Hmm. I suspect you are right. To me "came up with" does not mean "thought up something nobody in the world had ever thought of before", but it appears that to quite a few people it must mean that.
I kind of have to laugh at all the replies I got to this.
The sort of funny part is how everyone is tripping over themselves to point out that someone else had a similar idea earlier. I never once said otherwise, it was just an example. But the hilarious part is that I was flat out wrong, and nobody caught that at all.
I did a bit more research on this, and it turns out that the mass drivers were *not* Harlan's idea. They weren't even particularly nasty by Babylon-5 standards. They were employed by the Centauri, who were barely even a major power. There were two "superraces" in the B5 universe, each of which had their own planet-killer. The Vorlons had some kind of planetary bombarder that rendered the surface essentially uninhabitable. Details weren't really provided.
For the Shadows JMS wanted something scarier, and that's where Harlan came in. To quote from BabTech
They used a large web-like structure that was covered with some kind of dust-like cloud. This web encircles a planet, trapping it's inhabitants inside. The cloud prevents scanners from penetrating to or through the web. When the planet is completely enveloped, the web begins firing missiles. These missiles drill into the surface of the planet. When they reach deep inside the planet close to the core, they detonate.
The energy release from these missiles causes earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunami, etc. The planet quickly becomes a barren wasteland with a poisoned atmosphere that is uninhabitable to any known lifeform.
In Babylon-5 Harlan Ellison came up with mass drivers as an immoral weapon of mass-destruction on a planet-wide scale. The idea is that you grab nearby asteroids and bombard a habitated planet with them at very high speed. Not only does it indiscriminately kill the population, but the dust kicked up prevents proper plant growth over the entire planet for years, perhaps decades.
TFA seems to imply that this was something unique. However, I remember the old Thicke of the Night (Alan Thicke's late night talk show, from back when everybody had one in the early 80's), had a regular bit where about 4 or 5 comedians got together and did the same thing. The only real difference was that it was only a few minutes instead of the duration of an entire B movie. Well...that and nobody was pretending to be a robot.
Since I'm probably the only person still alive who witnessed this, I guess it's safe to claim that Joel and friends invented the concept.
Even worse, you will see people deny that Obama was given better treatment than McCain. They will probably say something similar to that old Politico story that basically says, "We had to give Obama better coverage. It's not our fault that McCain sucks".
Well...yeah. It is supposed to be the media's job to report what's going on. It is *not* their job to make the Republican candidate look better than he is for the sake of "balance". If Republicans don't like that, they should try nominating better candidates.
In retrospect he should have done the exact same thing but without the cameras and the press.... Instead they turned it into a political photo-op.
That's silly. Without the cameras and the press, Bush would have stayed home in the first place. The whole point of it from start to finish was that it was a political photo-op. For instance, many people forget that they had Bush himself land a fighter on the carrier (with of course a competent copilot sitting behind him). The "Mission Accomplished" banner is now known (after much lying to the contrary) to have been ordered put up by Rove. They were pulling out all the stops to make sure the press was there watching.
If Bush really cared about the enlisted, you'd be able to tell by a lot more things than just giving speeches (quietly or otherwise). He would have made sure they got armored Humvees when they needed them. He would have pushed to get them modern body armor, rather than dragging his feet. He would have made sure the military hospital system was properly funded. He would have supported the new GI bill.
More importantly, he would have spent more effort planning the occupation than he spent planning that photo-op. He would have made sure the occupation authority was staffed with the most competent people he could find, not the most loyal idealogues Liberty University could pump out. He would have made sure that this nation's most vital interests were in dire danger before sending them out to die for us in the first place.
That's part of the problem. I'm starting to have trouble remembering where my towel is these days. Frood, sooner or later you have to sass that you just aren't as hoopy as you used to be.
This is quite unsual. The summary is fairly accurate, but the author of TFA apparently didn't RTFA. He has totally missed the point of Worse is Better, which one thinks he would have gotten if he'd read to the end:
The right thing is frequently a monolithic piece of software, but for no reason other than that the right thing is often designed monolithically. That is, this characteristic is a happenstance.
The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.
The idea is that you don't sweat doing the Right Thing if it is really difficult to do, as that will actually hamper acceptence. What good does Payne's perfect Internet do for anyone if nobody but him has a node on it? Over time, our old imperfect internet will get incrementally fixed so that it is almost as keen (if not moreso), and everybody will be using it. If things didn't work this way, we'd all be gaming on Amiga's today instead of PC's.
Your own comment indicts him. If the problem is that pervasive, then it's clearly systemic. Who is reponsible for maintaining and operating the system? The government, that's who.
Who spent the last 7 years ripping out every business regulation he could get hold of, and refusing to enforce most of the rest? That would be our wonderful holders of the executive branch.
Obama stated that he wanted to take that success and spread it to people that made less than Joe hoped to make with his business acquisition and hard work
That was not what Obama was trying to say, and it was pretty clear if you actually watched the full video.
The points Obama made to Joe in the full video were:
His tax cut plan would have helped Joe back when he made less than $250, so that he could have been able to buy that business sooner.
His business will make much more money if %95 of the population has more money to spend on plummers.
If you watch, Obama was repectful and well-argued. The guy didn't really have any comeback at all, except repeating (progressively more subdued) "my taxes will go up", and even that turned out to be untrue. The whole "spread the wealth" thing is just Repubs trying to play content-less gotcha politics.
Typically, absentee ballots and any other form of mail-in votes are not even counted unless the outcome is very close and/or disputed.
What you are talking about is a provisional ballot. I have heard that some states used to count absentee ballots as provisional ballots (Florida?). However, I don't actually know of any state that still does this. I know for a fact that Oklahoma does not. A quick web search brought me citations that "battleground" states Ohio and Pennsylvania also count all absentee votes unconditionally. Check with your own state's board of elections if you are unsure.
Turnout is expected to be so huge next Tuesday, and lines in some places so long, that voting absentee is liable to be the best thing you can do to amplify your vote. Not only are you assured of getting a chance to vote, but by making the line one person shorter you may allow some other person to vote who would not have been able to wait otherwise. For that reason, one of the local Obama campaigns here is asking everyone to vote absentee.
I also think it is a superior way to vote, as you don't have to worry about making snap decisions on unexpected things you find on the ballot when you get there. There's nothing like being faced with playing "creationist roulette" on a school board ballot full of unfamiliar names.
Deadlines for applying for absentee ballots are fast approaching though. In Oklahoma, it is the day after tomorrow.
Being 41, I was rather dismayed to see this article. Even more upsetting was the fact that I then proceeded to left click on it, rather than my ususal middle-click to open it in a tab.
Not gonna be a clean mode of transport if you factor in where the electricity is generated from.
Probably not. But at least you can attack the emmissions problem at a couple hundred of places instead of having to do it at 10 million places. That brings the problem down from totally hopeless to meerly hard.
That's actually part of the problem. WoW is essentially sucking all the oxygen out of the room. Who has time to try out a potentially great new game when they are trying desperately to level up their characters or reputation or gear in WoW?
If you look at it as two separate industries: the MMORPG industry and the PC gaming industry, the former is doing OK (particularly if your name is Blizzard), but the latter has been doing much worse in the last couple of years.
Git is an excellent piece of software, but Windows performance is not so great.
That's a bit of a myth. Windows Git is slower than Git on Liunx (since that was its native platform). However, I found it to be far faster than SourceSafe on the same machine.
If you think about it, there's really no way SourceSafe could even hope to compete, really. Even if it were the best-written code in the world (30 second pause while I try to stop laughing), SourceSafe has to go out to the network every time you want to do anything with a file. The same with CVS, SVN, etc. (unless your repository isn't shared). Git users only need the network for the initial pulldown and the occasional merge back up.
The original sources for the "Windows Git is slow" comments were Linux developers who were used to Git on Linux, not Windows developers who are used to other source control software on Windows.
Pft... I'd actually like to get Spore working before before I get any expansion. I bought the game and it played fine for three days without a hitch and then decided to give up on life and refuses to run for long before running into issues and crashing. EA's customer support has been
Could be that your GPU (video card) fan died. Software doesn't tend to go bad over time like hardware does.
If you start having trouble due to flaky hardware, I would imagine that EA customer support would be rather unhelpful to you.
To be honest, I don't believe he achieved those four goals during his presidency, so I'm not sure one can say Reagonomics worked or not.
This is roughly the same thing die-hard communists say these days about communisim. It's the tinkerbell theory: It only failed because you didn't believe hard enough!
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. I suspect you are right. To me "came up with" does not mean "thought up something nobody in the world had ever thought of before", but it appears that to quite a few people it must mean that.
Actually, that was Harlan Ellison's idea. JMS had him on the show with some nebulous producer title specifically to help out with stuff like this.
I kind of have to laugh at all the replies I got to this.
The sort of funny part is how everyone is tripping over themselves to point out that someone else had a similar idea earlier. I never once said otherwise, it was just an example. But the hilarious part is that I was flat out wrong, and nobody caught that at all.
I did a bit more research on this, and it turns out that the mass drivers were *not* Harlan's idea. They weren't even particularly nasty by Babylon-5 standards. They were employed by the Centauri, who were barely even a major power.
There were two "superraces" in the B5 universe, each of which had their own planet-killer. The Vorlons had some kind of planetary bombarder that rendered the surface essentially uninhabitable. Details weren't really provided.
For the Shadows JMS wanted something scarier, and that's where Harlan came in. To quote from BabTech
They used a large web-like structure that was covered with some kind of dust-like cloud. This web encircles a planet, trapping it's inhabitants inside. The cloud prevents scanners from penetrating to or through the web. When the planet is completely enveloped, the web begins firing missiles. These missiles drill into the surface of the planet. When they reach deep inside the planet close to the core, they detonate.
The energy release from these missiles causes earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunami, etc. The planet quickly becomes a barren wasteland with a poisoned atmosphere that is uninhabitable to any known lifeform.
In Babylon-5 Harlan Ellison came up with mass drivers as an immoral weapon of mass-destruction on a planet-wide scale. The idea is that you grab nearby asteroids and bombard a habitated planet with them at very high speed. Not only does it indiscriminately kill the population, but the dust kicked up prevents proper plant growth over the entire planet for years, perhaps decades.
TFA seems to imply that this was something unique. However, I remember the old Thicke of the Night (Alan Thicke's late night talk show, from back when everybody had one in the early 80's), had a regular bit where about 4 or 5 comedians got together and did the same thing. The only real difference was that it was only a few minutes instead of the duration of an entire B movie. Well...that and nobody was pretending to be a robot.
Since I'm probably the only person still alive who witnessed this, I guess it's safe to claim that Joel and friends invented the concept.
Without home stills, there would never have been bootlegging. Without bootlegging, we wouldn't today have NASCAR.
That ought to get a few red-state politicians to rethink their positions.
In general, conservative policies are only good for big business and the investor class.
Perhaps where you live. In the US historicaly the stock market and the GDP have done much better under Democratic presidents.
Even worse, you will see people deny that Obama was given better treatment than McCain. They will probably say something similar to that old Politico story that basically says, "We had to give Obama better coverage. It's not our fault that McCain sucks".
Well...yeah. It is supposed to be the media's job to report what's going on. It is *not* their job to make the Republican candidate look better than he is for the sake of "balance". If Republicans don't like that, they should try nominating better candidates.
So instead of 30 people crowded on a mob spawn online, you'd have 30 people looking at their cellphones crowded around a mob spawn in RL? Ick.
Now you'll be able to tell the geeks, because they will be the ones with the pocket-projectors.
In retrospect he should have done the exact same thing but without the cameras and the press. ... Instead they turned it into a political photo-op.
That's silly. Without the cameras and the press, Bush would have stayed home in the first place. The whole point of it from start to finish was that it was a political photo-op. For instance, many people forget that they had Bush himself land a fighter on the carrier (with of course a competent copilot sitting behind him). The "Mission Accomplished" banner is now known (after much lying to the contrary) to have been ordered put up by Rove. They were pulling out all the stops to make sure the press was there watching.
If Bush really cared about the enlisted, you'd be able to tell by a lot more things than just giving speeches (quietly or otherwise). He would have made sure they got armored Humvees when they needed them. He would have pushed to get them modern body armor, rather than dragging his feet. He would have made sure the military hospital system was properly funded. He would have supported the new GI bill.
More importantly, he would have spent more effort planning the occupation than he spent planning that photo-op. He would have made sure the occupation authority was staffed with the most competent people he could find, not the most loyal idealogues Liberty University could pump out. He would have made sure that this nation's most vital interests were in dire danger before sending them out to die for us in the first place.
That's part of the problem. I'm starting to have trouble remembering where my towel is these days. Frood, sooner or later you have to sass that you just aren't as hoopy as you used to be.
This is quite unsual. The summary is fairly accurate, but the author of TFA apparently didn't RTFA. He has totally missed the point of Worse is Better, which one thinks he would have gotten if he'd read to the end:
The right thing is frequently a monolithic piece of software, but for no reason other than that the right thing is often designed monolithically. That is, this characteristic is a happenstance.
The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.
The idea is that you don't sweat doing the Right Thing if it is really difficult to do, as that will actually hamper acceptence. What good does Payne's perfect Internet do for anyone if nobody but him has a node on it? Over time, our old imperfect internet will get incrementally fixed so that it is almost as keen (if not moreso), and everybody will be using it. If things didn't work this way, we'd all be gaming on Amiga's today instead of PC's.
Your own comment indicts him. If the problem is that pervasive, then it's clearly systemic. Who is reponsible for maintaining and operating the system? The government, that's who.
Who spent the last 7 years ripping out every business regulation he could get hold of, and refusing to enforce most of the rest? That would be our wonderful holders of the executive branch.
Obama stated that he wanted to take that success and spread it to people that made less than Joe hoped to make with his business acquisition and hard work
That was not what Obama was trying to say, and it was pretty clear if you actually watched the full video.
The points Obama made to Joe in the full video were:
If you watch, Obama was repectful and well-argued. The guy didn't really have any comeback at all, except repeating (progressively more subdued) "my taxes will go up", and even that turned out to be untrue. The whole "spread the wealth" thing is just Repubs trying to play content-less gotcha politics.
Typically, absentee ballots and any other form of mail-in votes are not even counted unless the outcome is very close and/or disputed.
What you are talking about is a provisional ballot. I have heard that some states used to count absentee ballots as provisional ballots (Florida?). However, I don't actually know of any state that still does this. I know for a fact that Oklahoma does not. A quick web search brought me citations that "battleground" states Ohio and Pennsylvania also count all absentee votes unconditionally. Check with your own state's board of elections if you are unsure.
Turnout is expected to be so huge next Tuesday, and lines in some places so long, that voting absentee is liable to be the best thing you can do to amplify your vote. Not only are you assured of getting a chance to vote, but by making the line one person shorter you may allow some other person to vote who would not have been able to wait otherwise. For that reason, one of the local Obama campaigns here is asking everyone to vote absentee.
I also think it is a superior way to vote, as you don't have to worry about making snap decisions on unexpected things you find on the ballot when you get there. There's nothing like being faced with playing "creationist roulette" on a school board ballot full of unfamiliar names.
Deadlines for applying for absentee ballots are fast approaching though. In Oklahoma, it is the day after tomorrow.
Being 41, I was rather dismayed to see this article. Even more upsetting was the fact that I then proceeded to left click on it, rather than my ususal middle-click to open it in a tab.
Oh no! It's starting already!
Not gonna be a clean mode of transport if you factor in where the electricity is generated from.
Probably not. But at least you can attack the emmissions problem at a couple hundred of places instead of having to do it at 10 million places. That brings the problem down from totally hopeless to meerly hard.
That's actually part of the problem. WoW is essentially sucking all the oxygen out of the room. Who has time to try out a potentially great new game when they are trying desperately to level up their characters or reputation or gear in WoW?
If you look at it as two separate industries: the MMORPG industry and the PC gaming industry, the former is doing OK (particularly if your name is Blizzard), but the latter has been doing much worse in the last couple of years.
Git is an excellent piece of software, but Windows performance is not so great.
That's a bit of a myth. Windows Git is slower than Git on Liunx (since that was its native platform). However, I found it to be far faster than SourceSafe on the same machine.
If you think about it, there's really no way SourceSafe could even hope to compete, really. Even if it were the best-written code in the world (30 second pause while I try to stop laughing), SourceSafe has to go out to the network every time you want to do anything with a file. The same with CVS, SVN, etc. (unless your repository isn't shared). Git users only need the network for the initial pulldown and the occasional merge back up.
The original sources for the "Windows Git is slow" comments were Linux developers who were used to Git on Linux, not Windows developers who are used to other source control software on Windows.
I'm not an expert on stamp collecting, but I think you may have been doing it wrong.
Don't rag on the GP for this. That's exactly how the quote was read. Get on youtube and search for "Southpark Warcraft" if you don't believe me.
Could be that your GPU (video card) fan died. Software doesn't tend to go bad over time like hardware does.
If you start having trouble due to flaky hardware, I would imagine that EA customer support would be rather unhelpful to you.
if you can overlook our horde of lawyers that will go after you
/cheer
(raises breifcase high in the air)
For the Horde!
This is roughly the same thing die-hard communists say these days about communisim. It's the tinkerbell theory: It only failed because you didn't believe hard enough!