So, the happy owners of the affected laptops can now issue certificates and/or sign drivers, which will be accepted as genuine by other owners of Dell hardware?
Seriously? If so, that's just too dumb to be malicious...
It's not too dumb to be willful negligence -- defined in legal dictionaries as "Intentional performance of an unreasonable act in disregard of a known risk..."
Having the know-how to do such a thing necessarily entails knowledge of why its a bad idea. So either an engineer acted in breech of professional ethics, or managers rode roughshod over the engineers' objections.
Speaking as someone who learned C in 1980, C was originally thought of as a low-level language -- a suitable replacement in most cases for assembly language that, while abstracting underlying details like the CPU instruction set and registers, remained relatively small and "close to the hardware". Then later 80s I was asked to take over a course on C, and when I looked at the course description I was surprised to see it described as a "high level language". I asked the person who wrote the description what he meant by "high level language", and he really had no idea. He said he meant it was "powerful", which of course is just as vague when comparing any two Turing equivalent languages.
Of course "high level" vs. "low level" is relative. C is "high level" in comparison to assembly, or "B", in which the only datatype was a computer word. On the other hand C "low level" in comparison to most other languages that hide away the details of the hardware like instruction set and registers and such. So it depends on what you're comparing to; but in general I think people who describe C as "low level" know more about what they're talking about than those who call it a "high level" language.
The important thing isn't whether C is "high" or "low" level; it is what makes C work, which is largely about what was left out. It didn't have all the bells and whistles of something like PL/1, which made the language easy to implement, even on a tiny 8 bit microcomputer, and easy to learn, in the form of a slim, almost pamphlet-like book (The C Programming Language, 1st edition was 228 paperback-sized pages long).
Even so, C has become very slightly more "higher level" over the years. The original K&R C was more weakly typed than the later ANSI C. Particularly when you were dealing with pointers, the declared type of a pointer in K&R C was more of a mnemonic aid to the programmer than anything else.
What would be nice is if they learned about it before they develop habitual patterns for using a language/platform.
The problem is that people who teach n00bs want to give them the success experience of updating a database early on, before they've learned about prepared statements and (the much broader topic) of checking user input. If they'd just stop that then over the course of years the problem would become much smaller.
Of course Corporate America is supposed to rule America. What do you think the word "capital" in "Capitalism" means? Rule of those with capital., i.e. rule of the rich.
Funny, I thought capitalism was an economic system in which capital goods are owned by private individuals or corporations and in which decisions about pricing, production and distribution of the output of those capital goods is determined by the owners in a free market. Note that this does not preclude myriad forms of government regulation.
The only surprise is how "capitalism" has been marketed to Americans such that generations of them defend the rule of the rich as some utopia or ideal.
Well it's hardly surprising that private interests have rebranded regulation in the public interest by the boogey-man term "socialism", but I expect we are seeing early signs that this is starting to backfire. Americans in my generation associate "socialism" with the Soviet Union -- as a kind of "Communism lite". Millennials are increasingly apt to associate the word with the kind of "Nordic model" social democracy practiced in hellholes like Denmark and Sweden [note irony].
It's pointless to try to get the politicians to care until after you've got the voters to care.
"Care" of course means more than agreeing in principle that having a space exploration plan would be a good thing; it means when progress doesn't happen you get upset. Most people think some kind of space exploration plan would be a good thing, but very few care when it doesn't happen.
Well, making a lot of money doesn't take a lot of brains if the rules of the "game" allow you to use guns to seize productive assets, particularly of the extract-from-the-ground variety (oil, diamonds, tantalum etc.). This is particularly true when those things are geographically located in a place that has a power vacuum.
In such situations boldness and ruthlessness will either get you killed or make you rich.
Sure, but it is an open question of whether ingested megadoses of Vitamin C behave the same way, which was the poster's question. Sometimes nutrients act differently depending on how you get them; for example taking calcium supplements increases you chances of getting kidney stones, but eating the same amount in calcium-rich foods for some reason does not. So it's at least conceivable that getting 50,000 units of D through your gut might be a different story than 50,000 generated in your skin.
In any case I doubt that farmer gets 50,000 every day year 'round. Spain is at around 40 degrees north latitude. If you took that much D in pill form you wouldn't get sick right away; it takes several months to poison yourself at that level, after which the Sun is going to be lower in the sky.
The problem with that rule is that it presumes people are reasonable -- as in still in possession of their reason.
I have a young relative who is an anti-vaxxer. She's not stupid; she's paranoid -- about corporations and authority figures. It's the left-wing version of the right wing's hysterical climate denialism. Unfortunately she's not only nutty; she's also extremely charismatic. She's set herself up as a "certified" alternative health coach and she's recently started spreading anti-chemotherapy propaganda, although I think I've dissuaded her not to do that. She claimed she was just "sharing information", but my argument was that people are overwhelmed with contradictory data; she had to take into account that people will believe information they get from her *because* it came from her.
Now you could argue that people who buy snake oil get what they deserve -- I'd concede that point. But the people around them affected by their taking snake oil instead of medicine don't deserve what *they* get, especially if the dupe in question is a parent who is taking herbs instead of getting cancer treatment or is sending her kids to a "measles party" instead of getting them vaccinated.
I'm not sure what you're referring to about Vitamin D; the only regulation proposal I've heard is that the FDA is recommending the 400 units (the current RDA) be clearly marked on eyedroppers for liquid formulations, which seems sensible. They apparently limit vitamin D in milk to 400 units, which seems kind of low, but I think the rationale is that consumers might not be able track all the vitamin D they get from various sources. Now personally I've seen gel caps for sale offering 10,000 units, which is getting to the point where a person of normal weight could poison himself by taking four or five pills a day.
The problem that I have with anthropogenic global warming is that it started out sounded like a science-based issue, but it has since moved into the realm that's more reminiscent of a religion (complete with established dogma, punishment of heretics, an apocalyptic theology, etc.).
It's easy to have this perception if you haven't really been following the details of the debate, other the bowdlerized version in the (now emasculated) press.
The debate goes back over a hundred years. AGW was well and thoroughly debunked in the early 20th century, and on solid scientific grounds. For example it was "known" that CO2 was in equilibrium between the oceans and the atmosphere; the bulk of any increase in atmospheric CO2 would be absorbed into the oceans.
So what happened? Well, lots of things. Oceanographers went out and observed the ocean and realized that it's buffering capacity was much less than thought. We gained access to the upper atmosphere, which debunked the scientific consensus that increases in surface temperature would get mixed away. In the 50s we got the technology to make precise enough measurements of atmospheric CO2 to track its increase. And from the 60s on we gained the ability to track and correlate large bodies of data whereas researchers until then were limited to manually processing small quantities of data with pencil and paper. That's the most important point and I'll come back to it in a moment.
AGW became a political issue when An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, and it seemed to many of us like everything we learned about climate in our obsolete 1960s textbooks was being tossed out overnight. But it wasn't overnight. If you go back and follow the debate from the mid-50s using Google Scholar you'll see it took almost four hard-fought decades for the overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion to shift from against to in favor of AGW.
Well, what about the "dogmatic" dismissal of all the evidence against AGW? Well, complex systems always generate contradictory-looking data points. Let's say we tracked the state of the retail economy heading into the Great Depression by following a single representative company: Woolworths. The worse people said things were getting in "the economy", the more out of touch with reality they'd seem to us to be: Woolworth's gross sales in the so-called "Great Depression" kept going up. But if you looked at the big picture consumer spending had plummeted by 25% and retail prices had taken a nose dive, and this explains while Woolworths was thriving; it was displacing traditional retailers with higher overhead that couldn't survive the shock.
Much of the "debunking" climate data -- where it stands up to scrutiny -- is of this sort. For example take a look at this graph of temperatures in Greenland. The temperature spike you see at 1000 YBP is the famous "Medieval Warm Period", and if you go back to 7000 YBP and 8000 YBP it was even warmer. So does that disprove that the world is getting warmer? Are climate scientists who shrug this off being dogmatic?
No, because Greenland isn't the whole world; nor is the North Atlantic region that warmed in the MWP. This gets back to my point about data processing; you need to crunch a lot of data to get the global picture, which as far as we know looks like this.
It seems dogmatic if scientists don't believe what we want to be true and which we can back up with evidence. But there's always evidence in something like climate to support any position you'd like to take. It's the pattern of evidence that matters.
I used it very successfully. But I've been in this business in the 80's, and the same thing has been through of every development methodology and philosophy that's come down the pike: some people use it and report great success, but that success never translates to *everybody* who uses it -- much less just to those who merely pay lip service to it.
That's because you have to be realistic about what a methodology can achieve. It can put useful tools in the hands of fundamentally competent organizations, but it can't fix broken organizations and especially can't fix broken people.
Scrum was never a solution for everybody, but where it is appropriate it does a good job giving developers a little running room to get things actually done while at the same time ensuring their targets are tracking the organization's evolving needs. But that's not going to help if you have an organization that doesn't know what it needs, which is 90% of any successful development project.
Successful software development depends on the supporting organization's competence at managing people.
But if it has ten legs you can charge $9/pound for it if it's lobster, $15/pound if it's shrimp.
The distinction between crustaceans (like lobster and shrimp) and insects is literally academic. In fact about five years ago a paper came out suggesting that insects are crustaceans, although this has been tidied up by introducing a new clade to sit between the Arthropoda phylum and the Hexapoda and Crustacea sub-phyla: Pancrustacea.
And in point of fact eating insects has at some point in most cultures been considered normal. In Europe cheeses were often traditionally eaten with their accompanying insect populations -- the cheese mite for cheddar for example, or Piophila casei larvae for casu marzu in Italy. It has only been in modern times that its even possible to create such foods without insect hitchhikers, and we have come to associate insects with harmful contamination -- which they may be -- and consider them harmful -- which they may not be, any more than fungal growth is necessarily harmful (e.g. blue cheese).
In my lifetime I've seen a big shift in attitude in the US toward bacterial fermentation, which was also associated with contamination. Americans were introduced to yogurt around the time I was in middle school; it was exotic stuff. When James Beard published his "James Beard Cookbook" in 1959, he had to explain that "sour cream" wasn't the same thing as spoiled cream.
It's only hard if your standard of success is make it a thing that "everyone" is doing. Why not just spread the and if only a few people pick it up, that's OK.
The thing that's offensive about Black Friday news coverage is the subtle implication that "everyone else" is subjecting themselves to it, so you should too. Well screw that. It's OK to do something that doesn't have the imprimatur of the herd. Every day is a gift you get only once; you should spend it doing something you find rewarding.
Now some people may genuinely enjoy the whole Black Friday experience; if that's the case I've got nothing against that. But there's a kind of media complicity in turning people into mindless consumer sheep that's understandable given that outlets like Slashdot are businesses that need to generate revenue. But the owners ought to understand their audience better. Black Friday isn't "news for nerd"; White Friday would be. If they were smart the editors would run with the idea.
Some of those fan productions have been quite good; not as good as the very best of any of the series, but a hell of a lot better than you'd think if you imagine them by the standards of typical fan fic. These are labors of love, and they're genuinely entertaining -- although I admit to being a little prejudiced in favor anything that someone obviously put so much care into.
As for competition, well one of the big difference between a pro and a dedicated amateur is that a pro can work a lot faster. These fan productions put out an episode every year or two; the official series churned out 25-30 episodes per year. In a way this was te franchise's artistic downfall; for the entire run of Deep Space 9 there were TWO Star Trek series in production; TNG in 94 and Voyager from 95 on. That meant they were putting out something like 50 episodes a year, and toward the end of the DS9 run it began to feel like they had more episodes on the broadcast schedule to fill than they had stories to tell. There were a number of episodes in DS9 and Voyager which damaged the franchise's reputation, which is a shame because both series at their best could be quite good.
The problem with these amateur productions is that even when they're surprisingly good they don't produce enough product; the problem with the series has consistently been that they've produced *too much* product. What I'd like to see is something like the old Columbo TV series, which put out a half dozen "movie of the week" episodes per year: less quantity (although not too much less), more quality.
There was this old guy who was a friend of my wife's family who was smart, and funny, and an all around reasonable guy -- unless the topic of hispanics came up. And then it was like he was a totally different person. He became a ranter, and everyone around him would try to change the subject.
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that he hated Hispanics. As far as he was concerned if you were born hispanic that automatically made you useless, human trash. For the life of me I couldn't figure out where he got that hatred. As it turns out I grew up in the same neighborhood he did, albeit forty years later, and only when I was a kid were there many hispanics moving in. He'd moved up in the world after WW2; he left the neighborhood and lived in a series of lily-white suburbs. So as far as I could tell he'd never even *known* any hispanics personally.
And in the end I came to the conclusion that was the whole point. He didn't hate backs, or Poles, or Jews, or Catholics or Italians -- because he grew up in a neighborhood with all of those kinds of people, or served with them during the war. His opinions on hispanics was formed in a kind of vacuum. After that forty years of confirmation bias, unchecked by any actual firsthand experience turned what had been commonplace casual bigotry into full-blown batshit craziness.
There's no point in having an editorial policy if you don't enforce it. The policy says the journal only allows papers on freely available software; the author submitted the article under those conditions then reneged, so he loses.
By that logic, a Harley Electra-Glide weighing in at 882 pounds should have better gas mileage than a Prius with a curb weight of 3042 pounds. It doesn't. The Harley gets about 42 mpg combined and the Prius gets around 50.
Physics says it takes more energy to accelerate 3000 pounds by a given amount in a vacuum than it does 882 pounds. It doesn't say that a gas burning vehicle that weighs over 3000 pounds will necessarily burn more gas (and thus emit more CO2) than a vehicle that weighs less than 900 pounds. Design and technology matter too. Of course it's easier to make a lighter vehicle that is more energy efficient if that's what's important to the designers. Some electric motorcycles have a carbon footprint equivalent to getting over 200 MPG.
Slashdot Mirror
So, the happy owners of the affected laptops can now issue certificates and/or sign drivers, which will be accepted as genuine by other owners of Dell hardware?
Seriously? If so, that's just too dumb to be malicious...
It's not too dumb to be willful negligence -- defined in legal dictionaries as "Intentional performance of an unreasonable act in disregard of a known risk..."
Having the know-how to do such a thing necessarily entails knowledge of why its a bad idea. So either an engineer acted in breech of professional ethics, or managers rode roughshod over the engineers' objections.
Speaking as someone who learned C in 1980, C was originally thought of as a low-level language -- a suitable replacement in most cases for assembly language that, while abstracting underlying details like the CPU instruction set and registers, remained relatively small and "close to the hardware". Then later 80s I was asked to take over a course on C, and when I looked at the course description I was surprised to see it described as a "high level language". I asked the person who wrote the description what he meant by "high level language", and he really had no idea. He said he meant it was "powerful", which of course is just as vague when comparing any two Turing equivalent languages.
Of course "high level" vs. "low level" is relative. C is "high level" in comparison to assembly, or "B", in which the only datatype was a computer word. On the other hand C "low level" in comparison to most other languages that hide away the details of the hardware like instruction set and registers and such. So it depends on what you're comparing to; but in general I think people who describe C as "low level" know more about what they're talking about than those who call it a "high level" language.
The important thing isn't whether C is "high" or "low" level; it is what makes C work, which is largely about what was left out. It didn't have all the bells and whistles of something like PL/1, which made the language easy to implement, even on a tiny 8 bit microcomputer, and easy to learn, in the form of a slim, almost pamphlet-like book (The C Programming Language, 1st edition was 228 paperback-sized pages long).
Even so, C has become very slightly more "higher level" over the years. The original K&R C was more weakly typed than the later ANSI C. Particularly when you were dealing with pointers, the declared type of a pointer in K&R C was more of a mnemonic aid to the programmer than anything else.
Made in Egypt ... With technology they got from refugees from Atlantis, clearly.
What would be nice is if they learned about it before they develop habitual patterns for using a language/platform.
The problem is that people who teach n00bs want to give them the success experience of updating a database early on, before they've learned about prepared statements and (the much broader topic) of checking user input. If they'd just stop that then over the course of years the problem would become much smaller.
Of course Corporate America is supposed to rule America. What do you think the word "capital" in "Capitalism" means? Rule of those with capital., i.e. rule of the rich.
Funny, I thought capitalism was an economic system in which capital goods are owned by private individuals or corporations and in which decisions about pricing, production and distribution of the output of those capital goods is determined by the owners in a free market. Note that this does not preclude myriad forms of government regulation.
The only surprise is how "capitalism" has been marketed to Americans such that generations of them defend the rule of the rich as some utopia or ideal.
Well it's hardly surprising that private interests have rebranded regulation in the public interest by the boogey-man term "socialism", but I expect we are seeing early signs that this is starting to backfire. Americans in my generation associate "socialism" with the Soviet Union -- as a kind of "Communism lite". Millennials are increasingly apt to associate the word with the kind of "Nordic model" social democracy practiced in hellholes like Denmark and Sweden [note irony].
Big business didn't exist in America until after the Civil War.
Greed is supposed to rule in Corporate America. But Corporate America is not supposed to rule America.
It's pointless to try to get the politicians to care until after you've got the voters to care.
"Care" of course means more than agreeing in principle that having a space exploration plan would be a good thing; it means when progress doesn't happen you get upset. Most people think some kind of space exploration plan would be a good thing, but very few care when it doesn't happen.
Politics runs on emotion, not critical thinking. This is a pitch, and it will likely accomplish its purpose of scaring/radicalizing people.
Clearly there could be the rise of a charismatic egomaniac...
If that's Trump, all I can say is, God, how our standards have fallen.
Now Windows is too old to get a job in IT.
Well, making a lot of money doesn't take a lot of brains if the rules of the "game" allow you to use guns to seize productive assets, particularly of the extract-from-the-ground variety (oil, diamonds, tantalum etc.). This is particularly true when those things are geographically located in a place that has a power vacuum.
In such situations boldness and ruthlessness will either get you killed or make you rich.
Sure, but it is an open question of whether ingested megadoses of Vitamin C behave the same way, which was the poster's question. Sometimes nutrients act differently depending on how you get them; for example taking calcium supplements increases you chances of getting kidney stones, but eating the same amount in calcium-rich foods for some reason does not. So it's at least conceivable that getting 50,000 units of D through your gut might be a different story than 50,000 generated in your skin.
In any case I doubt that farmer gets 50,000 every day year 'round. Spain is at around 40 degrees north latitude. If you took that much D in pill form you wouldn't get sick right away; it takes several months to poison yourself at that level, after which the Sun is going to be lower in the sky.
The problem with that rule is that it presumes people are reasonable -- as in still in possession of their reason.
I have a young relative who is an anti-vaxxer. She's not stupid; she's paranoid -- about corporations and authority figures. It's the left-wing version of the right wing's hysterical climate denialism. Unfortunately she's not only nutty; she's also extremely charismatic. She's set herself up as a "certified" alternative health coach and she's recently started spreading anti-chemotherapy propaganda, although I think I've dissuaded her not to do that. She claimed she was just "sharing information", but my argument was that people are overwhelmed with contradictory data; she had to take into account that people will believe information they get from her *because* it came from her.
Now you could argue that people who buy snake oil get what they deserve -- I'd concede that point. But the people around them affected by their taking snake oil instead of medicine don't deserve what *they* get, especially if the dupe in question is a parent who is taking herbs instead of getting cancer treatment or is sending her kids to a "measles party" instead of getting them vaccinated.
I'm not sure what you're referring to about Vitamin D; the only regulation proposal I've heard is that the FDA is recommending the 400 units (the current RDA) be clearly marked on eyedroppers for liquid formulations, which seems sensible. They apparently limit vitamin D in milk to 400 units, which seems kind of low, but I think the rationale is that consumers might not be able track all the vitamin D they get from various sources. Now personally I've seen gel caps for sale offering 10,000 units, which is getting to the point where a person of normal weight could poison himself by taking four or five pills a day.
The problem that I have with anthropogenic global warming is that it started out sounded like a science-based issue, but it has since moved into the realm that's more reminiscent of a religion (complete with established dogma, punishment of heretics, an apocalyptic theology, etc.).
It's easy to have this perception if you haven't really been following the details of the debate, other the bowdlerized version in the (now emasculated) press.
The debate goes back over a hundred years. AGW was well and thoroughly debunked in the early 20th century, and on solid scientific grounds. For example it was "known" that CO2 was in equilibrium between the oceans and the atmosphere; the bulk of any increase in atmospheric CO2 would be absorbed into the oceans.
So what happened? Well, lots of things. Oceanographers went out and observed the ocean and realized that it's buffering capacity was much less than thought. We gained access to the upper atmosphere, which debunked the scientific consensus that increases in surface temperature would get mixed away. In the 50s we got the technology to make precise enough measurements of atmospheric CO2 to track its increase. And from the 60s on we gained the ability to track and correlate large bodies of data whereas researchers until then were limited to manually processing small quantities of data with pencil and paper. That's the most important point and I'll come back to it in a moment.
AGW became a political issue when An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, and it seemed to many of us like everything we learned about climate in our obsolete 1960s textbooks was being tossed out overnight. But it wasn't overnight. If you go back and follow the debate from the mid-50s using Google Scholar you'll see it took almost four hard-fought decades for the overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion to shift from against to in favor of AGW.
Well, what about the "dogmatic" dismissal of all the evidence against AGW? Well, complex systems always generate contradictory-looking data points. Let's say we tracked the state of the retail economy heading into the Great Depression by following a single representative company: Woolworths. The worse people said things were getting in "the economy", the more out of touch with reality they'd seem to us to be: Woolworth's gross sales in the so-called "Great Depression" kept going up. But if you looked at the big picture consumer spending had plummeted by 25% and retail prices had taken a nose dive, and this explains while Woolworths was thriving; it was displacing traditional retailers with higher overhead that couldn't survive the shock.
Much of the "debunking" climate data -- where it stands up to scrutiny -- is of this sort. For example take a look at this graph of temperatures in Greenland. The temperature spike you see at 1000 YBP is the famous "Medieval Warm Period", and if you go back to 7000 YBP and 8000 YBP it was even warmer. So does that disprove that the world is getting warmer? Are climate scientists who shrug this off being dogmatic?
No, because Greenland isn't the whole world; nor is the North Atlantic region that warmed in the MWP. This gets back to my point about data processing; you need to crunch a lot of data to get the global picture, which as far as we know looks like this.
It seems dogmatic if scientists don't believe what we want to be true and which we can back up with evidence. But there's always evidence in something like climate to support any position you'd like to take. It's the pattern of evidence that matters.
I used it very successfully. But I've been in this business in the 80's, and the same thing has been through of every development methodology and philosophy that's come down the pike: some people use it and report great success, but that success never translates to *everybody* who uses it -- much less just to those who merely pay lip service to it.
That's because you have to be realistic about what a methodology can achieve. It can put useful tools in the hands of fundamentally competent organizations, but it can't fix broken organizations and especially can't fix broken people.
Scrum was never a solution for everybody, but where it is appropriate it does a good job giving developers a little running room to get things actually done while at the same time ensuring their targets are tracking the organization's evolving needs. But that's not going to help if you have an organization that doesn't know what it needs, which is 90% of any successful development project.
Successful software development depends on the supporting organization's competence at managing people.
But if it has ten legs you can charge $9/pound for it if it's lobster, $15/pound if it's shrimp.
The distinction between crustaceans (like lobster and shrimp) and insects is literally academic. In fact about five years ago a paper came out suggesting that insects are crustaceans, although this has been tidied up by introducing a new clade to sit between the Arthropoda phylum and the Hexapoda and Crustacea sub-phyla: Pancrustacea.
And in point of fact eating insects has at some point in most cultures been considered normal. In Europe cheeses were often traditionally eaten with their accompanying insect populations -- the cheese mite for cheddar for example, or Piophila casei larvae for casu marzu in Italy. It has only been in modern times that its even possible to create such foods without insect hitchhikers, and we have come to associate insects with harmful contamination -- which they may be -- and consider them harmful -- which they may not be, any more than fungal growth is necessarily harmful (e.g. blue cheese).
In my lifetime I've seen a big shift in attitude in the US toward bacterial fermentation, which was also associated with contamination. Americans were introduced to yogurt around the time I was in middle school; it was exotic stuff. When James Beard published his "James Beard Cookbook" in 1959, he had to explain that "sour cream" wasn't the same thing as spoiled cream.
It's only hard if your standard of success is make it a thing that "everyone" is doing. Why not just spread the and if only a few people pick it up, that's OK.
The thing that's offensive about Black Friday news coverage is the subtle implication that "everyone else" is subjecting themselves to it, so you should too. Well screw that. It's OK to do something that doesn't have the imprimatur of the herd. Every day is a gift you get only once; you should spend it doing something you find rewarding.
Now some people may genuinely enjoy the whole Black Friday experience; if that's the case I've got nothing against that. But there's a kind of media complicity in turning people into mindless consumer sheep that's understandable given that outlets like Slashdot are businesses that need to generate revenue. But the owners ought to understand their audience better. Black Friday isn't "news for nerd"; White Friday would be. If they were smart the editors would run with the idea.
... Oh, wait.
It seemed to me that both DS9 and Voyager ran out of story ideas at the same time; perhaps it was a coincidence.
Some of those fan productions have been quite good; not as good as the very best of any of the series, but a hell of a lot better than you'd think if you imagine them by the standards of typical fan fic. These are labors of love, and they're genuinely entertaining -- although I admit to being a little prejudiced in favor anything that someone obviously put so much care into.
As for competition, well one of the big difference between a pro and a dedicated amateur is that a pro can work a lot faster. These fan productions put out an episode every year or two; the official series churned out 25-30 episodes per year. In a way this was te franchise's artistic downfall; for the entire run of Deep Space 9 there were TWO Star Trek series in production; TNG in 94 and Voyager from 95 on. That meant they were putting out something like 50 episodes a year, and toward the end of the DS9 run it began to feel like they had more episodes on the broadcast schedule to fill than they had stories to tell. There were a number of episodes in DS9 and Voyager which damaged the franchise's reputation, which is a shame because both series at their best could be quite good.
The problem with these amateur productions is that even when they're surprisingly good they don't produce enough product; the problem with the series has consistently been that they've produced *too much* product. What I'd like to see is something like the old Columbo TV series, which put out a half dozen "movie of the week" episodes per year: less quantity (although not too much less), more quality.
There was this old guy who was a friend of my wife's family who was smart, and funny, and an all around reasonable guy -- unless the topic of hispanics came up. And then it was like he was a totally different person. He became a ranter, and everyone around him would try to change the subject.
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that he hated Hispanics. As far as he was concerned if you were born hispanic that automatically made you useless, human trash. For the life of me I couldn't figure out where he got that hatred. As it turns out I grew up in the same neighborhood he did, albeit forty years later, and only when I was a kid were there many hispanics moving in. He'd moved up in the world after WW2; he left the neighborhood and lived in a series of lily-white suburbs. So as far as I could tell he'd never even *known* any hispanics personally.
And in the end I came to the conclusion that was the whole point. He didn't hate backs, or Poles, or Jews, or Catholics or Italians -- because he grew up in a neighborhood with all of those kinds of people, or served with them during the war. His opinions on hispanics was formed in a kind of vacuum. After that forty years of confirmation bias, unchecked by any actual firsthand experience turned what had been commonplace casual bigotry into full-blown batshit craziness.
There's no point in having an editorial policy if you don't enforce it. The policy says the journal only allows papers on freely available software; the author submitted the article under those conditions then reneged, so he loses.
Exactly. There are a huge number of people who are allowed to nominate, including anyone who is a professor of economics.
By that logic, a Harley Electra-Glide weighing in at 882 pounds should have better gas mileage than a Prius with a curb weight of 3042 pounds. It doesn't. The Harley gets about 42 mpg combined and the Prius gets around 50.
Physics says it takes more energy to accelerate 3000 pounds by a given amount in a vacuum than it does 882 pounds. It doesn't say that a gas burning vehicle that weighs over 3000 pounds will necessarily burn more gas (and thus emit more CO2) than a vehicle that weighs less than 900 pounds. Design and technology matter too. Of course it's easier to make a lighter vehicle that is more energy efficient if that's what's important to the designers. Some electric motorcycles have a carbon footprint equivalent to getting over 200 MPG.