their customers? Right.
Here is some information on the McDonald's scalding incident. The woman sought $20,000 to cover the cost of her operation, but McDonald's refused. A jury awarded her $200,000, not "a hundred million dollars."
As far as ridiculous, well, I've pulled this paragraph out of the page:
Further, McDonald's quality assurance manager testified that the company actively enforces a requirement that coffee be held in the pot at 185 degrees, plus or minus five degrees. He also testified that a burn hazard exists with any food substance served at 140 degree or above, and that McDonald's coffee, at the temperature at which it was poured into styrofoam cups,
was not fit for consumption because it would burn the mouth and throat. The quality assurance manager admitted that burns would occur, but testified that McDonald's had no intention of reducing the "holding temperature" of its coffee.
So tell me: deliberately selling a drink that was, by McDonald's own admission, "not fit for consumption" even though they knew that burns would occur--isn't that a little bit more ridiculous than the money the jury awarded her?
I shouldn't be surprised that he'd try to capitalize on current social context to pump up his own film...
Maybe that's what he's doing, but the message that you can't trust a pre-emptive police state is written pretty obviously throughout the movie, and it went into production before 9/11. So he's capitalizing on a wider social context than just the current hysteria/paranoia. And why shouldn't he? Don't artists get to criticize society? And does doing a kiddie movie like E.T. automatically and forever prevent him from having anything to say about the world?
The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment in July 1974 against Nixon because of the break-in and the cover-up. Nixon resigned August 9th, 1974, (the day I got my tonsils out) before the full House could vote on the articles.
I don't mean to be an ass, but it is not okay for adults or even teenagers to not know this.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing about the wormholes is, though, that they're governed by non-linear dynamics, and are therefore extremely convoluted and difficult to calculate. But that doesn't imply that they're static, just that they're usually not the shortest distance between points A and B.
And the main character's name isn't "Luke Skywalker," it's "Commander Apollo."
And his buddy isn't "Han Solo," it's "Starbuck."
And his mentor isn't "Obi-wan," it's "Adama."
And the shiny armor-suit-things aren't "Stormtroopers," they're "Cylons."
I'm glad to see there's so much interest in such a ground-breaking, original piece of TV science fiction, though.
...did anyone else get an urge to shout out, "Dobby has come to warn you, sir" when he was on screen?
You say you "absolutly loath vi" after having read this book. Did you like it before? Because I find vi to be an excellent editor; it lets me keep my fingers on the keyboard where they belong and gets a lot of work done with relatively few keystrokes. And if you also liked it before reading the book, I would think it's sad to change your opinion just because a book told you so.
I wonder (and I really do wonder, I'm not an OS hacker at all) if Minix might not have suffered from the same limitations--i.e., it's designed for teaching, but are it's lessons the ones people use in the real world?.
Maybe because we can't grammatical sentences?
Doesn't matter. If I buy a car from General Motors, GM has no right to tell me I can't taxi Ford workers to and from their workplace. That's "helping a competitor" with a product I bought from them, and if they don't like it, tough. This EULA is trying to prohibit an analogous freedom.
And as far as the "Slashdot hippies" crack and non-free software goes: this isn't about cost, as most of us (not all, but most) didn't complain about Linus using Bitkeeper in the first place. Non-free software prevents what you can do to that software; that's a choice Linus made. But even makers of non-free software don't have the right to tell you what to do with the software. Microsoft has no legal power to stop me from writing an anti-MS diatribe using MS Word, not with a (hypothetical) copy I bought from them. It's mine, that's that.
Closes out lynx, fires up Mozilla...
"Oh...I get it. No graphics."
Due to the Joint Operating Agreement signed a decade ago, both the Detroit News and the Free Press publish their Sunday editions together. It's called, yes, the Detroit News-Free Press. Which is how most of us think about both papers anyhow.
(*Note thatI said intended; I don't know anyone personally who uses it, but the examples I've seen are pretty interesting.)
Meanwhile, entering "Michael Jordan" in vivisimo gets me: sports, NBA, Posters, Pictures, Bulls-Chicago, Air, Tribute, Space Jam, Shoes... the list goes on and on, but no computer science. Even using "NOT basketball" still brings up basketball references exclusively .
Putting "computer scientists" in vivisimo, I get: research, engineers, interest, American, mathematics, study, issue, history, memory, life, and "more." None of these give me any indication that they hold information about anyone named Michael Jordan. Even clicking a few levels deeper on the directories didn't do it.
So the score is: Google getting it on the first try vs. vivisimo never finding it. We should all be "doomed" like that.
- Apple
- Blueberry
- Pumpkin
- Pecan
- Hair
Okay, enough puerile humor for one day...Yeah, I was thinking more about the modularity and data hiding than that one, though.
In most Hollywood productions, the writer usually has little or no control over what finally makes it onto the screen. The producer can add or subtract anything he wants, because he's paying the bills. And producers don't revise for clarity or coherence, they make business decisions. (Well, most. Some break this mold, but they're usually the writer/producer/director auteurs.)Directors and A-list stars also have enough clout to change things around, depending on what their contract says.
Also, stuff that looks good on paper or in the mind's eye might not be practical to shoot (for whatever reasons), or just not look as good when it comes out. Someone might decide that the odd Gilbert & Sullivan reference was just a little too cute to be the crucial clue that solves the puzzle, or that the attacking mushroom people looked cool, but not cool enough to divert the Enterprise to their homeworld.
That's not to say what gets cut just to make it PG-13. Take one exploding head out, and you might have to rewrite every scene that character was in.
So a writer who's aware of that will add stuff that will make a four-hour movie, knowing that not all of it will be shot, and knowing that not all of it that gets shot will make it past the cutting floor. When you get down to it, the plot is almost like the music, in that composers don't write symponies for movies, they write themes and bits that can be inserted into the movie at numerous points. The long and the short of it is, draft screenplays are almost always different, and often radically so, from the final product.
(P.S., didn't I read somewhere that Lucas rewrote the light saber fight between Obi-wan and Vader after shooting had begun? The original had him survive, and Guinness fought against having him sacrifice himself. Of course, George is one who'll rewrite a movie twenty years after releasing it, so maybe that's not the best example.)
Albuquerque's average daily high in February is around 55, and the low is around 28. You're right, I didn't check my facts. Still, let's assume it's halfway between the high and low, say 42 degrees. Still hardly finger-numbing weather. And that also doesn't let McDonald's off the hook.
The number of people who comment on this case without even looking up the most easily-found facts is staggering. It's not like it's an ink-blot test where you can make up whatever shit springs to mind. But let's make a list of your assumptions:
- Putting cream and sugar in coffee will lower the temperature by fifty degrees. (Ten degrees, I'll take. Fifty, no. Besides, she didn't get a chance to put anything in the coffee before it burned her.)
- McDonald's thought people would wait for their coffee to cool down. (They already stated that that's not what most people did.)
- February mornings are so cold in Albuquerque that people regularly warm their hands on a cup full of scalding beverage. (Albuquerque is roughly the same latitude as Phoenix and Amarillo, so unless they'd been experiencing an uncommonly cold spell, it wouldn't have been below fifty at the lowest.)
- The woman "gulped" her coffee. (No. As I said before, it spilled before she even got a chance to find out how hot it was.)
- The woman put "creamy butter" on her hands before opening the lid. (Oh--that was an attempt at being witty. Sorry. I'll ignore that one.)
So, stripped of your flights of fancy, the fact remains that McDonald's knew this was, not only an accident waiting to happen, but an accident that had already happened to other people. They just sat on their hands, refusing to do anything until a case got so severe that they couldn't ignore it. That's "takeing" care of their customers? Right.As far as ridiculous, well, I've pulled this paragraph out of the page:
So tell me: deliberately selling a drink that was, by McDonald's own admission, "not fit for consumption" even though they knew that burns would occur--isn't that a little bit more ridiculous than the money the jury awarded her?
Maybe that's what he's doing, but the message that you can't trust a pre-emptive police state is written pretty obviously throughout the movie, and it went into production before 9/11. So he's capitalizing on a wider social context than just the current hysteria/paranoia. And why shouldn't he? Don't artists get to criticize society? And does doing a kiddie movie like E.T. automatically and forever prevent him from having anything to say about the world?