Oh, one other point. You mentioned the OED, and that's just innapropriate. The OED has never, in my memory, been a respository of the English language as it is currently used.
The OED is the intersection of the English language as it existed about 1 generation (20 years give or take) ago and as it exists today, plus a history of that state going back through the generations that it has existed.
This is an execellent subset of the language to study, as it gives one a sense of the "core" of the language without the variances that short-term trends introduce, but just as the ~2,000 core Kanji are not sufficient to read and write Japanese, neither is the OED sufficient to communicate in the English language as it is spoken today.
Anyone who thinks that "it's not English unless it's in the OED" is going to have a very hard time understanding any given conversation with their peers.
"But we never presumed that if we were somehow persistent in our dweebishness that some of our geek-isms would be adopted in the English language proper."
And I'm sure the folks who founded Google never though that their company's name would become a general usage verb... No one stops to ask if you approve, you see.
"What is it with you 'virii' and 'cracker' and 'boxen' bozos"
The problem is that there are three types of people: the folks like me who observe the way language changes over time and deal; then there's the people like you that get offended that the language you grew up with is being corrupted with the popular culture that you grew up with; and then there's the vast majority of the world who just use the words that come to hand and keep on going.
Of course, huge swaths of these pop culture cross-overs will die out, and only a few with go the distance and become a part of the language academics deign to call English.
"English is a living language. Cope."
"Right, And the Oxford English Dictionary (not... not... 'jargonfile' or 'wikipedia' or some other self-serving "hey, kids, let's put on a reference work! Gosh, I know, we can use the Web!!" recent invention) has its finger on the pulse of that living language."
No. No, it really doesn't. How many decades did it take for us to finally admit that "ain't" was a word? It was associated with lack of education, so it could not possibly be a valid word. But, of course, everyone knew exactly what you meant when you said it, and it was used constantly in print, on TV, in movies and in common conversation. Why? Because it was "wrong".
Well, I have news: "wrong" cannot be applied to a language. There's just "understood" and "not understood". Everything else is chest-beating.
Oh, and as for Wikipedia, I simply cannot agree with you. Wikipedia is the first reference work IN THE HISTORY OF MAN to bring together so many contributors from so many fields, and while it's still in its infancy, I dare you to find a refernece work that had the breadth or depth of Wikipedia at the same point in ITS timeline.... go ahead, I'll wait.
"When the OED recognizes 'boxen' as meaning 'more than one box,' I'll deal with it, but in the long, long meantime, I'm suggesting it's you be the one doing the 'coping.'"
Absolutely, and I cope just fine, thank you. The world changes, I adapt. Life is good. Eventually the dead trees will figure it out.
Yes, it is the plural in common usage of box as a class, when refering to the type of computers which are classically placed inside rectangular (either stand-alone or rack-mounted) cases. Confusion arises because "boxes" is also used, but "boxen" is definitely used more often in my experience.
This usage stems from the 70s and 80s era usage of the plural "Vaxen" to refer to a class of computers which were based on Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX processor.
"Like it or not the GPL requires that if a company uses and adds to Linux they have to give back."
Horse hockey!
I use and add to GPLed software that I don't "give back" to all the time. I also use and add to GPLed (and non-GPLed) software that I do give back to.
The only requirement is that if you SHIP modified GPLed software, you have to provide the modified source to those whoe recieve it. The amusing part is that you don't even have to provide that source to the original authors, only to those you ship to. So, if you write software that you only ship to, say, Fortune 500 companies, then you're well within your right to tell the people who originally wrote the code that they have to go talk to the people at those companies if they want to try to get access to your modifications.
The GPL only grants rights (with stipulations) on a volutary basis. It does not remove any of the rights that you already had under copyright law, and it cannot be forced on you if you don't wish to agree to it.
Keeping in mind that MS did nothing about the fact that their OS crashed constantly for 15 years.... Microsoft put a lot of effort around 2000 into making sure Windows didn't crash any more because the Blue Screen of Death had finally started to become a liability (having cost them the low-end Internet server market). This paid off well for them, and XP is fairly solid... except for the fact that it's a malware jungle the second you put it on the Net (and yes, there's a TON of stuff out there that installs itself... just try running an instance of IIS to share your photographs with your son as my Mom did once, or download random movies or songs from the Net and play them in Media Player), sometimes even WITH software that's supposed to defend it, and so instead of the OS crashing, it just gets slow and applications fail randomly. An improvement? I think not.
Add in to the mix the fact that their updates often break huge swaths of software that runs on the platform, and you get user resistance to updates which makes the problem even worse.
"... was Linux. Knoppix kept spontaneously rebooting the machine while I was trying to show Linux off to a friend
Well, you downloaded a hobbyist distribution... what did you expect? Try buying a copy of Mantiva, or even use Red Hat's R&D distribution, Fedora, and things will be quite a lot smoother. You can also try out a somewhat more organized hobbyist distribution called Ubuntu, which I hear good things about.
Linux is not an OS, Linux is a collection of technologies. You must select your OS carefully, just as you select the underlying technology carefully. If you're looking for someone to tell you what the right thing to use is at every turn, buy a Mac.
"If the folks at MS Research are so extremely bright then why does MS still have to buy or copy a company's products whenever they want to do anything new?"
It depends on what you mean by "new". C# and most of the.Net Framework, for example, are results of research from MS Research, which were then re-tooled to look Java-friendly. This is why C# doesn't actually suck. I think MS Research is also responsible for some of the A/V work that's gone into Windows in recent years.
If you mean whole products... well, look at Bell Labs in the 80s for an example of how good research organizations are at producing whole products that can be effectively used by the average customer.
No, it's often easier to buy a company that has a functioning product, and let your research people work on the behind-the-scenes and developer-oriented stuff.
THIS is exactly why I thumb my nose at people who say that I should just relay all of my mail through my ISP. I don't and I never will because I don't care to have my private communications unencrypted on the Internet. I send mail to a customer, I want TLS to encrypt it end-to-end, and I don't want my relaying ISP decrypting it in the middle.
I have my own relay for exactly this reason, so at worst, my ISP then has a record that I talked to that company's mail server. Period.
Call me a tin-foil-hat type, but I've been saying that we'd get to this point for a decade now.
I also don't use my ISP's proxies. I don't run software they provide me, I secure my network so that the 10,000 or so probes I get on the average day have no effect and I make sure that any Windows machines on my network aren't spyware infested. These are the steps you take to make sure that your privacy remains yours.
Not shocking. The folks as MS Research are actually extremely bright, and often given a rather long leash. It's Micrsoft the software company that usually permutes the fruits of MS Research into the crash-freindly pablum that we've become all to familiar with.
Speaking of the upcoming movie, I hear that, after 3 instant sell-out sneak previews, the studio is considering re-thinking their plan to hold on to it until the fall to avoid competing with the memory of the Star Wars movie.
Everyone I've heard from who saw the sneak preview (fan or not, regardless of if they'd seen the series or not) really enjoyed it. I think if anything could convince Fox to sell the series rights to the Skiffy channel, the reception this movie is likely to get is probably it.
Certainly Firefly dodged the bullet on makeup; set design wasn't too much worse than your average drama; and the costuming was easier than usual (but they still had to establish the correct cultural feel which was an old-west / vaguely asian hybrid, which means that most of what you saw was NOT off-the-shelf costuming).
FX would have been very slightly cheaper than your average SF series, just because they didn't do flashy FX work most of the time, but the ship still had to be animated, and they still had to do some virtual sets, explosions, and some fancy weapons beyond simple slug throwers.
Plus, the pilot involved a pretty serious war, that was probably Fox's first impression of the costs of the show.
Overall it was a bold idea which required a certain amount of faith in Joss's abilities and probably seemed moderately pricy. Worse, Joss is involved in some pretty liberal stuff, so Fox probably started off with the sense that he wasn't exactly one of the team.
I think Fox did poorly by Firefly, but I also don't think they can be blamed too strongly for not seeing the value in a new SF series. It's hard to call those well, and what fans like often isn't what's popular, just look at Farscape.
It had a cat-walk, too. That's all futurish. And in one episode they opened something that had dry-ice steam floating off of it.
"generic non-descript infirmary."
Hey, they had needles in there... and... and stuff!
"generic non-descript kitchen (with garage-sale furniture that has been bolted to the floor so that it doesn't float around in low-g settings"
Ahem! "Space bolts"!
"generic curtain-filled room for the space-hooker's quarters."
Oh, and I supposed you think you can just saunter down to Better Whores and Brothels and pick up a bolt of Companion Cloth! That stuff was so 400 years ahead of it's time!
"generic dashboard-looking cockpit with plastic dinosaurs scattered here and there."
Dinosaurs! Do you hear yourself? Dinosaurs! The things died out millions of years ago, and yet through the magic of television they were brought back to us, just to "decorate a set"! My gods, how wastefull is this Joss Whedon guy?!
quoth smitty_one_each, "politicians I've encountered [aren't] as miserable and corrupt individually as all of them are together."
Not all of them, but where there's a bell-curve, there's always got to be outliers. Some of the folks who are sent to Washington are truly scary people, all politics aside.
First Dvorak jumps in with his usual troll, and now we get J. Random Reporter from some cool tech site telling us why he's wrong?
I'll make my own prediction: I think Apple's move to Intel spells a short-term rise and long-term fall of Linux for PowerPC;-)
Seriously, it's just not THAT sweeping a move. Let Apple have its fun, and more power to them taking over the desktop market from Microsoft. I'd certainly rather have to occasionally use a Mac at work than Windows.
"The problem with the law is that it allocates $250,000 a year of taxpayer money to maintain the list. As a born-again pervert, I'm a bit offended that they are using my tax money to fund a service I will never use."
Never use?! You could apply for the $250,000 job that involves nothing but surfing porn and taking notes!;-)
That aside how long will it be before all the ISP's will be required to pass ALL traffic through such filters. How long before the filters include not only porn but other material that the state decides is offensive?
That's what I am afraid of too, but I don't think that it's particularly likely, even in Utah.
This is actually why I'm UPSET at the ACLU for taking on this case. It seems like Utah is putting forward a reasonable anti-porn law (shock!) which can be complied with without even having to change any infrastructure.
However, when a law is put forward in a year or two that expands this practice, the ACLU will have lost some credibility on this point (as if they hadn't already) because they opposed a fairly reasonable law.
1. The Physical Layer 2. The Data Link Layer 3. The Network Layer 4. The Transport Layer 4.5 The Pr0n Layer 5. The Session Layer 6. The Presentation Layer 6.5 The Presentation of Pr0n Layer 7. The Application Layer 8. The Financial Layer 9. The Political Layer
I think you missed the point of my post. If you want to KNOW (not guess) what happened sometime before the Web existed (though the Internet did, at the time I'm talking about), you must use physical resources today. However, if the proposed digitization takes place, such research could be done online.
"I can't believe the number of posts on this site talking about how "unprofessional" even an earring on a male looks. Are we really still that wrapped up in gender identity that even a gold stud on a guy is a threat?"
It has almost nothing to do with gender identity.
It has to do with expectations. When you first see someone, you make several extrapolations about their personality and the degree to which they are a part of your particular sub-culture. You might train yourself to ignore this information, but most people do not. When you make those assumptions, you automatically extrapolate behavior expectations. This too is done mostly subconsciously.
When you don't know what to expect from someone, you tend to react in fear. That fear might be subtle, but even a subtle fear can harm your career long-term. Of course, demonstrating your value to a company will overcome a great deal of that fear, but you're still fighting an up-hill battle.
Of course, in a company full of people with earrings, there's no problem because you're not an unknown. Same goes for tatoos or anything else.
"You must be the only person on/. who doesn't use google."
Google can only find what IS online. There have been a number of times when I've wanted some tidbit of information, and you'd be surprised how much ISN'T online.
For example, I wanted to look up the old scandal around $400 screwdrivers. I found some things, but almost all of the references that I could find where MODERN references, many of which were contraditctory (prices varied, the actual items varied, etc). Then I found a lot of political sites with roughly the same info, but no one had real information, they were just yelling about the fact that SOMETHING had happened and it involved expensive stuff.
In the end, the best I could do was a set of Usenet posts, some of which supported and some of which debunked the idea that there were, in fact $400 screwdrivers. Some explanations were that: these weren't normal tools, they were specialized tools for working on building special components of ships; they were actually normal tools, but research overhead was spread out evenly across all line items require FOR the research, as required by procurement regulations; etc. If the documents that contained these events were online, I could have just searched for them, but they're not.
I would suggest putting Star Wars: Clone Wars in there between Eps 5 and 3. It's one of the best of the series, IMHO, and does an excellent job of setting up the first 20 minutes of Ep 3 in its final five episodes.
I also think that watching them in strict numerical order (with SW:CW just before 3) is perfectly acceptable. The series is NOT the same, then, but it has its own unique charms. The scene between Luke and Vader is all the more powerful, in my opinion, if you know that it's the truth going in, and you are watching Luke come to terms with that.
You can also watch them in this order: 4, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 which is interesting because you "know" from 4 that Vader kills Anakin, but then you get to Ep 3 and the other shoe drops when Palpatine names him Vader! Then Ep 5 fills this out by re-introducing the Emperor and Yoda.
Episode 5 is, in many ways, the true sequel to Episode 3.
"Your mention of master planning did help me to formulate a criticism of the theory however: it is too paranoid. The theory hinges on a huge conspiracy working for decades in the background, only producing barely visible ripples at the surface."
Well, yes. However, take a look at the rest of what Lucas has done, and decide for yourself. Is that kind of thing in line with a warehouse full of dangerous magical artifacts that no one is ever told about (Raiders of the Lost Ark)? Look at the Yound Indiana Jones show and some of the conspiracies in there.
Sure, it's too paranoid for the REAL WORLD, but is it too paranoid for Star Wars, the background of which is Lucas's invention?
Watch Episode 2 again, and listen for a line from Obi Wan along the lines of, "it's lucky for us the droids don't have free will, or we'd all be working for them." Random line or hint? You decide.
It has been my speculation since about 2 seconds before the end of Episode 2 that R2 is, in fact, an avatar of the force. Here's the details of the theory:
Long ago, Corsicant, a plantet girded by a single city, became not just self-aware (which many droids are), but self-motivated and free-willed.
It decided that humans (and I'll use that term, even when I mean "all biological sentients") were a threat of some sort. Perhaps their wars could have destroyed the computer, or some other, more subtle sort of threat.
In order to keep humans in check, it produced a nanotech tool called mediclorians, which could simulate a number of seemingly magical effects such as enhancing strength, generating magnetic and gravitation fields, providing sensory data, modifying the moods and simple surface-thoguhts of other (by dispersing a small cloud of them into the target creature) beings.
By dispersing this tool among the humans, two factions were created. The first (the Sith) were meant to maintain order, but they were too ruthless, and warred among themselves. So, a second group was created to counterpoint the Sith (the Jedi). This group, however, simply wiped out the Sith, rather than achieving a balance with them.
Anakin was created either directly by Corsicant's agents and avatars or by Palpatine on behalf of the planet (almost certainly without knowing the purpose). R2 was sent along by way of Padme to look after Anakin and make sure he was being guided down the path to "restoring balance to the force" (which becomes quite a bit more sinister when you think about it meaning the death of all but a handful of Jedi from the beginning).
Evidence:
R2 is the hero in so many scenes in all six movies that the point is hardly worth mentioning.
"He's been known to be wrong... from time to time." We never do establish how smart R2 is, but clearly it's far beyond the capabilities of most Astro Droids.
Several times people do things around R2 which make little sense (e.g. wiping the memory of C3PO, but not R2, combat droids deciding that the noise in the corner was "nothing"... do droids here things when R2 ISN'T around?)
R2 and Yoda have a very interesting relationship. Either R2 makes Yoda forget who he is (surely a blue R2 unit showing up along side Luke isn't a mere coincidence), or they both know what's going on... which makes me wonder who exactly WAS Yoda's master....
R2 is everywhere that an avatar of Corsicant would need to be to see the prophesy fulfilled and then set the whole process in motion again.
"I agree that this would be just as bad if another administration did it, but I suspect your example is a poor one."
While that's a wonderful shield against having to accept ugly truths, no this is a sadly excellent example. I spoke to him, got a chance to see some of their work, and watched as their funding dried up. The phrase "enemy of the planet" was explicitly used in funding conversations.
It's really sad, but it's not the first time. Check out a book by Herman from the 70s titled Sun, Weather and Climate. He suffered the same fate for saying the same thing.
"Either way though you cannot deny that the Bush Administration's hostility to science that does not confirm its narrow worldview has been unprecedented."
There is only one presidential administration that I can think of that didn't behave that way *as much*, and that's Carter. It's not that that kind of reactionary beuracracy wasn't there during Carter's administration, but his people were actually quite a bit less heavy-handed than Kenedy's, Johnson's, Nixon's, Ford's, Reagan's, Bush Sr.'s, Clinton's or Bush Jr.'s.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, one other point. You mentioned the OED, and that's just innapropriate. The OED has never, in my memory, been a respository of the English language as it is currently used.
The OED is the intersection of the English language as it existed about 1 generation (20 years give or take) ago and as it exists today, plus a history of that state going back through the generations that it has existed.
This is an execellent subset of the language to study, as it gives one a sense of the "core" of the language without the variances that short-term trends introduce, but just as the ~2,000 core Kanji are not sufficient to read and write Japanese, neither is the OED sufficient to communicate in the English language as it is spoken today.
Anyone who thinks that "it's not English unless it's in the OED" is going to have a very hard time understanding any given conversation with their peers.
"But we never presumed that if we were somehow persistent in our dweebishness that some of our geek-isms would be adopted in the English language proper."
And I'm sure the folks who founded Google never though that their company's name would become a general usage verb... No one stops to ask if you approve, you see.
"What is it with you 'virii' and 'cracker' and 'boxen' bozos"
The problem is that there are three types of people: the folks like me who observe the way language changes over time and deal; then there's the people like you that get offended that the language you grew up with is being corrupted with the popular culture that you grew up with; and then there's the vast majority of the world who just use the words that come to hand and keep on going.
Of course, huge swaths of these pop culture cross-overs will die out, and only a few with go the distance and become a part of the language academics deign to call English.
"English is a living language. Cope."
"Right, And the Oxford English Dictionary (not... not... 'jargonfile' or 'wikipedia' or some other self-serving "hey, kids, let's put on a reference work! Gosh, I know, we can use the Web!!" recent invention) has its finger on the pulse of that living language."
No. No, it really doesn't. How many decades did it take for us to finally admit that "ain't" was a word? It was associated with lack of education, so it could not possibly be a valid word. But, of course, everyone knew exactly what you meant when you said it, and it was used constantly in print, on TV, in movies and in common conversation. Why? Because it was "wrong".
Well, I have news: "wrong" cannot be applied to a language. There's just "understood" and "not understood". Everything else is chest-beating.
Oh, and as for Wikipedia, I simply cannot agree with you. Wikipedia is the first reference work IN THE HISTORY OF MAN to bring together so many contributors from so many fields, and while it's still in its infancy, I dare you to find a refernece work that had the breadth or depth of Wikipedia at the same point in ITS timeline.... go ahead, I'll wait.
"When the OED recognizes 'boxen' as meaning 'more than one box,' I'll deal with it, but in the long, long meantime, I'm suggesting it's you be the one doing the 'coping.'"
Absolutely, and I cope just fine, thank you. The world changes, I adapt. Life is good. Eventually the dead trees will figure it out.
"Boxen? Isn't that the plural of box?"
Yes, it is the plural in common usage of box as a class, when refering to the type of computers which are classically placed inside rectangular (either stand-alone or rack-mounted) cases. Confusion arises because "boxes" is also used, but "boxen" is definitely used more often in my experience.
This usage stems from the 70s and 80s era usage of the plural "Vaxen" to refer to a class of computers which were based on Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX processor.
English is a living language. Cope.
"Like it or not the GPL requires that if a company uses and adds to Linux they have to give back."
Horse hockey!
I use and add to GPLed software that I don't "give back" to all the time. I also use and add to GPLed (and non-GPLed) software that I do give back to.
The only requirement is that if you SHIP modified GPLed software, you have to provide the modified source to those whoe recieve it. The amusing part is that you don't even have to provide that source to the original authors, only to those you ship to. So, if you write software that you only ship to, say, Fortune 500 companies, then you're well within your right to tell the people who originally wrote the code that they have to go talk to the people at those companies if they want to try to get access to your modifications.
The GPL only grants rights (with stipulations) on a volutary basis. It does not remove any of the rights that you already had under copyright law, and it cannot be forced on you if you don't wish to agree to it.
"The last serious crash I had"
Keeping in mind that MS did nothing about the fact that their OS crashed constantly for 15 years.... Microsoft put a lot of effort around 2000 into making sure Windows didn't crash any more because the Blue Screen of Death had finally started to become a liability (having cost them the low-end Internet server market). This paid off well for them, and XP is fairly solid... except for the fact that it's a malware jungle the second you put it on the Net (and yes, there's a TON of stuff out there that installs itself... just try running an instance of IIS to share your photographs with your son as my Mom did once, or download random movies or songs from the Net and play them in Media Player), sometimes even WITH software that's supposed to defend it, and so instead of the OS crashing, it just gets slow and applications fail randomly. An improvement? I think not.
Add in to the mix the fact that their updates often break huge swaths of software that runs on the platform, and you get user resistance to updates which makes the problem even worse.
"... was Linux. Knoppix kept spontaneously rebooting the machine while I was trying to show Linux off to a friend
Well, you downloaded a hobbyist distribution... what did you expect? Try buying a copy of Mantiva, or even use Red Hat's R&D distribution, Fedora, and things will be quite a lot smoother. You can also try out a somewhat more organized hobbyist distribution called Ubuntu, which I hear good things about.
Linux is not an OS, Linux is a collection of technologies. You must select your OS carefully, just as you select the underlying technology carefully. If you're looking for someone to tell you what the right thing to use is at every turn, buy a Mac.
"If the folks at MS Research are so extremely bright then why does MS still have to buy or copy a company's products whenever they want to do anything new?"
.Net Framework, for example, are results of research from MS Research, which were then re-tooled to look Java-friendly. This is why C# doesn't actually suck. I think MS Research is also responsible for some of the A/V work that's gone into Windows in recent years.
It depends on what you mean by "new". C# and most of the
If you mean whole products... well, look at Bell Labs in the 80s for an example of how good research organizations are at producing whole products that can be effectively used by the average customer.
No, it's often easier to buy a company that has a functioning product, and let your research people work on the behind-the-scenes and developer-oriented stuff.
THIS is exactly why I thumb my nose at people who say that I should just relay all of my mail through my ISP. I don't and I never will because I don't care to have my private communications unencrypted on the Internet. I send mail to a customer, I want TLS to encrypt it end-to-end, and I don't want my relaying ISP decrypting it in the middle.
I have my own relay for exactly this reason, so at worst, my ISP then has a record that I talked to that company's mail server. Period.
Call me a tin-foil-hat type, but I've been saying that we'd get to this point for a decade now.
I also don't use my ISP's proxies. I don't run software they provide me, I secure my network so that the 10,000 or so probes I get on the average day have no effect and I make sure that any Windows machines on my network aren't spyware infested. These are the steps you take to make sure that your privacy remains yours.
Not shocking. The folks as MS Research are actually extremely bright, and often given a rather long leash. It's Micrsoft the software company that usually permutes the fruits of MS Research into the crash-freindly pablum that we've become all to familiar with.
"But is it really the ISP's responsibility to make sure a given individual keeps their computer up to date?"
To "make sure"? No. However, it's an easy enough thing to:
* Provide software that manages updates
* Provide user-configurable filtering
* Follow up on complaints with the customer
These are not hard steps to take, and they would yield a dramatic reduction in problems.
Now, perhaps we can start putting some pressure on the bad ISPs to clean up their networks on the basis of their successful peers.
I'm really sick of everyone in the world looking down on me as soon as they find that my IP is on a Comcast block.
Speaking of the upcoming movie, I hear that, after 3 instant sell-out sneak previews, the studio is considering re-thinking their plan to hold on to it until the fall to avoid competing with the memory of the Star Wars movie.
Everyone I've heard from who saw the sneak preview (fan or not, regardless of if they'd seen the series or not) really enjoyed it. I think if anything could convince Fox to sell the series rights to the Skiffy channel, the reception this movie is likely to get is probably it.
For the most part, the costs in an SF show are:
Actors
Cameras
FX/CG
Costuming
Makeup
Set design
Certainly Firefly dodged the bullet on makeup; set design wasn't too much worse than your average drama; and the costuming was easier than usual (but they still had to establish the correct cultural feel which was an old-west / vaguely asian hybrid, which means that most of what you saw was NOT off-the-shelf costuming).
FX would have been very slightly cheaper than your average SF series, just because they didn't do flashy FX work most of the time, but the ship still had to be animated, and they still had to do some virtual sets, explosions, and some fancy weapons beyond simple slug throwers.
Plus, the pilot involved a pretty serious war, that was probably Fox's first impression of the costs of the show.
Overall it was a bold idea which required a certain amount of faith in Joss's abilities and probably seemed moderately pricy. Worse, Joss is involved in some pretty liberal stuff, so Fox probably started off with the sense that he wasn't exactly one of the team.
I think Fox did poorly by Firefly, but I also don't think they can be blamed too strongly for not seeing the value in a new SF series. It's hard to call those well, and what fans like often isn't what's popular, just look at Farscape.
"generic non-descript cargo hold."
It had a cat-walk, too. That's all futurish. And in one episode they opened something that had dry-ice steam floating off of it.
"generic non-descript infirmary."
Hey, they had needles in there... and... and stuff!
"generic non-descript kitchen (with garage-sale furniture that has been bolted to the floor so that it doesn't float around in low-g settings"
Ahem! "Space bolts"!
"generic curtain-filled room for the space-hooker's quarters."
Oh, and I supposed you think you can just saunter down to Better Whores and Brothels and pick up a bolt of Companion Cloth! That stuff was so 400 years ahead of it's time!
"generic dashboard-looking cockpit with plastic dinosaurs scattered here and there."
Dinosaurs! Do you hear yourself? Dinosaurs! The things died out millions of years ago, and yet through the magic of television they were brought back to us, just to "decorate a set"! My gods, how wastefull is this Joss Whedon guy?!
quoth smitty_one_each, "politicians I've encountered [aren't] as miserable and corrupt individually as all of them are together."
Not all of them, but where there's a bell-curve, there's always got to be outliers. Some of the folks who are sent to Washington are truly scary people, all politics aside.
First Dvorak jumps in with his usual troll, and now we get J. Random Reporter from some cool tech site telling us why he's wrong?
;-)
I'll make my own prediction: I think Apple's move to Intel spells a short-term rise and long-term fall of Linux for PowerPC
Seriously, it's just not THAT sweeping a move. Let Apple have its fun, and more power to them taking over the desktop market from Microsoft. I'd certainly rather have to occasionally use a Mac at work than Windows.
"The problem with the law is that it allocates $250,000 a year of taxpayer money to maintain the list. As a born-again pervert, I'm a bit offended that they are using my tax money to fund a service I will never use."
;-)
Never use?! You could apply for the $250,000 job that involves nothing but surfing porn and taking notes!
That aside how long will it be before all the ISP's will be required to pass ALL traffic through such filters. How long before the filters include not only porn but other material that the state decides is offensive?
That's what I am afraid of too, but I don't think that it's particularly likely, even in Utah.
This is actually why I'm UPSET at the ACLU for taking on this case. It seems like Utah is putting forward a reasonable anti-porn law (shock!) which can be complied with without even having to change any infrastructure.
However, when a law is put forward in a year or two that expands this practice, the ACLU will have lost some credibility on this point (as if they hadn't already) because they opposed a fairly reasonable law.
So how does that fit in the OSI model? Is it:
1. The Physical Layer
2. The Data Link Layer
3. The Network Layer
4. The Transport Layer
4.5 The Pr0n Layer
5. The Session Layer
6. The Presentation Layer
6.5 The Presentation of Pr0n Layer
7. The Application Layer
8. The Financial Layer
9. The Political Layer
I think you missed the point of my post. If you want to KNOW (not guess) what happened sometime before the Web existed (though the Internet did, at the time I'm talking about), you must use physical resources today. However, if the proposed digitization takes place, such research could be done online.
"I can't believe the number of posts on this site talking about how "unprofessional" even an earring on a male looks. Are we really still that wrapped up in gender identity that even a gold stud on a guy is a threat?"
It has almost nothing to do with gender identity.
It has to do with expectations. When you first see someone, you make several extrapolations about their personality and the degree to which they are a part of your particular sub-culture. You might train yourself to ignore this information, but most people do not. When you make those assumptions, you automatically extrapolate behavior expectations. This too is done mostly subconsciously.
When you don't know what to expect from someone, you tend to react in fear. That fear might be subtle, but even a subtle fear can harm your career long-term. Of course, demonstrating your value to a company will overcome a great deal of that fear, but you're still fighting an up-hill battle.
Of course, in a company full of people with earrings, there's no problem because you're not an unknown. Same goes for tatoos or anything else.
"You must be the only person on /. who doesn't use google."
Google can only find what IS online. There have been a number of times when I've wanted some tidbit of information, and you'd be surprised how much ISN'T online.
For example, I wanted to look up the old scandal around $400 screwdrivers. I found some things, but almost all of the references that I could find where MODERN references, many of which were contraditctory (prices varied, the actual items varied, etc). Then I found a lot of political sites with roughly the same info, but no one had real information, they were just yelling about the fact that SOMETHING had happened and it involved expensive stuff.
In the end, the best I could do was a set of Usenet posts, some of which supported and some of which debunked the idea that there were, in fact $400 screwdrivers. Some explanations were that: these weren't normal tools, they were specialized tools for working on building special components of ships; they were actually normal tools, but research overhead was spread out evenly across all line items require FOR the research, as required by procurement regulations; etc. If the documents that contained these events were online, I could have just searched for them, but they're not.
I would suggest putting Star Wars: Clone Wars in there between Eps 5 and 3. It's one of the best of the series, IMHO, and does an excellent job of setting up the first 20 minutes of Ep 3 in its final five episodes.
I also think that watching them in strict numerical order (with SW:CW just before 3) is perfectly acceptable. The series is NOT the same, then, but it has its own unique charms. The scene between Luke and Vader is all the more powerful, in my opinion, if you know that it's the truth going in, and you are watching Luke come to terms with that.
You can also watch them in this order: 4, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 which is interesting because you "know" from 4 that Vader kills Anakin, but then you get to Ep 3 and the other shoe drops when Palpatine names him Vader! Then Ep 5 fills this out by re-introducing the Emperor and Yoda.
Episode 5 is, in many ways, the true sequel to Episode 3.
"Your mention of master planning did help me to formulate a criticism of the theory however: it is too paranoid. The theory hinges on a huge conspiracy working for decades in the background, only producing barely visible ripples at the surface."
Well, yes. However, take a look at the rest of what Lucas has done, and decide for yourself. Is that kind of thing in line with a warehouse full of dangerous magical artifacts that no one is ever told about (Raiders of the Lost Ark)? Look at the Yound Indiana Jones show and some of the conspiracies in there.
Sure, it's too paranoid for the REAL WORLD, but is it too paranoid for Star Wars, the background of which is Lucas's invention?
Watch Episode 2 again, and listen for a line from Obi Wan along the lines of, "it's lucky for us the droids don't have free will, or we'd all be working for them." Random line or hint? You decide.
It has been my speculation since about 2 seconds before the end of Episode 2 that R2 is, in fact, an avatar of the force. Here's the details of the theory:
Long ago, Corsicant, a plantet girded by a single city, became not just self-aware (which many droids are), but self-motivated and free-willed.
It decided that humans (and I'll use that term, even when I mean "all biological sentients") were a threat of some sort. Perhaps their wars could have destroyed the computer, or some other, more subtle sort of threat.
In order to keep humans in check, it produced a nanotech tool called mediclorians, which could simulate a number of seemingly magical effects such as enhancing strength, generating magnetic and gravitation fields, providing sensory data, modifying the moods and simple surface-thoguhts of other (by dispersing a small cloud of them into the target creature) beings.
By dispersing this tool among the humans, two factions were created. The first (the Sith) were meant to maintain order, but they were too ruthless, and warred among themselves. So, a second group was created to counterpoint the Sith (the Jedi). This group, however, simply wiped out the Sith, rather than achieving a balance with them.
Anakin was created either directly by Corsicant's agents and avatars or by Palpatine on behalf of the planet (almost certainly without knowing the purpose). R2 was sent along by way of Padme to look after Anakin and make sure he was being guided down the path to "restoring balance to the force" (which becomes quite a bit more sinister when you think about it meaning the death of all but a handful of Jedi from the beginning).
Evidence:
R2 is the hero in so many scenes in all six movies that the point is hardly worth mentioning.
"He's been known to be wrong... from time to time." We never do establish how smart R2 is, but clearly it's far beyond the capabilities of most Astro Droids.
Several times people do things around R2 which make little sense (e.g. wiping the memory of C3PO, but not R2, combat droids deciding that the noise in the corner was "nothing"... do droids here things when R2 ISN'T around?)
R2 and Yoda have a very interesting relationship. Either R2 makes Yoda forget who he is (surely a blue R2 unit showing up along side Luke isn't a mere coincidence), or they both know what's going on... which makes me wonder who exactly WAS Yoda's master....
R2 is everywhere that an avatar of Corsicant would need to be to see the prophesy fulfilled and then set the whole process in motion again.
"I agree that this would be just as bad if another administration did it, but I suspect your example is a poor one."
While that's a wonderful shield against having to accept ugly truths, no this is a sadly excellent example. I spoke to him, got a chance to see some of their work, and watched as their funding dried up. The phrase "enemy of the planet" was explicitly used in funding conversations.
It's really sad, but it's not the first time. Check out a book by Herman from the 70s titled Sun, Weather and Climate. He suffered the same fate for saying the same thing.
"Either way though you cannot deny that the Bush Administration's hostility to science that does not confirm its narrow worldview has been unprecedented."
There is only one presidential administration that I can think of that didn't behave that way *as much*, and that's Carter. It's not that that kind of reactionary beuracracy wasn't there during Carter's administration, but his people were actually quite a bit less heavy-handed than Kenedy's, Johnson's, Nixon's, Ford's, Reagan's, Bush Sr.'s, Clinton's or Bush Jr.'s.