I think Ebert's point is that this Trek movie feels so by-the-numbers & predictable the only thing left to do is overanalyze it.
As you said, the panels spit sparks for the visual effect and the danger, but how many times can that truly be exciting?
Every genre movie has to hit certain marks: a romance probably has kissing, a horror movie involves a killer. What separates a good genre movie from a tired one is how it manages to incorporate everything you expect and yet manages to feel fresh.
I agree that Windows platforms are vulnerable due to the ubiquity of the OS and applications. However, I guarantee there's an exploit or twenty hidden in your Mac configuration.
Even mutt had a nice exploit a few months back, in the email address parsing! Not much an attachment-blocking scheme can do about that. I must have missed the Slashdot story regarding this:) (and I'm sure someone will followup with a link to the story if I did)
Just make sure you keep up with patches for whatever computer software you choose to run.
Your average UPS employee is so damn busy he or she doesn't have time to play games with boxes.
What most likely destroyed this shipment was it's journey along overcrowded belts, where it was squeezed mercilessly betwixt 200 80lb. boxes of greeting cards and 80 dell or gateway boxes. When a friend of mine worked there, he said he'd wince when he'd see a wrapped gramma's xmas present nestled between industrial shipments.
UPS does home consumer shipping as a sideline: they're more worried about pleasing their corporate customers.
Well of course they are. They have to have something for the buy-me sticker that'll be the dvds they'll pump out if this thing is even a moderate success: "Unseen FOOTAGE! Director's Cut!"
"Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." - Ted Sturgeon, SF Author who contributed heavily to the good 10% of the genre http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/Sturg eon's-Law.html
Stop me if you've heard this one. I actually first heard about this in my college AI class.
Apparently there was a military project to train a neural net to identify tanks hidden in surveillance photos. They took pictures with hidden tanks and pictures without hidden tanks and fed 'em to their proggy. The NN worked fine on the training pictures, but when they tried other pictures it was almost always incorrect. What could be wrong?
DOH! The training pictures with tanks were all taken on a sunny day, and the sans tank pix were taken on a cloudy day. And voila...a neural net that could successfully determine whether you might need sunscreen that day.:)
Dunno if it's true or an urban legend; I saw apparent slides of the training photos in class, though. As the saying goes, computers don't do what you want them to do but only what you tell 'em.
I can see the benefits of both systems. I know that I would read with a much more dedicated or critical eye if I had moderation points, and would thus carefully evaluate every message. This increases the quality of the comment evaluations. However, with a free-for-all moderation system, you'd have a chance of taking the true pulse of the Slashdot readership for that topic. Maybe both systems can be combined?
-Always show the moderation controls. -As in the current system, occasionally bless users with 5 moderator points, and let them know this. -After a user exhausts all their moderation points, instead of having no influence: 1) they have a random chance of a moderation succeeding, say a 1 out of 20 chance. Don't let them know if they succeed or not. 2) everyone has peon points that count for 1/50 of a full mod point. Don't let users see fractional points
Ballot stuffing could be handled by tying the percentage chance or weight of a vote to the number of times that user has voted that day. Or simply don't allow a user to vote more than once in a topic or for a message.
Man, this could get more complicated than the U.S.'s electoral college system (see Sept 6th entry at www.memepool.com).
Actually, the first portable mp3 player I'll consider buying will be the gadget that reads from compact disks or from flash memory cards. Maybe a combo audio cd/pc cd super discman?
Too bad I'm all thumbs at hardware. At least we're getting there on the processor side. Remember the smallest webserver that was mentioned on slashdot last month?
Slashdot Mirror
I think I know where you're coming from.
You can even extend instances of classes, rather than the classes themselves:
In this last example, only the Array instance assigned to x has the is_even? method. Other array instances are unaffected.
This really tickles me for some reason. One of the many reasons to love Ruby. It also makes me want to go back and investigate Smalltalk again.
I think Ebert's point is that this Trek movie feels so by-the-numbers & predictable the only thing left to do is overanalyze it.
As you said, the panels spit sparks for the visual effect and the danger, but how many times can that truly be exciting?
Every genre movie has to hit certain marks: a romance probably has kissing, a horror movie involves a killer. What separates a good genre movie from a tired one is how it manages to incorporate everything you expect and yet manages to feel fresh.
I agree that Windows platforms are vulnerable due to the ubiquity of the OS and applications. However, I guarantee there's an exploit or twenty hidden in your Mac configuration.
:) (and I'm sure someone will followup with a link to the story if I did)
Even mutt had a nice exploit a few months back, in the email address parsing! Not much an attachment-blocking scheme can do about that. I must have missed the Slashdot story regarding this
Just make sure you keep up with patches for whatever computer software you choose to run.
Dammit. s/it's/its/
Your average UPS employee is so damn busy he or she doesn't have time to play games with boxes.
What most likely destroyed this shipment was it's journey along overcrowded belts, where it was squeezed mercilessly betwixt 200 80lb. boxes of greeting cards and 80 dell or gateway boxes. When a friend of mine worked there, he said he'd wince when he'd see a wrapped gramma's xmas present nestled between industrial shipments.
UPS does home consumer shipping as a sideline: they're more worried about pleasing their corporate customers.
Hahah...good lord. Where are those moderator points when I need them.
Well of course they are. They have to have something for the buy-me sticker that'll be the dvds they'll pump out if this thing is even a moderate success: "Unseen FOOTAGE! Director's Cut!"
"Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." - Ted Sturgeon, SF Author who contributed heavily to the good 10% of the genre http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/Sturg eon's-Law.html
Stop me if you've heard this one. I actually first heard about this in my college AI class.
:)
Apparently there was a military project to train a neural net to identify tanks hidden in surveillance photos. They took pictures with hidden tanks and pictures without hidden tanks and fed 'em to their proggy. The NN worked fine on the training pictures, but when they tried other pictures it was almost always incorrect. What could be wrong?
DOH! The training pictures with tanks were all taken on a sunny day, and the sans tank pix were taken on a cloudy day. And voila...a neural net that could successfully determine whether you might need sunscreen that day.
Dunno if it's true or an urban legend; I saw apparent slides of the training photos in class, though. As the saying goes, computers don't do what you want them to do but only what you tell 'em.
I can see the benefits of both systems. I know that I would read with a much more dedicated or critical eye if I had moderation points, and would thus carefully evaluate every message. This increases the quality of the comment evaluations. However, with a free-for-all moderation system, you'd have a chance of taking the true pulse of the Slashdot readership for that topic. Maybe both systems can be combined?
-Always show the moderation controls.
-As in the current system, occasionally bless users with 5 moderator points, and let them know this.
-After a user exhausts all their moderation points, instead of having no influence:
1) they have a random chance of a moderation succeeding, say a 1 out of 20 chance. Don't let them know if they succeed or not.
2) everyone has peon points that count for 1/50 of a full mod point. Don't let users see fractional points
Ballot stuffing could be handled by tying the percentage chance or weight of a vote to the number of times that user has voted that day. Or simply don't allow a user to vote more than once in a topic or for a message.
Man, this could get more complicated than the U.S.'s electoral college system (see Sept 6th entry at www.memepool.com).
Actually, the first portable mp3 player I'll consider buying will be the gadget that reads from compact disks or from flash memory cards. Maybe a combo audio cd/pc cd super discman?
Too bad I'm all thumbs at hardware. At least we're getting there on the processor side. Remember the smallest webserver that was mentioned on slashdot last month?