Oh, thank god! Some one who actually remembers. Putting the whole crew (or even a large portion of it) that was assigned to Enterprise for the TOS 5-year mission together for their academy years is a continuity nightmare.
Maybe it's plausible that Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty were on campus in one capacity or another at the same time. (Sulu, Ohura, Checkov, Rand, etc., of course, are way too young.) The most interesting year to set it in is probably 2254, when Kirk would have been nearing graduation. (Kirk takes command of Enterprise in 2267 for TOS.)
Plus, there's a great way to make it worse. Suppose the writers start digging through TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT characters to determine who was alive and could have been on earth when Kirk was a cadet. Guinan? Yes. Picard's Boothby? Not quite. Sarek? Yes. Pike? No - he was on command in deep space with Spock. Robert April? Maybe. Lt. Gary Mitchell? Yup. Everyone who visited the Nexus in Generations? Ewww.
The story says that Yahoo received a demand in China that was legal under Chinese law and that Yahoo turned over the information.
Suppose Yahoo were to receive a demand in the U.S. that was legal under U.S. law. What do you suppose they would do? . . . Perhaps they'd file an objection, but if it was overruled, they'd turn over the information in the U.S., too.
The only difference, if any, between what Yahoo would do in China and what they would do in the U.S. is in what info the government can demand.
"If you had an off switch, Doctor, would you not keep it a secret?" (Data, ST:TNG "Datalore")
MAL: . . . Which, how exactly does that work anyhow? SIMON: It's a safe word. The people who helped me break River out had intel that River and the other subjects were being embedded with behavioral conditioning. They taught me a safe word in case something happened. KAYLEE: Not sure I get it. SIMON: It's a phrase that makes her fall asleep. If I speak the words-- JAYNE: Don't say it! ZOE: It only works on her, Jayne. JAYNE: Well now I know that. (Serenity, 2005)
Who said anything about M$? You'd have done better to accuse me of being a DHS/CBP fanboy. (Which isn't true either, but YMMV.) If I deserve to be tarred for anything, it would have to be for suggesting that the failure of DHS to push the patch immediately was just a routine error.
For instance, I didn't mention that -- get your fanboy stamp ready -- M$ had the patch ready in time.
The only interesting thing in the whole piece is that the spokesman in December tried to deny that they'd been hit by a virus. That a government department has a cobbled together computer system full of M$ products that doesn't work, inconveniences people, and costs too much -- that's just routine. I submit that the reason news outlets (Wired, slashdot, etc.) care about this example of government waste is that they don't like DHS. Suppose the Social Security Administration, Medicaid, or Sallie Mae had a 1-day nationwide computer failure. Odds of that making slashdot are pretty slim.
ALL'S FAIR writes: How can we call down women who use what they've got to get ahead? In every endeavor (work, politics, sports, etc.) women who want to compete have to slog through a never-ending bog of discrimination. If a woman uses her looks to get ahead, that's her right. The success she gains by her looks will never balance out the discrimination she has to deal with.
PART OF THE PROBLEM writes: We are geeks. Geeks believe in the value of skill and intellect over physical appearance. In gaming, more than anywhere, we should try to eliminate looks as a factor in success. Women (or men) who have looks and use them to get ahead perpetuate a system that trods upon people whose gifts don't include looks. If we let looks matter here, the A-crowd will take over gaming just like it takes over everything else.
Clue-bat: Sponsorships are about celebrity, which includes skill, appearance, legend, and personality.
Look a NASCAR. Look at golf. Sponsorships do not track directly with success in competition. Look at talent shows like American Idol.
Sure, it may offend our geek principles that anything but skill can determine outcomes. But, now that money is involved, are we really surprised to see gaming descend to the same level as every other competition?
. . . CertifiedMail is here to certify the delivery of spam by the "important" spammers who have the resources to pay for it.
Not that I'm a fan of CertifiedMail, but like any whitelist, it will block a lot of spam. Lots of the spam (a) only exists because sending it costs ~zero and (b) comes from temporary addresses that wouldn't register. Getting a better class of spam (i.e. from people who think they have a chance of persuading me to buy something) would be an improvement.
It would reduce the workload on my filters, for one thing.
. . . the fact is that a lot (not all) management speak does actually have a purpose and meaning.
NewSpeak has another purpose, too. It serves as an (imperfect) abstraction layer to let people talk about the broad concepts without getting bogged down in the details. When used this way, NewSpeak is like talking about a While-Do loop without understanding the branch operations.
To be sure, we rightly criticize NewSpeak when it ignores a detail that turns out to be important (e.g. repeating unneeded ops in the heart of the loop). However, our solution to this cannot be that every conversation must be conducted in the business equivalent of assembly language.
They mean to the speaker what he imagines he means, and they mean to the listener what he imagines he hears.
Not for nothing do they call politics "the art of the possible". Real people constitute real obstacles even if they're silly buggers. Practice political judo. It requires less effort to deflect a NewSpeaker with a little NewSpeak than it does to stop him outright with the details. Then, you can move on to your objective.
other C-Speakers should be able to get the gist of it
The real danger of NewSpeak is when managers in your organization start drinking the koolaid that's been brewed for the outside. If your manager can't tell the difference between a snow-job and a real idea, that's when you have the submitter's problem.
Look. If your manager is an idiot, you may not be able to teach the pig to sing. Rather than wasting your time and annoying the pig, you may have to learn to talk to him in the language he wants to hear.
This is why reading Bruce is better than reading some random guy on slashdot. The man knows his stuff. Go RT whole FA. It's worth it just to hear some one say it straight without screwing something up.
I'll say this for the blackberry: it has improved our email culture. Email messages from blackberry users are shorter no matter where they send them from. Where I used to get:
After considering your suggestion that you do a . . . [two paragraph redundant description of my proposal] . . . , I have decided that this is a necessary step, despite the associated expense. You should begin right away. This is a top priority item that should be done before the other tasks you are currently working on.
Have fun. Beat me. Slap me. Mod me down. At which point, the mods proceeded to boost 12 comments up to +5. That's gotta be some sort of record in a single story.
I know that our denominational leadership doesn't use the term "fundamentalist" to describe our church. I don't think my congregation would describe themselves with that term, but I might be unpleasantly surprised about that.
Anyways. Good initial post, BTW. And, good journeys!
And remember: when we acknowledge the existence of an omnipotent being, we acknowledge that the means exist for faking everything -- the world could have been created yesterday, for all we can tell.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, thank god! Some one who actually remembers. Putting the whole crew (or even a large portion of it) that was assigned to Enterprise for the TOS 5-year mission together for their academy years is a continuity nightmare.
Maybe it's plausible that Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty were on campus in one capacity or another at the same time. (Sulu, Ohura, Checkov, Rand, etc., of course, are way too young.) The most interesting year to set it in is probably 2254, when Kirk would have been nearing graduation. (Kirk takes command of Enterprise in 2267 for TOS.)
Plus, there's a great way to make it worse. Suppose the writers start digging through TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT characters to determine who was alive and could have been on earth when Kirk was a cadet. Guinan? Yes. Picard's Boothby? Not quite. Sarek? Yes. Pike? No - he was on command in deep space with Spock. Robert April? Maybe. Lt. Gary Mitchell? Yup. Everyone who visited the Nexus in Generations? Ewww.
The story says that Yahoo received a demand in China that was legal under Chinese law and that Yahoo turned over the information.
Suppose Yahoo were to receive a demand in the U.S. that was legal under U.S. law. What do you suppose they would do? . . . Perhaps they'd file an objection, but if it was overruled, they'd turn over the information in the U.S., too.
The only difference, if any, between what Yahoo would do in China and what they would do in the U.S. is in what info the government can demand.
It's all about methodology:
Do you play video games? "No."
Do you play cards? "Yes."
What kind? "Solitare."
Where? "On my computer."
Pick one.
Yup. Open source encourages everything.
That's the point.
"If you had an off switch, Doctor, would you not keep it a secret?"
(Data, ST:TNG "Datalore")
MAL: . . . Which, how exactly does that work anyhow?
SIMON: It's a safe word. The people who helped me break River out had intel that River and the other subjects were being embedded with behavioral conditioning. They taught me a safe word in case something happened.
KAYLEE: Not sure I get it.
SIMON: It's a phrase that makes her fall asleep. If I speak the words--
JAYNE: Don't say it!
ZOE: It only works on her, Jayne.
JAYNE: Well now I know that.
(Serenity, 2005)
Who said anything about M$? You'd have done better to accuse me of being a DHS/CBP fanboy. (Which isn't true either, but YMMV.) If I deserve to be tarred for anything, it would have to be for suggesting that the failure of DHS to push the patch immediately was just a routine error.
For instance, I didn't mention that -- get your fanboy stamp ready -- M$ had the patch ready in time.
The only interesting thing in the whole piece is that the spokesman in December tried to deny that they'd been hit by a virus. That a government department has a cobbled together computer system full of M$ products that doesn't work, inconveniences people, and costs too much -- that's just routine. I submit that the reason news outlets (Wired, slashdot, etc.) care about this example of government waste is that they don't like DHS. Suppose the Social Security Administration, Medicaid, or Sallie Mae had a 1-day nationwide computer failure. Odds of that making slashdot are pretty slim.
Who cares how much weight it can handle piled on it?
We want to know how much weight it can handle suspended from it.
Large organization gets hit by virus before patch testing is complete.
Film at 11.
(Can anyone say "slashdot bias"?)
ALL'S FAIR writes:
How can we call down women who use what they've got to get ahead? In every endeavor (work, politics, sports, etc.) women who want to compete have to slog through a never-ending bog of discrimination. If a woman uses her looks to get ahead, that's her right. The success she gains by her looks will never balance out the discrimination she has to deal with.
PART OF THE PROBLEM writes:
We are geeks. Geeks believe in the value of skill and intellect over physical appearance. In gaming, more than anywhere, we should try to eliminate looks as a factor in success. Women (or men) who have looks and use them to get ahead perpetuate a system that trods upon people whose gifts don't include looks. If we let looks matter here, the A-crowd will take over gaming just like it takes over everything else.
Clue-bat: Sponsorships are about celebrity, which includes skill, appearance, legend, and personality.
Look a NASCAR. Look at golf. Sponsorships do not track directly with success in competition. Look at talent shows like American Idol.
Sure, it may offend our geek principles that anything but skill can determine outcomes. But, now that money is involved, are we really surprised to see gaming descend to the same level as every other competition?
(quote by Aaron Sorkin, The West Wing (1999))
. . . CertifiedMail is here to certify the delivery of spam by the "important" spammers who have the resources to pay for it.
Not that I'm a fan of CertifiedMail, but like any whitelist, it will block a lot of spam. Lots of the spam (a) only exists because sending it costs ~zero and (b) comes from temporary addresses that wouldn't register. Getting a better class of spam (i.e. from people who think they have a chance of persuading me to buy something) would be an improvement.
It would reduce the workload on my filters, for one thing.
. . . the fact is that a lot (not all) management speak does actually have a purpose and meaning.
NewSpeak has another purpose, too. It serves as an (imperfect) abstraction layer to let people talk about the broad concepts without getting bogged down in the details. When used this way, NewSpeak is like talking about a While-Do loop without understanding the branch operations.
To be sure, we rightly criticize NewSpeak when it ignores a detail that turns out to be important (e.g. repeating unneeded ops in the heart of the loop). However, our solution to this cannot be that every conversation must be conducted in the business equivalent of assembly language.
They mean to the speaker what he imagines he means, and they mean to the listener what he imagines he hears.
Not for nothing do they call politics "the art of the possible". Real people constitute real obstacles even if they're silly buggers. Practice political judo. It requires less effort to deflect a NewSpeaker with a little NewSpeak than it does to stop him outright with the details. Then, you can move on to your objective.
other C-Speakers should be able to get the gist of it
The real danger of NewSpeak is when managers in your organization start drinking the koolaid that's been brewed for the outside. If your manager can't tell the difference between a snow-job and a real idea, that's when you have the submitter's problem.
Look. If your manager is an idiot, you may not be able to teach the pig to sing. Rather than wasting your time and annoying the pig, you may have to learn to talk to him in the language he wants to hear.
All programs will be shown in their entirety, including commercials which cannot be avoided.
That's fine as far as it goes, but what everyone wants to know is, will there be a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom?
A: "Master"
This is why reading Bruce is better than reading some random guy on slashdot. The man knows his stuff. Go RT whole FA. It's worth it just to hear some one say it straight without screwing something up.
Scratch that. Never mind.
Have fun. Beat me. Slap me. Mod me down.
At which point, the mods proceeded to boost 12 comments up to +5. That's gotta be some sort of record in a single story.
Practice makes perfect.
Who'd have thunk it?
I know that our denominational leadership doesn't use the term "fundamentalist" to describe our church. I don't think my congregation would describe themselves with that term, but I might be unpleasantly surprised about that.
;-)
Anyways. Good initial post, BTW. And, good journeys!
And remember: when we acknowledge the existence of an omnipotent being, we acknowledge that the means exist for faking everything -- the world could have been created yesterday, for all we can tell.