The MacArthur Genius awards are an example of a rich, eccentric family giving money to other eccentrics. When you come right down to it, it doesn't have much to do with genius. They've given money to people with some truly useful ideas in the past, but there have also been plenty of stinkers in this list. My favorite was the woman that got an award for her new theory that sperm was an invasive infection in a woman's vaginal tract. By the way, she wasn't in the medical field. Her source for this new theory that blazed bold trails in medicine?
She saw the infection "in a dream".
There's a reason they get a lot of people from the Ivy Leagues for these awards. The Ivy's nurture that kind of nonsense, many times at public expense. Call me when the Nobel's are announced. I might care then.
Isn't this the guy that predicted Microsoft was inevitably doomed by 2004 or so? Because the profit margin had nowhere to go? Doomed. He seems to use that word a lot.
Sun isn't going anywhere, and if the Merrill Lynch "open letter" was an official company communication, I'll be shocked. Anyone wanna bet that the guys that wrote it will be called in on the carpet for exposing it publicly? Most public evaluations of companies aren't put into such informal language. "His act is getting old" is a bit suspect.
Sun has 5 billion in cash reserves, and a profitable high end server business that will shrink somewhat, but not completely. It's utterly foolish to write this company off at this point. I know it's a popular thing to do around here becaue of the way they play footsie with Linux, but I'm afraid you all are going to be dissapointed if you're waiting for Sun to go belly up, or be bought out anytime soon.
Oh, and Eric should stick to open source advocacy. Because his economic predictions are kind of suspect at this point....
Good Lord, I'm also tired of the dry-as-sand gaming stories. They post far too many here. I don't want to completely ignore the gaming section, but I'll have to if they continue to post this kind of tripe.
Not only do they have too many gaming stories, it's usually about something academic or relatively insignificant. An obscure theory, or in this case, a single feature.
....the fact that these stories about obscure game design theories usually end up with less than a dozen posts ought to tell the editors something. Nobody cares but the editors. There are far better things to cover. Do so, please.
Don't believe me? Go back and see what the average number of posts for gaming stories is...
And yes, I know I can prevent game stories from appearing on my page. But I don't want to completely ignore it. There are some topics on games that I might find interesting. Slashdot just hasn't been posting any. Again, usually it's about some obscure design theory that no one but the editors gives a shit about.
Too many game stories. Post response numbers don't lie....
"Well, do you believe these guys have any impact in Brussels?"
None whatsoever.
As much as the US goverment is criticized on cyber issues these days, the EU has been even more hardcore on these types of issues (such as patents). One gets the impression that the collective leadership has made their minds up on the issue.
"How many people are "criminals" because they dared have a few grams of pot on them?"
All of them.
Because the law currently says pot is illegal, case closed. They may not be evil for smoking pot, and maybe pot should be legal. But until it is, using it is a crime. No debate here.
It never ceases to amaze me that so many people here rage at the fact that people get sued and prosecuted for doing illegal things just because they disagree with the law. What they need to be doing is trying to get those laws changed. And if you can't get them changed, and the majority of the public does NOT support your position on getting it changed, tough luck, you lose, move on. That's how it works in a democratic republic. Just because YOU don't support the law, that doesn't mean that you have a blank check to defy it. If we defied all the laws we didn't like, it wouldn't be much of a civilization, would it?
He wasn't refering to graduates at the time. He was refering to very gifted students, ones that were establishing reputations for themselves, suddenly dropping out of school, or just dissapearing altogether. He wasn't talking about the normal cycle of graduates moving on somewhere else.
We'll never know who the best are. Because they're SMART ENOUGH NOT TO BRAG ABOUT IT IN PUBLIC.
All sarcasm aside, I once heard Prof. Gene Spafford of CERIUS say that some of his best students had simply dissapeared from the face of the Earth. He suspected that they were either recruited by Government organizations, or major corporations; and he was afraid that some even went to work for organized crime.
THESE people are the real pros. They get the job done, get paid, and quietly move on. They could live next door to you, and you'd have no clue that they crack heavily guarded systems for a living. For every Adrian Lamo or Kevin Mitnick, or even Peter Shipley for that matter, there are a half dozen guys way better that you'll never hear about.
...at one time, Joy owned huge amounts of Microsoft stock. In all truth, I wouldn't be terribly shocked if he ended up affiliated with Microsoft in SOME way.
Let me speak for him by saying, thanks, Fuck You Too AND the horse you rode in on.
"I don't know about you, but here in civilised countries.."
And where would THAT be? Doubtless, it's better than we barbarian Americans are used to, huh?
"we have this idea that children below a certain age aren't sufficiently mature to understand that what they're doing is wrong and therefore they can't be held accountable. "
Wow, we barbarians have that idea too! And with all of your genius, if you had realized that Taco was trying to inflame opinion by playing up the "scared little girl" aspect, you'd also know that in American courts, up to a certain age, parents are held accountable for the actions of their children. It's not little Miss Tummy Ache that will be sued, it's her parents.
"If anyone's guilty it's the Kazaa for charging the fee for a service they couldn't legally provide"
Well, whaddaya know? Barbarians and "civilsed" people can agree on something!
Next time you want to come back and taunt us Bronze age cavemen, just fire off another insult to our country. We just looooove that here! Yall come back now, hear?!
"Public perception is that file sharing is NOT illegal"
The public knows perfectly WELL it's illegal. The public just doesn't care.
The attitude has always been "what are they going to do? Come after me?" Ummm, well, yeah, actually, they are.
Looks like a Windows 95 clone
on
SkyOS GUI Contest
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That in and of itself is not a bad thing. Windows 95 was actually pretty nice in a lot of ways. DLL Hell and its instability made it a pain. Fix those issues, and Linux might never have taken off like it did...
Since Windows XP (and Longhorn) have moved away from the classic Win95 interface, why chuck it? Unless you just want a unique interface to establish SkyOs's identity. But hell, keep what works. The familiarity would attract a lot of users.
The other poster is right. Football is like chess with two lines of guys moving at the same time, rather than just one player at a time. It's a constant cat and mouse game, as you try to guess what the other side is going to do? Defense is especially hard to play, because offense always has initiative. That's why the best championship teams have top flight defenses.
Just think about all of the things that have to be considered...
If you're a defensive coordinator, all manner of things are running through your head.
"They're lined up in the I formation. Hard to tell what they're going to do. One wideout to either side, a tailback and fulback with a tight end blocking. Fuck, they could be doing anything. Best guess is a toss sweep to the tailback behind the tight end, unless the tight end moves directly midfield, then I have to have the linebackers ready for a playaction pass...."
And that's just the standard kind of plays. When a trick play comes off right, like a flea-flicker, end-around reverse, or a fake punt, it's just a fucking thing of beauty, man.
Defending against good defenses is always a hoot, too. Do you stack 9 men in the box, or do you hang your cornerbacks deceptively to throw a safety blitz on the QB? Do you go zone or press-man on the recievers? Again, just like chess. What is your oponent going to do?
Those that think football isn't an intellectual game don't know jack shit about it. The best players are the SMART ones.
I know that was (partially) a joke, but I'm sick and tired of the idea that geeks can't like sports, or they're not real geeks. Where is it written that we can't like football or baseball or basketball or auto racing? Are we THAT FUCKING PATHETIC? Are we REALLY going to limit ourselves to basement D&D sessions with other geeks, or writing software for our only means of fun?(You porn mavens shut up now.......)
Good God, who said we all had to be Alan Alda's with keyboards? And when you rib geeks who don't like sports, they take it sooooooo fucking personally. Look, I'm sorry that the linebackers beat you up in high school, but the rest of us have lives outside of the server room. If you hate and fear athletes THAT much (many of which are really bright people), then join a gym and take some Karate lessons to repair your damaged self-esteem.
"No, we are still waiting for a peer-reviewed study to be published that shows something other than caloriesIn-caloriesBurned*0 = weightLoss, regardless of the type of caloric intake."
Sorry abou the MSNBC link, but the New England Journal of Medicine's website seems to be down right now....the article discusses two studies on Atkins.
" It's a travesty for a scientist to say cold fusion is wrong because of his faith... Since when does peer review mean you only test things that fit into your view of the universe? "
It's always been this way. Theres a big difference between the scientific method, and Science, Inc. And while you're at it, realize that Science Inc is as much a religion as any other faiths. It has its orthodoxies just like anything else. The Atkins Diet has always had its detractors. It took them, what, over two decades to admit that you can lose weight with it? And even now some doctors refuse to acknowledge that it can work. It violated the dogma of low fat/high carbs. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, science has its dogmas. Stephen Hawking is considered a genius now, but back when he was starting his career, the Steady State theory was the reigning dogma of physics. Some scientists simply refused to acknowledge any other possibilities.
Revolutionary ideas in science are often met with skepticism at first.
" To mac lovers like myself raw processing power does not matter."
That speaks volumes right there.
"The thing is that the mac allows you to get your work done without crashing every 30 seconds"
If you're talking about OS9 and earlier legendary instability, then yeah, this is a huge improvement. If you're taking a swipe at windows users, Windows has been very stable since Win2000. And I KNOW you weren't dumb enough to aim that at Unix users.
"And it looks sexy too."
Someone kill me now. ITS A FUCKING COMPUTER.
"I think that the fact that mac users find their computers sexy telling"
You have no idea...
"they love their machines, which is something that most users simply do not do."
Mac users attachments to their machines borders on the psychotic. It's a computer, no more, no less. It may be a very capable computer, in an attractive case (and beauty is definitly in the eye of the beholder here), but it's a machine that does a job. You don't admire it like the Mona Lisa. You don't fuck it. Listening to some of these posters, I get the impression that thousands of slashdotters are sitting on the can, spanking the monkey to MacMall catalogs.
I'm going to get modded -1 troll, but what the fuck, let's go a little further. Since the iMac, Mac case design has been getting progressively less impressive. The colored iMacs and iBooks were truly original and groundbreaking, and saved the company. So what does Jobs do? Chuck that idea out the window. While we're at, lets make the next iMac a table lamp. And now we've got the G5. Impressive hardware. And a case that would look at home on a GM assembly line. It looks like stamped industrial stainless steel. If you like it, fine. But quit making it out to be a piece of fine art.
Jobs is slipping down the same path he trod at NeXT, when he was more concerned about how his office furniture looked than the company. Same slavish devotion to post modern fashion. And you all are paying almost two grand a pop to wank with him. Meanwhile, unless you're using a dual G5, Xeons beat the G5 in almost all real world tasks.
Stephen King tried this. Charged a buck per chapter for a novel he was publishing online. Said he'd only continue if at least 75% of downloads were paid for.
He never got past the second chapter.
This is the internet. If it can be copied and distributed to a million of your closest friends, it will be, whether its wrong or not.
In short, producers aren't stupid enough to try this. They know us better than that. And don't give me any crap about the Apple store being an example of paid downloads. Here's my example. Kazaa. Which one do you think has more traffic, and by a mile?
A- VERY cheap to produce, and... B- Get VERY high ratings.
Those two things add up to huge profit for Fox. Sci-Fi is, by its nature, expensive to produce, with a fairly limited audience. Fox is there to make money, not make an artistic statement. They're less pretentious than the other networks in that regard. And major networks don't view sci-fi seriously or artistically anyway. The original Star Trek only got on the air because NBC and Desilu thought they were getting a laser shoot-em-up, or as Gene Roddenberry put it, "Wagontrain in Space".
Sci-Fi will always be a harder sell than "normal" dramas or reality tv because of the expense. Rendering technology has made it cheaper, but it's still a long ways off from being cost competitive. It's just easier and cheaper to produce another "When Rabid Ferrets Attack" or "The Gay Show".
Sarah Michelle Gellar has been quoted as saying they'll never do a Buffy movie, and that the first one was viewed as a failure. Perhaps they think that'll cause a stigma to any other Buffy flicks.
Personally, I just get the impression she's tired of the role and wants to move on. Maybe if no significant work show up, she'll change her mind.
While I'd like to see more use of disposable, cheaper rockets, it's near impossible to launch something like Hubble into orbit with them. Have you actually SEEN how big Hubble is? Things like Delta or Titan rockets couldn't do it. If we still had the Saturn V, MAYBE that could do it. But we've had nothing like the Saturn for decades now, and the costs to develop an equivilant to it wouldn't make it truly cost effective. There are some missions where we simply need a big 'ole space truck like the shuttle. Don't get me wrong. I'd LOVE for us to bring someting like the Saturn back, but don't bet on it.
"For instance, do you really believe that the labor movement would ever have gotten anywhere if they never held any strikes? That the civil rights movement would have gotten anywhere if they never got in anybody's face?"
That's totally different. It's one thing to stop working on a production line, and temporarily kill a physical product that isn't easily replicated. You're hurting The Mans pockets that way.
Who are these protesters hurting by shutting down their own fuckin' web sites? Themselves, and you that support them. You think proprietary software companies or governments give a flying fuck about Knoppix shutting their website down? Please.
And software companies will just take advantage os this by saying "See? Those open source people are fanatics. You can't depend on them. If they don't get what they want, they'll cry and take their ball home. You can always rely on the steady, rock solid support of *insert software company name here*".
This is just like rioters that disply their rage by destroying their own homes and communities. After its all over, where the fuck are you going to live? Same principal here.
Slashdot Mirror
The MacArthur Genius awards are an example of a rich, eccentric family giving money to other eccentrics. When you come right down to it, it doesn't have much to do with genius. They've given money to people with some truly useful ideas in the past, but there have also been plenty of stinkers in this list. My favorite was the woman that got an award for her new theory that sperm was an invasive infection in a woman's vaginal tract. By the way, she wasn't in the medical field. Her source for this new theory that blazed bold trails in medicine?
She saw the infection "in a dream".
There's a reason they get a lot of people from the Ivy Leagues for these awards. The Ivy's nurture that kind of nonsense, many times at public expense. Call me when the Nobel's are announced. I might care then.
Isn't this the guy that predicted Microsoft was inevitably doomed by 2004 or so? Because the profit margin had nowhere to go? Doomed. He seems to use that word a lot.
Sun isn't going anywhere, and if the Merrill Lynch "open letter" was an official company communication, I'll be shocked. Anyone wanna bet that the guys that wrote it will be called in on the carpet for exposing it publicly? Most public evaluations of companies aren't put into such informal language. "His act is getting old" is a bit suspect.
Sun has 5 billion in cash reserves, and a profitable high end server business that will shrink somewhat, but not completely. It's utterly foolish to write this company off at this point. I know it's a popular thing to do around here becaue of the way they play footsie with Linux, but I'm afraid you all are going to be dissapointed if you're waiting for Sun to go belly up, or be bought out anytime soon.
Oh, and Eric should stick to open source advocacy. Because his economic predictions are kind of suspect at this point....
Good Lord, I'm also tired of the dry-as-sand gaming stories. They post far too many here. I don't want to completely ignore the gaming section, but I'll have to if they continue to post this kind of tripe.
Not only do they have too many gaming stories, it's usually about something academic or relatively insignificant. An obscure theory, or in this case, a single feature.
Bravo for your post.
....the fact that these stories about obscure game design theories usually end up with less than a dozen posts ought to tell the editors something. Nobody cares but the editors. There are far better things to cover. Do so, please.
Don't believe me? Go back and see what the average number of posts for gaming stories is...
And yes, I know I can prevent game stories from appearing on my page. But I don't want to completely ignore it. There are some topics on games that I might find interesting. Slashdot just hasn't been posting any. Again, usually it's about some obscure design theory that no one but the editors gives a shit about.
Too many game stories. Post response numbers don't lie....
"Well, do you believe these guys have any impact in Brussels?"
None whatsoever.
As much as the US goverment is criticized on cyber issues these days, the EU has been even more hardcore on these types of issues (such as patents). One gets the impression that the collective leadership has made their minds up on the issue.
"How many people are "criminals" because they dared have a few grams of pot on them?"
All of them.
Because the law currently says pot is illegal, case closed. They may not be evil for smoking pot, and maybe pot should be legal. But until it is, using it is a crime. No debate here.
It never ceases to amaze me that so many people here rage at the fact that people get sued and prosecuted for doing illegal things just because they disagree with the law. What they need to be doing is trying to get those laws changed. And if you can't get them changed, and the majority of the public does NOT support your position on getting it changed, tough luck, you lose, move on. That's how it works in a democratic republic. Just because YOU don't support the law, that doesn't mean that you have a blank check to defy it. If we defied all the laws we didn't like, it wouldn't be much of a civilization, would it?
He wasn't refering to graduates at the time. He was refering to very gifted students, ones that were establishing reputations for themselves, suddenly dropping out of school, or just dissapearing altogether. He wasn't talking about the normal cycle of graduates moving on somewhere else.
We'll never know who the best are. Because they're SMART ENOUGH NOT TO BRAG ABOUT IT IN PUBLIC.
All sarcasm aside, I once heard Prof. Gene Spafford of CERIUS say that some of his best students had simply dissapeared from the face of the Earth. He suspected that they were either recruited by Government organizations, or major corporations; and he was afraid that some even went to work for organized crime.
THESE people are the real pros. They get the job done, get paid, and quietly move on. They could live next door to you, and you'd have no clue that they crack heavily guarded systems for a living. For every Adrian Lamo or Kevin Mitnick, or even Peter Shipley for that matter, there are a half dozen guys way better that you'll never hear about.
"...modernized version of the Apollo Space Capsule. Manned spacecraft might actually leave low earth orbit again!"
Now if only we can get the Saturn Rocket, HemiCudas, and Led Zeppelin back, I'll be set...
"Watching the campers' mute contortions, Mrs. King shakes her head. 'It seems so different," she allows, "when you do the Macarena in silence.' "
This is a BAD thing?
...at one time, Joy owned huge amounts of Microsoft stock. In all truth, I wouldn't be terribly shocked if he ended up affiliated with Microsoft in SOME way.
"You're plainly a moron. "
Let me speak for him by saying, thanks, Fuck You Too AND the horse you rode in on.
"I don't know about you, but here in civilised countries.."
And where would THAT be? Doubtless, it's better than we barbarian Americans are used to, huh?
"we have this idea that children below a certain age aren't sufficiently mature to understand that what they're doing is wrong and therefore they can't be held accountable. "
Wow, we barbarians have that idea too! And with all of your genius, if you had realized that Taco was trying to inflame opinion by playing up the "scared little girl" aspect, you'd also know that in American courts, up to a certain age, parents are held accountable for the actions of their children. It's not little Miss Tummy Ache that will be sued, it's her parents.
"If anyone's guilty it's the Kazaa for charging the fee for a service they couldn't legally provide"
Well, whaddaya know? Barbarians and "civilsed" people can agree on something!
Next time you want to come back and taunt us Bronze age cavemen, just fire off another insult to our country. We just looooove that here! Yall come back now, hear?!
"Public perception is that file sharing is NOT illegal"
The public knows perfectly WELL it's illegal. The public just doesn't care.
The attitude has always been "what are they going to do? Come after me?" Ummm, well, yeah, actually, they are.
That in and of itself is not a bad thing. Windows 95 was actually pretty nice in a lot of ways. DLL Hell and its instability made it a pain. Fix those issues, and Linux might never have taken off like it did...
Since Windows XP (and Longhorn) have moved away from the classic Win95 interface, why chuck it? Unless you just want a unique interface to establish SkyOs's identity. But hell, keep what works. The familiarity would attract a lot of users.
" Instead try handing over the names of the sons and daughters of your favorite senator."
Actually, just for shits and giggles, I was going to give them yours.....
Hmmm, wait a sec.... *looks over Foes and Freaks lists*..
Heh....heh heh....Mmmm mmmm... mwah hah hah hah hah....fiendish.....FIENDISH....
The other poster is right. Football is like chess with two lines of guys moving at the same time, rather than just one player at a time. It's a constant cat and mouse game, as you try to guess what the other side is going to do? Defense is especially hard to play, because offense always has initiative. That's why the best championship teams have top flight defenses.
Just think about all of the things that have to be considered...
If you're a defensive coordinator, all manner of things are running through your head.
"They're lined up in the I formation. Hard to tell what they're going to do. One wideout to either side, a tailback and fulback with a tight end blocking. Fuck, they could be doing anything. Best guess is a toss sweep to the tailback behind the tight end, unless the tight end moves directly midfield, then I have to have the linebackers ready for a playaction pass...."
And that's just the standard kind of plays. When a trick play comes off right, like a flea-flicker, end-around reverse, or a fake punt, it's just a fucking thing of beauty, man.
Defending against good defenses is always a hoot, too. Do you stack 9 men in the box, or do you hang your cornerbacks deceptively to throw a safety blitz on the QB? Do you go zone or press-man on the recievers? Again, just like chess. What is your oponent going to do?
Those that think football isn't an intellectual game don't know jack shit about it. The best players are the SMART ones.
"Now if only our football team was that cool"
"Are you sure you're a geek?"
I know that was (partially) a joke, but I'm sick and tired of the idea that geeks can't like sports, or they're not real geeks. Where is it written that we can't like football or baseball or basketball or auto racing? Are we THAT FUCKING PATHETIC? Are we REALLY going to limit ourselves to basement D&D sessions with other geeks, or writing software for our only means of fun?(You porn mavens shut up now.......)
Good God, who said we all had to be Alan Alda's with keyboards? And when you rib geeks who don't like sports, they take it sooooooo fucking personally. Look, I'm sorry that the linebackers beat you up in high school, but the rest of us have lives outside of the server room. If you hate and fear athletes THAT much (many of which are really bright people), then join a gym and take some Karate lessons to repair your damaged self-esteem.
"No, we are still waiting for a peer-reviewed study to be published that shows something other than caloriesIn-caloriesBurned*0 = weightLoss, regardless of the type of caloric intake."
You mean like this one
and this one ?
Sorry abou the MSNBC link, but the New England Journal of Medicine's website seems to be down right now....the article discusses two studies on Atkins.
" It's a travesty for a scientist to say cold fusion is wrong because of his faith... Since when does peer review mean you only test things that fit into your view of the universe? "
It's always been this way. Theres a big difference between the scientific method, and Science, Inc. And while you're at it, realize that Science Inc is as much a religion as any other faiths. It has its orthodoxies just like anything else. The Atkins Diet has always had its detractors. It took them, what, over two decades to admit that you can lose weight with it? And even now some doctors refuse to acknowledge that it can work. It violated the dogma of low fat/high carbs. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, science has its dogmas. Stephen Hawking is considered a genius now, but back when he was starting his career, the Steady State theory was the reigning dogma of physics. Some scientists simply refused to acknowledge any other possibilities.
Revolutionary ideas in science are often met with skepticism at first.
" To mac lovers like myself raw processing power does not matter."
That speaks volumes right there.
"The thing is that the mac allows you to get your work done without crashing every 30 seconds"
If you're talking about OS9 and earlier legendary instability, then yeah, this is a huge improvement. If you're taking a swipe at windows users, Windows has been very stable since Win2000. And I KNOW you weren't dumb enough to aim that at Unix users.
"And it looks sexy too."
Someone kill me now. ITS A FUCKING COMPUTER.
"I think that the fact that mac users find their computers sexy telling"
You have no idea...
"they love their machines, which is something that most users simply do not do."
Mac users attachments to their machines borders on the psychotic. It's a computer, no more, no less. It may be a very capable computer, in an attractive case (and beauty is definitly in the eye of the beholder here), but it's a machine that does a job. You don't admire it like the Mona Lisa. You don't fuck it. Listening to some of these posters, I get the impression that thousands of slashdotters are sitting on the can, spanking the monkey to MacMall catalogs.
I'm going to get modded -1 troll, but what the fuck, let's go a little further. Since the iMac, Mac case design has been getting progressively less impressive. The colored iMacs and iBooks were truly original and groundbreaking, and saved the company. So what does Jobs do? Chuck that idea out the window. While we're at, lets make the next iMac a table lamp. And now we've got the G5. Impressive hardware. And a case that would look at home on a GM assembly line. It looks like stamped industrial stainless steel. If you like it, fine. But quit making it out to be a piece of fine art.
Jobs is slipping down the same path he trod at NeXT, when he was more concerned about how his office furniture looked than the company. Same slavish devotion to post modern fashion. And you all are paying almost two grand a pop to wank with him. Meanwhile, unless you're using a dual G5, Xeons beat the G5 in almost all real world tasks.
OSX is the only saving grace of that company.
Stephen King tried this. Charged a buck per chapter for a novel he was publishing online. Said he'd only continue if at least 75% of downloads were paid for.
He never got past the second chapter.
This is the internet. If it can be copied and distributed to a million of your closest friends, it will be, whether its wrong or not.
In short, producers aren't stupid enough to try this. They know us better than that. And don't give me any crap about the Apple store being an example of paid downloads. Here's my example. Kazaa. Which one do you think has more traffic, and by a mile?
...Fox's "Lame Reality Shows" are:
A- VERY cheap to produce, and...
B- Get VERY high ratings.
Those two things add up to huge profit for Fox. Sci-Fi is, by its nature, expensive to produce, with a fairly limited audience. Fox is there to make money, not make an artistic statement. They're less pretentious than the other networks in that regard. And major networks don't view sci-fi seriously or artistically anyway. The original Star Trek only got on the air because NBC and Desilu thought they were getting a laser shoot-em-up, or as Gene Roddenberry put it, "Wagontrain in Space".
Sci-Fi will always be a harder sell than "normal" dramas or reality tv because of the expense. Rendering technology has made it cheaper, but it's still a long ways off from being cost competitive. It's just easier and cheaper to produce another "When Rabid Ferrets Attack" or "The Gay Show".
Sarah Michelle Gellar has been quoted as saying they'll never do a Buffy movie, and that the first one was viewed as a failure. Perhaps they think that'll cause a stigma to any other Buffy flicks.
Personally, I just get the impression she's tired of the role and wants to move on. Maybe if no significant work show up, she'll change her mind.
While I'd like to see more use of disposable, cheaper rockets, it's near impossible to launch something like Hubble into orbit with them. Have you actually SEEN how big Hubble is? Things like Delta or Titan rockets couldn't do it. If we still had the Saturn V, MAYBE that could do it. But we've had nothing like the Saturn for decades now, and the costs to develop an equivilant to it wouldn't make it truly cost effective. There are some missions where we simply need a big 'ole space truck like the shuttle. Don't get me wrong. I'd LOVE for us to bring someting like the Saturn back, but don't bet on it.
"For instance, do you really believe that the labor movement would ever have gotten anywhere if they never held any strikes? That the civil rights movement would have gotten anywhere if they never got in anybody's face?"
That's totally different. It's one thing to stop working on a production line, and temporarily kill a physical product that isn't easily replicated. You're hurting The Mans pockets that way.
Who are these protesters hurting by shutting down their own fuckin' web sites? Themselves, and you that support them. You think proprietary software companies or governments give a flying fuck about Knoppix shutting their website down? Please.
And software companies will just take advantage os this by saying "See? Those open source people are fanatics. You can't depend on them. If they don't get what they want, they'll cry and take their ball home. You can always rely on the steady, rock solid support of *insert software company name here*".
This is just like rioters that disply their rage by destroying their own homes and communities. After its all over, where the fuck are you going to live? Same principal here.