It's funny that the irony didn't occur to me at the time: I have Flash installed only on IE, not on FF. Whenever I actually want to view a Flash thing (which is nearly never), I just boot up IE. I didn't even notice that I was booting IE to view an ad for FF.
Why don't I just use Flashblock? Well, I used to, but somehow or other a more recent installation of FF didn't get Flash connected in to it, and I was just as happy to be 100% certain that I'd never see any flash unless I specifically went out of my way for it.
Why don't I just use adblock then? Because I like web ads. I like the fact that I get all sorts of cool stuff supported by minimalistic advertising. (I have animated gifs turned off, too.) I like getting Slashdot and others for free, as long as the ads don't try to convince my eyes that they're more important than the content.
If it helps, I just metamoderated as wrong whoever it was that modded you down. I disagree with you, for reasons talked about by many other responders, but you're not trolling. I appreciate your polite, thoughtful call for intelligent discussion of the topic, sans flames.
And what experiments have shown one organism turning into another?
Just for reference, the natural selection theory doesn't claim that one organism turns into another. It claims that children differ slightly from parents, and over many generations those differences lead to new species, especially when one group is isolated from another. Individual organisms don't evolve; species do.
There are about a billion fine points to this that you and I could debate (and have already been debated ad nauseam elsewhere in this thread), but I just wanted to make sure you weren't working from a false strawman of the theory you're opposing. I don't expect to convince you that my theory is correct, or that yours isn't, but the discussion wouldn't be any fun if we didn't at least agree on what it is we were arguing about.
I'm a member of an oppressed minority group who believes that New Hope was better than Empire.
I dunno why that is. Maybe we didn't care for some of the darkness in ESB, and New Hope was more fun. Maybe the open-ended conclusion was less thrilling than the destruction of the Death Star. Maybe it's the "freshman effect" that made Clerks better than Mallrats. (Not that ESB is anything like Mallrats. ESB is a great movie. Just less fun than New Hope.)
It's not important why. I just wanted to state out loud that although it's accepted wisdom that Empire was better than New Hope, it's not entirely universal.
But that's why I've said before on Slashdot that I thought that Sith had a good chance to be the best of the prequels: it ties in to what I feel is the best of the originals.
It's interesting because it means that there are still enough unpatched machines out there for a worm to gain serious traction without uncovering new technical vulnerabilities. Worms that hit patched machines are technologically interesting, but those are problems that can be fixed (eventually) by patching. A technological problem with a technological solution.
But it appears that even if a putative Service Pack 3 were flawless, there would still be massive worm activity in those who haven't patched. And if they haven't patched by now, they're not gonna, and that means we're going to be dealing with this problem for a long time to come.
It's a non-technological problem, so there may not be a technological solution. (Me, I'd like to see ISPs start throttling infected users, but that's a whole separate can of worms.)
When they cut a movie to avoid an NC-17 rating, it's because most theaters won't show NC-17 movies. So his option is to either cut it or send it direct to video.
When they cut a film to get PG-13 rating rather than R, usually those are summer-action-blockbuster types that are counting on teenagers to see. Their goal is to pack in violence/boobies to get the 13-18 year olds out in droves, but not enough to lose them to the R rating (which some theaters actually enforce). Usually those movies aren't all that good to start with, so you're not losing all that much by having some bit of gore/nudity removed. Yeah, it's the artist's "vision", but for summer action blockbusters the "artist" is usually visualizing money.
With the NC-17 films cut down to R, yeah, sometimes you're losing an auteur's actual work. Team America had some gags cut that were beyond the pale for the MPAA. They're restored on the DVD.
That's the solution to the free speech dilemma: you're free to film whatever you like; the theaters are free not to show it; you're free to buy the unrated DVD. The only lack of freedom is that the artist can't force the theater to show their movie any way they want.
Just because you asked, it's "bona fide", literally "good faith". If we were really speaking Latin it would be pronounced "BOH-nuh FEE-day", but somehow it entered English as "BOH-nuh FIED".
Though somehow, "bonified" seems appropriate as applied to Windows. As in, "I was really going to have my paper done on time, but just as I was going to save it Windows bonified me."
Well, if it's converted by bacteria, it does have a biological source.
The guys who made up the theory call it "abiogenic", and they just mean that the material itself isn't decayed plant matter. I'm not crazy about the terminology (or the theory) myself.
That's why I like the idea of an anti-phishing toolbar. Maybe you should install this on grandma's computer. I don't think I need it myself, but I'd feel a lot better if your grandmother did, if for no other reason than that maybe it'll decrease the number of idiotic phishing spams I get.
But it would suck if my new eYarn.com (buy all your yarn online!) site had its intitial Knitting Digest ad campaign, but grandma got scared off just because the site was new. (It turns out eyarn.com is actually taken. I have no idea who they are. I just made this up as an example.)
One of the factors that goes into the risk rating is the age of the site. That's a good insight: phishers tend to create new sites often, as the old ones get closed down or are simply dropped.
But man, wouldn't it suck to open a new site only to have Netcraft scare off all your customers?
I wonder what "new" means. How long do phishing sites stay around? And how badly would this kill the buzz of the initial marketing effort?
Time isn't the only tool they have in the toolbar, so hopefully novelty as the only warning sign won't ring any alarm bells.
Eventually, phishers will work around this by creating sites and only activating the phishing attack after the requisite time period has elapsed. But that's work, which weeds out the laziest phishers. Watching the escalation of tactics is going to be fascinating.
Some geologists support a theory by Thomas Gold which says that petroleum has a non-biological source. The gist is that non-biological methane is converted into longer-chain hydrocarbons by bacteria deep in the crust.
There's a bunch of evidence to support the theory. It may or may not be sufficient to explain all of the petroleum we see, but it could be; it's not a complete crackpot theory.
I'm not supporting ID or creationism here; I think that the intelligent design people are nut jobs and/or hypocrites. But you don't get to call yourself a scientist without taking all the facts into account. Abiogenic petroleum doesn't constitute a shred of evidence against evolution or for intelligent design. It just means that the irony you cite isn't quite as funny as it could be. Sorry.
"Soap with SF/Horror" is actually a pretty good description. Well, it depends on what you mean by "soap"; it's not like a daytime soap which focus primarily on romantic angles. They do exist on Buffy, but they're usually a sub-plot. Still, it's similarly character-based, and it works only if you like the characters and want to find out what happens to them.
If the three episodes you saw were average episodes, then you've probably seen all you need to see. It wouldn't hurt to watch them from the beginning, to get into the characters, but that's a lot of time to invest.
Of course it could be like me and X-Files, where every time I caught an episode people would tell me, "No, no, that's was a bad one. You've got to see Episode ZZ," or something like that. Me, I just don't care much for horror, which seemed to be the focus of the show, so I just gave up.
Still, I stuck with Babylon 5, mostly because somebody loaned me the DVDs and it was worth watching when there was nothing else available. Several seasons in it became... watchable
So it depends on your time. If you're looking to kill 40 minutes at a shot, and don't mind renting or borrowing from friends (I just stick it on my Netflix queue), Buffy isn't a total waste of time. But if you're just looking at it to say, "Hey, all my friends like it, therefore I must find a way to cram it into my schedule," life's just too short for that.
Actually, Firefly is a much better series. Better acted, better writing (mostly), a bit more mature outlook, far less cheesy fighting. And it's closed-ended: you can watch the whole damn thing in one weekend if you're lying in bed sick (as a friend of mine did.) Fewer clunker episodes than Buffy, too. Watch it from the beginning, though it only really gets going about 6 episodes in.
Some people thought the Western-in-space premise was just stupid, and I'm not gonna tell them they're wrong. I found it interesting, and I'm not a huge fan of Westerns. It's also more episodic, which makes it a bit less soap-opera-esque than Buffy or Angel. If you don't go for it after the first DVD, it's not gonna happen. Go outside instead; it's spring here in the northern hemisphere.
I just remember that it was possible because pi was periodic in some obscure fractional base.
I don't believe that's true. Pi is a transcendental number, which pretty much precludes it being periodic in an fractional base.
(Assuming by "fractional" you mean "rational", the ratio of two whole numbers. Sorry to be picky; I'm just trying to be complete.)
You can compute arbitrary digits of pi in hexadecimal (and binary and octal and any other 2^n base), but as far as I'm aware there isn't any corresponding algorithm for decimal numbers. I'm not certain it's been precluded, either, but I'm fairly certain you won't find pi to be periodic in any fractional base.
If there does exist a proof that you can't do it in decimal, I suspect it will involve the fact that there exist fractions in base 10 that don't have terminating representations in base 16 (e.g. 1/5). That'll make it hard to apply the algorithm from base 16 back to base 10; a one-bit change in the base 16 representation will have dramatic effects all over the base 10 representation.
(I'm not a mathematician, but I used to be, which is why this post is so maddeningly vague. I hope somebody gives you a better answer than I just did.)
I'd love to see Mapquest/GoogleMaps/etc start sending maps in SVG. They currently use low-resolution formats for the screen, and they look terrible when printed, especially street names. They're also hard to zoom in on. And I'd like to think that it might be smaller to send the map vectorized than sending every pixel. (The blank spaces compress nicely, but text-as-graphic doesn't.)
Google Maps is a significant advance over what I've seen at Mapquest/Yahoo Maps, but they can do a lot better.
They could have used PDF, but that requires a separate and not-very-interactive application, or Flash, but that's plain evil. SVG really is the way to go for this.
Xena had the advantage of having an actual singer in the leading role. As a singer, Sarah Michelle Gellar is very pretty.
Joss isn't for everybody. You're not the first one to say that to me. As you say, different tastes.
But thanks for the inspiration. I just finished watching Buffy and Angel on DVD (I don't have cable and over-the-air reception is terrible at my house.) I've watched the with my gf over the past several years, and we've been looking for something else to watch. Xena is a good choice. I missed it on TV, and having a DVD with reasonable entertainment chunked into 40-minute units is incredibly convenient.
I don't like everything Sam Raimi has done (yes, I know who was responsible for the series) but it's worth a try.
Funny that you didn't hear about it at the time. It was much anticipated here on Slashdot. I'm sure there were ads for it during Buffy, if you watched it.
But if you weren't on Slashdot, it's easy to see how you could have missed it. It was put in a poor time slot, and moved around a lot, and it was cancelled mid-season.
At their best, Buffy and Angel were filled with smart, funny writing. The shows presented interesting challenges: they could be funny, sad, scary, and romantic by turns, between episodes and within episodes. The performances were often quirky and interesting, and they liked to take chances: one episode of Buffy was done as a musical, another as a silent movie.
They did long story arcs. Not quite as long as on Babylon 5, but long enough to make each episode potentially fun to watch both on its own and as part of a contribution to a bigger story. For those who like such things, cool fight scenes and scary monster special effects. And it had a smart, independent but deeply flawed heroine who really could be a good role model for girls.
That's at their best, which was usually when Joss was in the driver's seat. They didn't always achieve that. Sometimes they'd be stupid. Sometimes the acting was terrible. Too often, they were just so-so: not bad as part of a longer story arc but not enough to make somebody dropping in for a single episode care very much.
As much as Joss loved his actors, and they do seem to be good people, most of them simply weren't very talented. But they were game to try whatever he threw at them, and that was often good enough for me.
So it's a little hard for me to say, "Here, see episode X and you'll understand." I'd say that too much of the first three seans of Angel were simply lame, and yet it got interesting just in time to get cancelled. Buffy was pretty hit-and-miss as well. I'd say that if you got friends to loan you the first couple of seasons of Buffy you might enjoy them.
That said, if you really want it boiled down to a single episode, try "Once More With Feeling", the famous musical episode. It's hardly representative, but it gives you a good view of the things that they were trying to accomplish on the show. It's late in the series, and there's a good deal of background it would take to know everything that's going on, but it might hook you.
Firefly, in my opinion, represented the best of Joss' work, with significantly better actors.
Much of that information should already be in the hands of the bad guys, but making it easier (and admitting that the policy doesn't change over time) doesn't help.
We're already hypothesizing a material far, far stronger than anything we've ever made, and available in lengths of thousands of miles. Why not just pretend we could make something that could withstand that kind of force?
The US government has for a long time, and this adiminstration in particular, classified things reflexively, whether secrecy was actually required or not.
In many ways it'll be scarier if the redactions show nothing of interest at all: not protecting anybody's privacy or any actual secrets. (A quick scan suggests exactly that.) It leaves open the question, "Why is the government keeping that information secret? Why is the government keeping so much information secret?"
There are many things that people would like to know to keep an eye on their government. Not all of that information should be released, for national security reasons, but it's always been the government who makes that decision. This lack of a check on the power of government makes people increasingly nervous as crimes (e.g. Abu Ghraib) are discovered anyway.
Most people in government over-classify things in order to protect their jobs. It's not a crime to overclassify; it's a big crime to release national security info, even accidentally. That's understandable, but a failure to release information that people are allowed to know makes it extremely difficult to check up on what the government does and whether it is still acting in our interest.
So yeah, maybe this is a bad thing. Maybe this is a release of national security information and lives may be lost. Or maybe it's laziness, somebody redacting because it's easier than checking on whether or not it was OK to release. Now we'll find out, and perhaps gain some broader insight.
There are several reasons, but here are the biggest ones:
* Especially early on, Fortran's non-stack-based structure gave it a lot of opportunities for optimization. When you don't have recursion you can do a lot of "lifting" of subroutines, which makes function calls really fast, and loop unrolling. You can reduce the overhead to literally nothing. That's harder in a stack-based environment, especially when there's the possibility of recursion.
* Some variants of Fortran (including Fortress) have matrices as first-order objects, which gives you a lot of opportunities for optimizations. Especially compared to C++, which thinks of nearly everything as a pointer and is therefore damn hard to optimize, and Java, whose garbage-collecting, ultra-safe environment means you have to do a lot of optimization just to get back in the vicinity of C++ performance.
* And over the years they've taken up a lot of those opportunities. Especially for matrices, which are the meat and drink of pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies.
* They've been doing it that way forever. If your boss/professor writes in Fortran, and you've been asked to extend the library, it's hard to do that in, say, Haskell.
* A lot of pipe-stress and crystallography algorithms are already written, optimized, and debugged in Fortran. There's a lot to be said for getting it done fast.
Those optimizations are really important; they're talking about algorithms that will run a gazillion loops, so microscopic improvements mean the difference between getting it done today and not getting it done at all.
I suspect the biggest reasons have to do with the "that's the way we've always done it" factor than anything else. As you say, once it's compiled and optimized performance on something like this ought to be pretty much the same no matter what language you write in. If you really want something devoted to math, Mathematica should be at least as good.
You'll tend to see rewritten press releases in the business section. The front page of most newspapers originates in wire service articles: AP, Reuters, AFP, sometimes big national papers like the Washington Post or the New York Times.
If you click through a news story from a news aggregator like Google News, you'll note that many of them have identical text, because they're literally repeating the AP wire service story, crediting the original AP writer and all.
Actual reporters are used primarily for local news; very few newspapers have staff anywhere else. Most don't even have reporters in Washington, much less Paris/Jakarta/Darfur.
The bias comes not so much from the writers as from the editorial choices of which press releases and wire reports they're running and what page they put them on.
Either way, they rarely get the skeptical eye you'd really hope they get before receiving the imprimatur of being printed in the newspaper. Even a few phone calls would be nice.
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny that the irony didn't occur to me at the time: I have Flash installed only on IE, not on FF. Whenever I actually want to view a Flash thing (which is nearly never), I just boot up IE. I didn't even notice that I was booting IE to view an ad for FF.
Why don't I just use Flashblock? Well, I used to, but somehow or other a more recent installation of FF didn't get Flash connected in to it, and I was just as happy to be 100% certain that I'd never see any flash unless I specifically went out of my way for it.
Why don't I just use adblock then? Because I like web ads. I like the fact that I get all sorts of cool stuff supported by minimalistic advertising. (I have animated gifs turned off, too.) I like getting Slashdot and others for free, as long as the ads don't try to convince my eyes that they're more important than the content.
If it helps, I just metamoderated as wrong whoever it was that modded you down. I disagree with you, for reasons talked about by many other responders, but you're not trolling. I appreciate your polite, thoughtful call for intelligent discussion of the topic, sans flames.
And what experiments have shown one organism turning into another?
Just for reference, the natural selection theory doesn't claim that one organism turns into another. It claims that children differ slightly from parents, and over many generations those differences lead to new species, especially when one group is isolated from another. Individual organisms don't evolve; species do.
There are about a billion fine points to this that you and I could debate (and have already been debated ad nauseam elsewhere in this thread), but I just wanted to make sure you weren't working from a false strawman of the theory you're opposing. I don't expect to convince you that my theory is correct, or that yours isn't, but the discussion wouldn't be any fun if we didn't at least agree on what it is we were arguing about.
In sci-fi, they drink beer. In fantasy, they drink ale.
I'm a member of an oppressed minority group who believes that New Hope was better than Empire.
I dunno why that is. Maybe we didn't care for some of the darkness in ESB, and New Hope was more fun. Maybe the open-ended conclusion was less thrilling than the destruction of the Death Star. Maybe it's the "freshman effect" that made Clerks better than Mallrats. (Not that ESB is anything like Mallrats. ESB is a great movie. Just less fun than New Hope.)
It's not important why. I just wanted to state out loud that although it's accepted wisdom that Empire was better than New Hope, it's not entirely universal.
But that's why I've said before on Slashdot that I thought that Sith had a good chance to be the best of the prequels: it ties in to what I feel is the best of the originals.
It's interesting because it means that there are still enough unpatched machines out there for a worm to gain serious traction without uncovering new technical vulnerabilities. Worms that hit patched machines are technologically interesting, but those are problems that can be fixed (eventually) by patching. A technological problem with a technological solution.
But it appears that even if a putative Service Pack 3 were flawless, there would still be massive worm activity in those who haven't patched. And if they haven't patched by now, they're not gonna, and that means we're going to be dealing with this problem for a long time to come.
It's a non-technological problem, so there may not be a technological solution. (Me, I'd like to see ISPs start throttling infected users, but that's a whole separate can of worms.)
When they cut a movie to avoid an NC-17 rating, it's because most theaters won't show NC-17 movies. So his option is to either cut it or send it direct to video.
When they cut a film to get PG-13 rating rather than R, usually those are summer-action-blockbuster types that are counting on teenagers to see. Their goal is to pack in violence/boobies to get the 13-18 year olds out in droves, but not enough to lose them to the R rating (which some theaters actually enforce). Usually those movies aren't all that good to start with, so you're not losing all that much by having some bit of gore/nudity removed. Yeah, it's the artist's "vision", but for summer action blockbusters the "artist" is usually visualizing money.
With the NC-17 films cut down to R, yeah, sometimes you're losing an auteur's actual work. Team America had some gags cut that were beyond the pale for the MPAA. They're restored on the DVD.
That's the solution to the free speech dilemma: you're free to film whatever you like; the theaters are free not to show it; you're free to buy the unrated DVD. The only lack of freedom is that the artist can't force the theater to show their movie any way they want.
bonified (sp?)
Just because you asked, it's "bona fide", literally "good faith". If we were really speaking Latin it would be pronounced "BOH-nuh FEE-day", but somehow it entered English as "BOH-nuh FIED".
Though somehow, "bonified" seems appropriate as applied to Windows. As in, "I was really going to have my paper done on time, but just as I was going to save it Windows bonified me."
Of course, if offered something good for free, people like it and will switch to it.
You mean like RHF?
Thanks, Brad.
Well, if it's converted by bacteria, it does have a biological source.
The guys who made up the theory call it "abiogenic", and they just mean that the material itself isn't decayed plant matter. I'm not crazy about the terminology (or the theory) myself.
That's why I like the idea of an anti-phishing toolbar. Maybe you should install this on grandma's computer. I don't think I need it myself, but I'd feel a lot better if your grandmother did, if for no other reason than that maybe it'll decrease the number of idiotic phishing spams I get.
But it would suck if my new eYarn.com (buy all your yarn online!) site had its intitial Knitting Digest ad campaign, but grandma got scared off just because the site was new. (It turns out eyarn.com is actually taken. I have no idea who they are. I just made this up as an example.)
One of the factors that goes into the risk rating is the age of the site. That's a good insight: phishers tend to create new sites often, as the old ones get closed down or are simply dropped.
But man, wouldn't it suck to open a new site only to have Netcraft scare off all your customers?
I wonder what "new" means. How long do phishing sites stay around? And how badly would this kill the buzz of the initial marketing effort?
Time isn't the only tool they have in the toolbar, so hopefully novelty as the only warning sign won't ring any alarm bells.
Eventually, phishers will work around this by creating sites and only activating the phishing attack after the requisite time period has elapsed. But that's work, which weeds out the laziest phishers. Watching the escalation of tactics is going to be fascinating.
Some geologists support a theory by Thomas Gold which says that petroleum has a non-biological source. The gist is that non-biological methane is converted into longer-chain hydrocarbons by bacteria deep in the crust.
There's a bunch of evidence to support the theory. It may or may not be sufficient to explain all of the petroleum we see, but it could be; it's not a complete crackpot theory.
I'm not supporting ID or creationism here; I think that the intelligent design people are nut jobs and/or hypocrites. But you don't get to call yourself a scientist without taking all the facts into account. Abiogenic petroleum doesn't constitute a shred of evidence against evolution or for intelligent design. It just means that the irony you cite isn't quite as funny as it could be. Sorry.
"Soap with SF/Horror" is actually a pretty good description. Well, it depends on what you mean by "soap"; it's not like a daytime soap which focus primarily on romantic angles. They do exist on Buffy, but they're usually a sub-plot. Still, it's similarly character-based, and it works only if you like the characters and want to find out what happens to them.
If the three episodes you saw were average episodes, then you've probably seen all you need to see. It wouldn't hurt to watch them from the beginning, to get into the characters, but that's a lot of time to invest.
Of course it could be like me and X-Files, where every time I caught an episode people would tell me, "No, no, that's was a bad one. You've got to see Episode ZZ," or something like that. Me, I just don't care much for horror, which seemed to be the focus of the show, so I just gave up.
Still, I stuck with Babylon 5, mostly because somebody loaned me the DVDs and it was worth watching when there was nothing else available. Several seasons in it became... watchable
So it depends on your time. If you're looking to kill 40 minutes at a shot, and don't mind renting or borrowing from friends (I just stick it on my Netflix queue), Buffy isn't a total waste of time. But if you're just looking at it to say, "Hey, all my friends like it, therefore I must find a way to cram it into my schedule," life's just too short for that.
Actually, Firefly is a much better series. Better acted, better writing (mostly), a bit more mature outlook, far less cheesy fighting. And it's closed-ended: you can watch the whole damn thing in one weekend if you're lying in bed sick (as a friend of mine did.) Fewer clunker episodes than Buffy, too. Watch it from the beginning, though it only really gets going about 6 episodes in.
Some people thought the Western-in-space premise was just stupid, and I'm not gonna tell them they're wrong. I found it interesting, and I'm not a huge fan of Westerns. It's also more episodic, which makes it a bit less soap-opera-esque than Buffy or Angel. If you don't go for it after the first DVD, it's not gonna happen. Go outside instead; it's spring here in the northern hemisphere.
I just remember that it was possible because pi was periodic in some obscure fractional base.
I don't believe that's true. Pi is a transcendental number, which pretty much precludes it being periodic in an fractional base.
(Assuming by "fractional" you mean "rational", the ratio of two whole numbers. Sorry to be picky; I'm just trying to be complete.)
You can compute arbitrary digits of pi in hexadecimal (and binary and octal and any other 2^n base), but as far as I'm aware there isn't any corresponding algorithm for decimal numbers. I'm not certain it's been precluded, either, but I'm fairly certain you won't find pi to be periodic in any fractional base.
If there does exist a proof that you can't do it in decimal, I suspect it will involve the fact that there exist fractions in base 10 that don't have terminating representations in base 16 (e.g. 1/5). That'll make it hard to apply the algorithm from base 16 back to base 10; a one-bit change in the base 16 representation will have dramatic effects all over the base 10 representation.
(I'm not a mathematician, but I used to be, which is why this post is so maddeningly vague. I hope somebody gives you a better answer than I just did.)
I'd love to see Mapquest/GoogleMaps/etc start sending maps in SVG. They currently use low-resolution formats for the screen, and they look terrible when printed, especially street names. They're also hard to zoom in on. And I'd like to think that it might be smaller to send the map vectorized than sending every pixel. (The blank spaces compress nicely, but text-as-graphic doesn't.)
Google Maps is a significant advance over what I've seen at Mapquest/Yahoo Maps, but they can do a lot better.
They could have used PDF, but that requires a separate and not-very-interactive application, or Flash, but that's plain evil. SVG really is the way to go for this.
Xena had the advantage of having an actual singer in the leading role. As a singer, Sarah Michelle Gellar is very pretty.
Joss isn't for everybody. You're not the first one to say that to me. As you say, different tastes.
But thanks for the inspiration. I just finished watching Buffy and Angel on DVD (I don't have cable and over-the-air reception is terrible at my house.) I've watched the with my gf over the past several years, and we've been looking for something else to watch. Xena is a good choice. I missed it on TV, and having a DVD with reasonable entertainment chunked into 40-minute units is incredibly convenient.
I don't like everything Sam Raimi has done (yes, I know who was responsible for the series) but it's worth a try.
Funny that you didn't hear about it at the time. It was much anticipated here on Slashdot. I'm sure there were ads for it during Buffy, if you watched it.
But if you weren't on Slashdot, it's easy to see how you could have missed it. It was put in a poor time slot, and moved around a lot, and it was cancelled mid-season.
Must be where they saw it. I saw HHGG last night and the Serenity trailer was attached.
At their best, Buffy and Angel were filled with smart, funny writing. The shows presented interesting challenges: they could be funny, sad, scary, and romantic by turns, between episodes and within episodes. The performances were often quirky and interesting, and they liked to take chances: one episode of Buffy was done as a musical, another as a silent movie.
They did long story arcs. Not quite as long as on Babylon 5, but long enough to make each episode potentially fun to watch both on its own and as part of a contribution to a bigger story. For those who like such things, cool fight scenes and scary monster special effects. And it had a smart, independent but deeply flawed heroine who really could be a good role model for girls.
That's at their best, which was usually when Joss was in the driver's seat. They didn't always achieve that. Sometimes they'd be stupid. Sometimes the acting was terrible. Too often, they were just so-so: not bad as part of a longer story arc but not enough to make somebody dropping in for a single episode care very much.
As much as Joss loved his actors, and they do seem to be good people, most of them simply weren't very talented. But they were game to try whatever he threw at them, and that was often good enough for me.
So it's a little hard for me to say, "Here, see episode X and you'll understand." I'd say that too much of the first three seans of Angel were simply lame, and yet it got interesting just in time to get cancelled. Buffy was pretty hit-and-miss as well. I'd say that if you got friends to loan you the first couple of seasons of Buffy you might enjoy them.
That said, if you really want it boiled down to a single episode, try "Once More With Feeling", the famous musical episode. It's hardly representative, but it gives you a good view of the things that they were trying to accomplish on the show. It's late in the series, and there's a good deal of background it would take to know everything that's going on, but it might hook you.
Firefly, in my opinion, represented the best of Joss' work, with significantly better actors.
Fascinating. Thank you.
Much of that information should already be in the hands of the bad guys, but making it easier (and admitting that the policy doesn't change over time) doesn't help.
We're already hypothesizing a material far, far stronger than anything we've ever made, and available in lengths of thousands of miles. Why not just pretend we could make something that could withstand that kind of force?
Well, now we'll see, won't we?
The US government has for a long time, and this adiminstration in particular, classified things reflexively, whether secrecy was actually required or not.
In many ways it'll be scarier if the redactions show nothing of interest at all: not protecting anybody's privacy or any actual secrets. (A quick scan suggests exactly that.) It leaves open the question, "Why is the government keeping that information secret? Why is the government keeping so much information secret?"
There are many things that people would like to know to keep an eye on their government. Not all of that information should be released, for national security reasons, but it's always been the government who makes that decision. This lack of a check on the power of government makes people increasingly nervous as crimes (e.g. Abu Ghraib) are discovered anyway.
Most people in government over-classify things in order to protect their jobs. It's not a crime to overclassify; it's a big crime to release national security info, even accidentally. That's understandable, but a failure to release information that people are allowed to know makes it extremely difficult to check up on what the government does and whether it is still acting in our interest.
So yeah, maybe this is a bad thing. Maybe this is a release of national security information and lives may be lost. Or maybe it's laziness, somebody redacting because it's easier than checking on whether or not it was OK to release. Now we'll find out, and perhaps gain some broader insight.
There are several reasons, but here are the biggest ones:
* Especially early on, Fortran's non-stack-based structure gave it a lot of opportunities for optimization. When you don't have recursion you can do a lot of "lifting" of subroutines, which makes function calls really fast, and loop unrolling. You can reduce the overhead to literally nothing. That's harder in a stack-based environment, especially when there's the possibility of recursion.
* Some variants of Fortran (including Fortress) have matrices as first-order objects, which gives you a lot of opportunities for optimizations. Especially compared to C++, which thinks of nearly everything as a pointer and is therefore damn hard to optimize, and Java, whose garbage-collecting, ultra-safe environment means you have to do a lot of optimization just to get back in the vicinity of C++ performance.
* And over the years they've taken up a lot of those opportunities. Especially for matrices, which are the meat and drink of pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies.
* They've been doing it that way forever. If your boss/professor writes in Fortran, and you've been asked to extend the library, it's hard to do that in, say, Haskell.
* A lot of pipe-stress and crystallography algorithms are already written, optimized, and debugged in Fortran. There's a lot to be said for getting it done fast.
Those optimizations are really important; they're talking about algorithms that will run a gazillion loops, so microscopic improvements mean the difference between getting it done today and not getting it done at all.
I suspect the biggest reasons have to do with the "that's the way we've always done it" factor than anything else. As you say, once it's compiled and optimized performance on something like this ought to be pretty much the same no matter what language you write in. If you really want something devoted to math, Mathematica should be at least as good.
You'll tend to see rewritten press releases in the business section. The front page of most newspapers originates in wire service articles: AP, Reuters, AFP, sometimes big national papers like the Washington Post or the New York Times.
If you click through a news story from a news aggregator like Google News, you'll note that many of them have identical text, because they're literally repeating the AP wire service story, crediting the original AP writer and all.
Actual reporters are used primarily for local news; very few newspapers have staff anywhere else. Most don't even have reporters in Washington, much less Paris/Jakarta/Darfur.
The bias comes not so much from the writers as from the editorial choices of which press releases and wire reports they're running and what page they put them on.
Either way, they rarely get the skeptical eye you'd really hope they get before receiving the imprimatur of being printed in the newspaper. Even a few phone calls would be nice.