When you include US military spending as part of "spend", you will find that the GOP is worse on "tax and spend" than the Dems. They started a war that costs the US $1B a day, that has lasted 8 years, and provided no way to pay for it. That is a more egregious "tax and spend" program than any social program the Dems have initiated, "Obamacare" included.
Show me figures which demonstrate this, because I have searched and have been unable to identify your mythical "1 billion a day" figure. If anything, overall DoD expenditures have been less in the past decade than in the previous decade.
Additionally, you can't have it both ways: "provided no way to pay for it" can't be an argument against the war when you oppose methods of payment, such as collecting the profits from oil/mineral sales in those lands. (That is, after all, the entire point of war: maintaining or improving economic standing.)
I'm not disagreeing with you fundamentally, but you're being a bit disingenuous/intellectually dishonest.
I work at Joe's Trinket Emporium. He makes (US-made) industrial strength trinkets and employs half my town, which is decidedly middle class (30-50k household income, two kids, two vehicles, a dog, etc.). There's a Walmart in town, but everyone shops at Joe's, because the quality is better/they want to support Joe/they're middle class snobs/whatever.
But Joe goes out of business because Walmart artificially lowers its prices to drive Joe out of the market; thift, short-sighted people shop at Walmart and Joe goes out of business.
So the people working at Joe's now have to find other jobs - and there are a lot of them. Many go work at Walmart for half the pay; the rest either leave town or find work doing other things with a worse benefit/cost to make a living (roofing, construction, etc.).
Well, guess what? They may get 90% (or even 100%) of their consumables at 20% lower prices now, but that doesn't account for other things in their lives that cost money:
What's more, they're not making 20% less; they're making 30%+ less.
Speaking personally: if the box stores hadn't come in here and destroyed the local economy, people would be making 30%+ more on average, because there would be a larger market for skilled workers. There would be more competition, and not only would dumb clerks and forklift operators be needed: people able to create, or at least sell creatively, would be, too. The downtown area would not be decimated.
The things I listed - housing, gas, etc. - all come out to significantly more than the benefit of 20% savings, because they're largely fixed prices based on material costs. They're not consumables but long-term things needed for basic living.
Ultimately, things like this culminate in a mess where you've got people not able to make their gas and power bills, but they've got a 30"+ TV in the living room that they've not turned on for months because they don't have cable. They've got two vehicles, but only one works because they can't afford the repairs. The value of their assets - their homes, for instance - decays because they're only able to just barely scape by on their diminished incomes: forget 'improvements' like keeping paint on the house or replacing a leaky roof: those things are unimportant when your immediate needs (and those of your children) aren't being met.
Also, for college grads, there tends to be more specialization, so jobs are more scattered geographically; if you become unemployed, there may be a lot of "openings" but it is a big deal to move across the coutnry, esp if you have kids
I interviewed at a local place a while back for a sysadmin job. It's a small city. I got a second interview, but the interview essentially ended before it started: "You're the most qualified, but we feel we would like someone who better fits our industry. Normally we have only local candidates apply, but this time we had 40 times as many out-of-town candidates and we found some with industry-specific experience. Just the same, we'd like to keep you on the top of our list in the event that this doesn't work out." OK, no harm no foul in my mind (even though that was probably a white lie), but still: there are a lot more people looking for work out of there to the risk of moving their families.
I know I was looking far and wide for employment - I applied for jobs everyhwere from Iowa, Nebraska, to South Dakota, Texas, Florida, New York, Virginia, and California. I'd not want to live in half those places, let alone with children.
The conclusion is clear: we need more highly educated college graduates in this country, and we need them three years ago.
You can't possibly reach those conclusions on the basis of college graduate unemployment rates.
How do you explain the many, many experienced, capable college graduates who are out of work and have been for some time (years+)? Surely there are 'bad apples' not worth hiring, but if there were such an overall demand, I don't see why the experienced individuals wouldn't be hired first. You can't run an institution on inexperience.
Oh, that's right: the college grads are getting hired over the experienced individuals due to corporate efforts to cut costs. They let 2 experienced individuals go, 'retiring' them prematurely (and that's what it amounts to in this economy), and replace them with 3 recent graduates.
If anything, recent graduate employment rates are skewing the overall unemployment rate downward.
I'm not going to disagree with the premise you make - that Windows 1.0 was a complete joke - but your 'supporting evidence' is a bit of hokum, IMO.
Why would 'overlapping windows' be a good thing, exactly? Tiling I can see - just now, Windows is finally getting the ability to effectively tile windows. But overlapping? That begs the introduction of features to help deal with display short-comings - like the tear-off corners a person has to use to resize said window.
Aside from this fact, why would the ability to overlay or tile windows be of any importance when your resolution is negligible and your screen even less so? We're talking about displays only slightly larger than what we find on tablets today, and at significantly lower resolution.
There's a huge difference between upgrading something that's not supported anymore for something with more features, vs. upgrading something to gain no/little added functionality and a significant time burden.
Now, Fink appears viable (which it wasn't when I last looked), but Darwinports isn't. Upgrade one thing, and you pretty much have to upgrade everything else - that's how that system works. It's a huge pain in the ass.
BTDT, and I wouldn't go there again unless I had 100% control of a very uniform environment that I could build uniformly for.
Hulu has a number of problems right now which, I imagine, probably translate over to their paid subscriptions:
* Poor performance due to Flash. The latest versions of Flash have caused nothing but problems for us at home - surprisingly, worse on Windows than on Linux. We'll occasionally have to restart the browser 1-3 times throughout a show due to dropped frames and choppiness resulting from Flash leakages and the like. * Ads. They're not only getting more obnoxious but they're getting longer and more frequent. (That one about the 'skittles tree-boy' has to be the most offensive, disturbing ad I've ever seen.) * Decreasing content. A lot of what used to be there, is no longer (BSG). No, I don't care if I can watch a show's latest 5 episodes: character development is important to me. If I can't watch the beginning of a season (particularly if it's a drama), I'm going to skip the show.
Add in the lack of the downsides, and I don't see the benefit. Maybe for $1-5, but certainly not for $10/mo.
Which is precisely why nobody wanted to buy Apple products for servers. Either you go with OSX and are OK for a couple years, or you install Windows, a virtual engine, or Linux, and don't mess with that shit until the hardware is internally EOL'd.
Then install it. The Xserve is UNIX. Also, most data centers have more than one machine, and hardly any have all the same brand throughout.
Yet even AIX has proper package management these days.
If you verge away from "Provided by Apple" software, you are essentially doing things the BSD way: building things from ports. This is stupid. It's akin to going to the Five and Dime shop and picking up things at random to redo your roof.
Well, they still make servers, just not rack-mounted ones.
And that is fundamentally different than a workstation, how? These days, it barely makes sense to buy "servers" unless they're rackmount with redundant PSUs. The cost to do so is too high due to the potential repercussions of failure, and the necessary density of a rack. Aside from the Xserve, there's no (apparent) Apple option for redundant power supplies: you're telling me you're going to run a server on hardware which has no redundancy for the most commonly failing component?
IF you were running the tests on real hardware, I'd be more likely to agree.
They weren't. They were running it on a virtualized host in KVM. This means that not only were their results largely determined by the specific network, etc. drivers they used (which can see significant revision between kernels and not accurately reflect the kernel itself), but any idiosyncratic behavior in KVM in how it treats guest interfaces may account for the discrepancies.
Not only that, but they only looked at the kernel with a specific version of GCC. Due to this, the performance differences could theoretically be not only accounted for by minute differences in how the compiler handles things.
The bigger thing with Linux performance isn't just the kernel - it's the entire stack. You've got the kernel, sure - and then you've got the core libraries (glibc, etc.) and the compiler which built them. These all can change performance significantly, and in real-world environments, the two are usually associated.
I'd be interested in seeing the results if they went back and looked at the kernel readme files and applied "requires version x or newer of y" and built everything that way. I suspect you'd see a performance curve inversely related to the kernel version.
Sure, with a new car, your initial investment is huge. But once you've bit the bullet, you haven't got to do jack shit to keep it - just make the regular payments. Then, when the mileage gets up there or some asshole hits it in a parking lot, you can turn around and sell it.
The used car, on the other hand, costs less to begin with, but then you start having irksome maintenance costs almost right away: muffler, shocks, struts, and so on. You might not have your maintenance fee, but you might very well end up paying more in the long run.
Also: assholes finish first. You drive a hard bargain with the new car salesman, you get a significant discount and some 'free' features.
(I suspect a non-trivial number of the people breaking up after V-day are the guys who are sick and tired of putting up with the drama.)
See, I didn't think the existing season had any filler. Each and every episode had some decent character development - and that, IMO, was the whole appeal to Firefly.
Sure, the Sci-Fi backing was appreciated. But it was a weak backing, and would not have held up to good plot development. There was nothing 'interesting' about the Alliance, and therefore anything built on top of it (in terms of 'complex plots' or the like) would have fell mostly flat. What the Alliance did do was provide a good backdrop for socially complex situations (eg. with River and the Doctor's parents, and the associated commentary).
Why do you think they were cool questions to begin with?
They were cool because they were unanswered. The show clearly started with largely theologically guised questions. Everything - everything - in the show centered around the existential, theological, echumenical state of man. It went off in other directions but ultimately the story, characters, and plot came back to it: the "big why".
Yet, we can't grow compounds as strong as steel - yet. Not on that scale, at least.
Consider: bone is actually stronger, by weight, than mild steel. It also has significantly better compaction properties (like cement). What if we could grow bone structures, held together with ligaments, muscles, and sinew?
If we figured out how to keep this tissue alive, we'd have a lightweight, flexible, yet resilient vessel. In many ways, it would be superior in construction to an aircraft carrier - at least for the purposes of space flight. If you can grow organic tissue and keep it alive (that's a big "if", but it seems on the horizon today), repairs would be seemingly easy.
For space flight, organic, grown ships seem to make more sense. It's self-repairing at the fabric level, the materials are mostly lightweight, and there are many examples and specimens in the animal world on which to base your genetic engineering which are likely well-suited.
As for a wooden sailboat? I'd much rather have a sailboat made from living matter than one made from synthetics or metal. Metal rusts (moisture on a ship?) and becomes embrittled; plastics become embrittled as well. I suspect we'd make our war ships from wood, if we were able to do so: there aren't a lot of trees large enough to serve as deck beams on an aircraft carrier.
Meanwhile, we've got single organism aspen groves which are tens of thousands of years old. They're specially grown for this environment, based on thousands of years of development. They're resilient and have natural adaptations to thrive after common disasters (eg. forest fire).
In my mind, it's more conceivable that ships might be made with evolutionarily-pushed organics than nanobot repair and the Borg.
Too many people are still overwrought about cancellations of great shows, like Firefly. The thing is, if they kept riding that horse, it'd just have ended up becoming another Star Trek Voyager.
Interestingly, the better seasons in Voyager were the later ones (IIRC). People didn't like them because they 'broke convention', which IMO, means it's a good story.:)
As for Firefly, there was at least another full season of content there. Supposedly, there were 2 full seasons of plot and character advancement already developed. They had to rush it and cram it into the movie to give it some sort of 'closure', but at the same time, it fell short.
I'm not sure what you're on about... good stories end. BSG was a good story.
The reason crap like American Idol and 90210 keep going on (jesus, when did they bring back 90210) is because they're crap: they're not good stories. They have no beginning, middle, and end. Their character development is weak, and therefore all characters are easily replaceable. They just keep going on and on, like yet another load of dirty laundry.
BSG lasted for 6 full seasons, and each of them were fresh and unique, without compromising the story. Each episode was a full 40 minutes long. That's a full 80-plus hours of quality entertainment. That's a long damn time for any TV show, never mind something which isn't:
* a talk show (this includes sports and cooking shows, and anything similar ) * a reality TV show * a sitcom * a soap opera * news * a children's show
If you remove talking head shows, soap operas, and news, you're left with a scant few at the bottom, lower numbers. Most of those are sitcoms. Of the ones which are not:
* CSI * JAG * MST3K (hardly common fare) * Stargate SG-1 (yeah, that's not good TV. It's only one of the most wildly popular geek shows, and generally decent shows, ever) * TMNT (cartoon) * ER
At 15 seasons, you're in the "classic television everyone has seen and memorized the characters in because it's part of our cultural identity" department - stuff like The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show. At 20 hours, you've got Lassie, Gunsmoke, and Law & Order.
A full 6 seasons for a serial drama (or any serial, for that matter) is a hell of a lot. The only two I can think of which have gotten 5 or more seasons are Burn Notice and 24 (and with 24, you could start each season 'fresh', while the last several seasons sucked).
So if there'd been another 1, 2 seasons of BSG, what then? What more was there to explain after season 5? Not a lot: they basically just had to wrap up the loose subplots and finish up with some character development. We knew who all but the final 5 were (and they gave plenty of hints). Truth be told, to even keep up with things you had to be quite invested in BSG - it was very easy to lose your way. Yet it still managed to keep a very large, very dedicated following, all considering.
I'm used to having to work outdoors during winter nights, on occasion. It's a mixture of rapid moving and exertion and standing and doing nothing for hours on end. For this, I need a combination of things:
* nimble fingers * good insulation for my whole hand
What I've come down to is a pair of wool mittens with a 'finger convertible flap' which turns them into fingerless mittens. Underneath these, I wear textured gortex gloves - basically, 'cop gloves', and/or (depending on the the type of work and weather) a pair of very thin bison leather gloves (basically some of the strongest leather available, by thickness).
This way, when it's cold and I don't immediately need my hands, I just flip the cover off the mitten. They're quite warm (as in, too warm to wear in weather over about 20F: you'll sweat too much), and the 'layer' approach allows me to take off and put on things as the weather changes throughout the day.
Not unsurprisingly, the same thing works quite well for hunting.
This is yet another reason why I really can't get excited about modern touchscreen phones.
OK, so it's got a 4.5" display. Awesome.
Can I use it during the winter? No. The screen/input method doesn't even work during fall weather in most of upper North America.
Can I use the phone without looking at it? No. I've basically got to look at what I'm inputting, as I'm inputting it, regardless of how good the input method is: there's no tactility. That's great for answering the phone when I've got my glasses off, or when I want to disable the alarm in the morning.
Unfortunately, all the newer phones seem to be coming out without a slide-out chickpea qwerty board. As crappy as they are, you get used to them, and input can be quite fast. Add that with capacitive screens being crap for anything but the crudest input and the newer, screen-only models being more expensive due to the 'ooo big screen' marketability, and these things have essentially become clumsy feature phones.
(Hell, newer phones have operating threshold specifications that are so narrow, they're basically designed for indoor use. Why not just use a landline?)
I think most mail clients are 100% IMAP and POP3 compatible.
Outlook isn't. It's completely buggered for the IMAP implementation. http://www.hmailserver.com/documentation/latest/?page=ts_outlook_crashes
I believe Adobe Flash player is 100% compatible with Flash.
Judging by how often flash sites like hulu or youtube "don't work" out of the blue, I'd say that no, Adobe Flash player isn't 100% compatible with Flash.
IE6 was crap when it came out, too. It had gobs of issues with older sites and was horribly unstable. It really did not offer much over the Firefox/Mozilla builds of the day other than being shackled to Microsoft's proprietary 'platform' browser implementation and server-side nightmare that only caters to said browser.
IE6 took a lot of ground because IE5 automatically upgraded to it, and one or the other have been shipped with Windows for 4+ years.
What we got out of the deal was huge, unsupportable, and difficult to migrate applications costing as much as, if not more than, the annual salary of several full-time employees.
If you're used to Microsoft's rendering, Apple's text will look slightly blurry. If you're used to Apple's rendering, Microsoft's will look weirdly spaced.
As a Linux user, Apple fonts look blurry; Microsoft fonts (AA'd or not) look like jagged crags of ugly (very difficult to read, at times - see the powershell font).
Slashdot Mirror
Tiling was Microsoft's effort to avoid infringing on Apple's overlapping windows IP.
What? Seriously? That's just stupid. IF this were true, a person would suspect that tiled windows in WIndows would actually be:
a) the default
b) useful
It's neither (until now, just barely). IF you're referring to the current status, we're ignoring about 20 years of window managers.
When you include US military spending as part of "spend", you will find that the GOP is worse on "tax and spend" than the Dems. They started a war that costs the US $1B a day, that has lasted 8 years, and provided no way to pay for it. That is a more egregious "tax and spend" program than any social program the Dems have initiated, "Obamacare" included.
Show me figures which demonstrate this, because I have searched and have been unable to identify your mythical "1 billion a day" figure. If anything, overall DoD expenditures have been less in the past decade than in the previous decade.
Additionally, you can't have it both ways: "provided no way to pay for it" can't be an argument against the war when you oppose methods of payment, such as collecting the profits from oil/mineral sales in those lands. (That is, after all, the entire point of war: maintaining or improving economic standing.)
I'm not disagreeing with you fundamentally, but you're being a bit disingenuous/intellectually dishonest.
No; no it is not.
Counter-example:
I work at Joe's Trinket Emporium. He makes (US-made) industrial strength trinkets and employs half my town, which is decidedly middle class (30-50k household income, two kids, two vehicles, a dog, etc.). There's a Walmart in town, but everyone shops at Joe's, because the quality is better/they want to support Joe/they're middle class snobs/whatever.
But Joe goes out of business because Walmart artificially lowers its prices to drive Joe out of the market; thift, short-sighted people shop at Walmart and Joe goes out of business.
So the people working at Joe's now have to find other jobs - and there are a lot of them. Many go work at Walmart for half the pay; the rest either leave town or find work doing other things with a worse benefit/cost to make a living (roofing, construction, etc.).
Well, guess what? They may get 90% (or even 100%) of their consumables at 20% lower prices now, but that doesn't account for other things in their lives that cost money:
* housing.
* utilities.
* gasoline.
* vehicle payments and/or repair.
What's more, they're not making 20% less; they're making 30%+ less.
Speaking personally: if the box stores hadn't come in here and destroyed the local economy, people would be making 30%+ more on average, because there would be a larger market for skilled workers. There would be more competition, and not only would dumb clerks and forklift operators be needed: people able to create, or at least sell creatively, would be, too. The downtown area would not be decimated.
The things I listed - housing, gas, etc. - all come out to significantly more than the benefit of 20% savings, because they're largely fixed prices based on material costs. They're not consumables but long-term things needed for basic living.
Ultimately, things like this culminate in a mess where you've got people not able to make their gas and power bills, but they've got a 30"+ TV in the living room that they've not turned on for months because they don't have cable. They've got two vehicles, but only one works because they can't afford the repairs. The value of their assets - their homes, for instance - decays because they're only able to just barely scape by on their diminished incomes: forget 'improvements' like keeping paint on the house or replacing a leaky roof: those things are unimportant when your immediate needs (and those of your children) aren't being met.
Also, for college grads, there tends to be more specialization, so jobs are more scattered geographically; if you become unemployed, there may be a lot of "openings" but it is a big deal to move across the coutnry, esp if you have kids
I interviewed at a local place a while back for a sysadmin job. It's a small city. I got a second interview, but the interview essentially ended before it started: "You're the most qualified, but we feel we would like someone who better fits our industry. Normally we have only local candidates apply, but this time we had 40 times as many out-of-town candidates and we found some with industry-specific experience. Just the same, we'd like to keep you on the top of our list in the event that this doesn't work out." OK, no harm no foul in my mind (even though that was probably a white lie), but still: there are a lot more people looking for work out of there to the risk of moving their families.
I know I was looking far and wide for employment - I applied for jobs everyhwere from Iowa, Nebraska, to South Dakota, Texas, Florida, New York, Virginia, and California. I'd not want to live in half those places, let alone with children.
The conclusion is clear: we need more highly educated college graduates in this country, and we need them three years ago.
You can't possibly reach those conclusions on the basis of college graduate unemployment rates.
How do you explain the many, many experienced, capable college graduates who are out of work and have been for some time (years+)? Surely there are 'bad apples' not worth hiring, but if there were such an overall demand, I don't see why the experienced individuals wouldn't be hired first. You can't run an institution on inexperience.
Oh, that's right: the college grads are getting hired over the experienced individuals due to corporate efforts to cut costs. They let 2 experienced individuals go, 'retiring' them prematurely (and that's what it amounts to in this economy), and replace them with 3 recent graduates.
If anything, recent graduate employment rates are skewing the overall unemployment rate downward.
I'm not going to disagree with the premise you make - that Windows 1.0 was a complete joke - but your 'supporting evidence' is a bit of hokum, IMO.
Why would 'overlapping windows' be a good thing, exactly? Tiling I can see - just now, Windows is finally getting the ability to effectively tile windows. But overlapping? That begs the introduction of features to help deal with display short-comings - like the tear-off corners a person has to use to resize said window.
Aside from this fact, why would the ability to overlay or tile windows be of any importance when your resolution is negligible and your screen even less so? We're talking about displays only slightly larger than what we find on tablets today, and at significantly lower resolution.
You're confusing what I meant.
There's a huge difference between upgrading something that's not supported anymore for something with more features, vs. upgrading something to gain no/little added functionality and a significant time burden.
Now, Fink appears viable (which it wasn't when I last looked), but Darwinports isn't. Upgrade one thing, and you pretty much have to upgrade everything else - that's how that system works. It's a huge pain in the ass.
BTDT, and I wouldn't go there again unless I had 100% control of a very uniform environment that I could build uniformly for.
Hulu has a number of problems right now which, I imagine, probably translate over to their paid subscriptions:
* Poor performance due to Flash. The latest versions of Flash have caused nothing but problems for us at home - surprisingly, worse on Windows than on Linux. We'll occasionally have to restart the browser 1-3 times throughout a show due to dropped frames and choppiness resulting from Flash leakages and the like.
* Ads. They're not only getting more obnoxious but they're getting longer and more frequent. (That one about the 'skittles tree-boy' has to be the most offensive, disturbing ad I've ever seen.)
* Decreasing content. A lot of what used to be there, is no longer (BSG). No, I don't care if I can watch a show's latest 5 episodes: character development is important to me. If I can't watch the beginning of a season (particularly if it's a drama), I'm going to skip the show.
Add in the lack of the downsides, and I don't see the benefit. Maybe for $1-5, but certainly not for $10/mo.
knowing Apple, wont be supported for long.
Which is precisely why nobody wanted to buy Apple products for servers. Either you go with OSX and are OK for a couple years, or you install Windows, a virtual engine, or Linux, and don't mess with that shit until the hardware is internally EOL'd.
Then install it. The Xserve is UNIX. Also, most data centers have more than one machine, and hardly any have all the same brand throughout.
Yet even AIX has proper package management these days.
If you verge away from "Provided by Apple" software, you are essentially doing things the BSD way: building things from ports. This is stupid. It's akin to going to the Five and Dime shop and picking up things at random to redo your roof.
Well, they still make servers, just not rack-mounted ones.
And that is fundamentally different than a workstation, how? These days, it barely makes sense to buy "servers" unless they're rackmount with redundant PSUs. The cost to do so is too high due to the potential repercussions of failure, and the necessary density of a rack. Aside from the Xserve, there's no (apparent) Apple option for redundant power supplies: you're telling me you're going to run a server on hardware which has no redundancy for the most commonly failing component?
IF you were running the tests on real hardware, I'd be more likely to agree.
They weren't. They were running it on a virtualized host in KVM. This means that not only were their results largely determined by the specific network, etc. drivers they used (which can see significant revision between kernels and not accurately reflect the kernel itself), but any idiosyncratic behavior in KVM in how it treats guest interfaces may account for the discrepancies.
Not only that, but they only looked at the kernel with a specific version of GCC. Due to this, the performance differences could theoretically be not only accounted for by minute differences in how the compiler handles things.
The bigger thing with Linux performance isn't just the kernel - it's the entire stack. You've got the kernel, sure - and then you've got the core libraries (glibc, etc.) and the compiler which built them. These all can change performance significantly, and in real-world environments, the two are usually associated.
I'd be interested in seeing the results if they went back and looked at the kernel readme files and applied "requires version x or newer of y" and built everything that way. I suspect you'd see a performance curve inversely related to the kernel version.
You get bonus points for dumping a girl while during vacation to visit the family.
Think of it as New Car vs. Used Car.
Sure, with a new car, your initial investment is huge. But once you've bit the bullet, you haven't got to do jack shit to keep it - just make the regular payments. Then, when the mileage gets up there or some asshole hits it in a parking lot, you can turn around and sell it.
The used car, on the other hand, costs less to begin with, but then you start having irksome maintenance costs almost right away: muffler, shocks, struts, and so on. You might not have your maintenance fee, but you might very well end up paying more in the long run.
Also: assholes finish first. You drive a hard bargain with the new car salesman, you get a significant discount and some 'free' features.
(I suspect a non-trivial number of the people breaking up after V-day are the guys who are sick and tired of putting up with the drama.)
See, I didn't think the existing season had any filler. Each and every episode had some decent character development - and that, IMO, was the whole appeal to Firefly.
Sure, the Sci-Fi backing was appreciated. But it was a weak backing, and would not have held up to good plot development. There was nothing 'interesting' about the Alliance, and therefore anything built on top of it (in terms of 'complex plots' or the like) would have fell mostly flat. What the Alliance did do was provide a good backdrop for socially complex situations (eg. with River and the Doctor's parents, and the associated commentary).
Which episodes did you think were filler?
Why do you think they were cool questions to begin with?
They were cool because they were unanswered. The show clearly started with largely theologically guised questions. Everything - everything - in the show centered around the existential, theological, echumenical state of man. It went off in other directions but ultimately the story, characters, and plot came back to it: the "big why".
Wait... what are you saying? Who was Starbuck?
Now I'm supremely confused. I thought she was just another "human" who served an allegorical role in the show. Was she something more?
Yet, we can't grow compounds as strong as steel - yet. Not on that scale, at least.
Consider: bone is actually stronger, by weight, than mild steel. It also has significantly better compaction properties (like cement). What if we could grow bone structures, held together with ligaments, muscles, and sinew?
If we figured out how to keep this tissue alive, we'd have a lightweight, flexible, yet resilient vessel. In many ways, it would be superior in construction to an aircraft carrier - at least for the purposes of space flight. If you can grow organic tissue and keep it alive (that's a big "if", but it seems on the horizon today), repairs would be seemingly easy.
For space flight, organic, grown ships seem to make more sense. It's self-repairing at the fabric level, the materials are mostly lightweight, and there are many examples and specimens in the animal world on which to base your genetic engineering which are likely well-suited.
As for a wooden sailboat? I'd much rather have a sailboat made from living matter than one made from synthetics or metal. Metal rusts (moisture on a ship?) and becomes embrittled; plastics become embrittled as well. I suspect we'd make our war ships from wood, if we were able to do so: there aren't a lot of trees large enough to serve as deck beams on an aircraft carrier.
Meanwhile, we've got single organism aspen groves which are tens of thousands of years old. They're specially grown for this environment, based on thousands of years of development. They're resilient and have natural adaptations to thrive after common disasters (eg. forest fire).
In my mind, it's more conceivable that ships might be made with evolutionarily-pushed organics than nanobot repair and the Borg.
Too many people are still overwrought about cancellations of great shows, like Firefly. The thing is, if they kept riding that horse, it'd just have ended up becoming another Star Trek Voyager.
Interestingly, the better seasons in Voyager were the later ones (IIRC). People didn't like them because they 'broke convention', which IMO, means it's a good story. :)
As for Firefly, there was at least another full season of content there. Supposedly, there were 2 full seasons of plot and character advancement already developed. They had to rush it and cram it into the movie to give it some sort of 'closure', but at the same time, it fell short.
I'm not sure what you're on about... good stories end. BSG was a good story.
The reason crap like American Idol and 90210 keep going on (jesus, when did they bring back 90210) is because they're crap: they're not good stories. They have no beginning, middle, and end. Their character development is weak, and therefore all characters are easily replaceable. They just keep going on and on, like yet another load of dirty laundry.
BSG lasted for 6 full seasons, and each of them were fresh and unique, without compromising the story. Each episode was a full 40 minutes long. That's a full 80-plus hours of quality entertainment. That's a long damn time for any TV show, never mind something which isn't:
* a talk show (this includes sports and cooking shows, and anything similar )
* a reality TV show
* a sitcom
* a soap opera
* news
* a children's show
Look at this list: list of longest running US TV series
If you remove talking head shows, soap operas, and news, you're left with a scant few at the bottom, lower numbers. Most of those are sitcoms. Of the ones which are not:
* CSI
* JAG
* MST3K (hardly common fare)
* Stargate SG-1 (yeah, that's not good TV. It's only one of the most wildly popular geek shows, and generally decent shows, ever)
* TMNT (cartoon)
* ER
At 15 seasons, you're in the "classic television everyone has seen and memorized the characters in because it's part of our cultural identity" department - stuff like The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show. At 20 hours, you've got Lassie, Gunsmoke, and Law & Order.
A full 6 seasons for a serial drama (or any serial, for that matter) is a hell of a lot. The only two I can think of which have gotten 5 or more seasons are Burn Notice and 24 (and with 24, you could start each season 'fresh', while the last several seasons sucked).
So if there'd been another 1, 2 seasons of BSG, what then? What more was there to explain after season 5? Not a lot: they basically just had to wrap up the loose subplots and finish up with some character development. We knew who all but the final 5 were (and they gave plenty of hints). Truth be told, to even keep up with things you had to be quite invested in BSG - it was very easy to lose your way. Yet it still managed to keep a very large, very dedicated following, all considering.
I've kind of adapted my glove wearing a bit.
I'm used to having to work outdoors during winter nights, on occasion. It's a mixture of rapid moving and exertion and standing and doing nothing for hours on end. For this, I need a combination of things:
* nimble fingers
* good insulation for my whole hand
What I've come down to is a pair of wool mittens with a 'finger convertible flap' which turns them into fingerless mittens. Underneath these, I wear textured gortex gloves - basically, 'cop gloves', and/or (depending on the the type of work and weather) a pair of very thin bison leather gloves (basically some of the strongest leather available, by thickness).
This way, when it's cold and I don't immediately need my hands, I just flip the cover off the mitten. They're quite warm (as in, too warm to wear in weather over about 20F: you'll sweat too much), and the 'layer' approach allows me to take off and put on things as the weather changes throughout the day.
Not unsurprisingly, the same thing works quite well for hunting.
This is yet another reason why I really can't get excited about modern touchscreen phones.
OK, so it's got a 4.5" display. Awesome.
Can I use it during the winter? No. The screen/input method doesn't even work during fall weather in most of upper North America.
Can I use the phone without looking at it? No. I've basically got to look at what I'm inputting, as I'm inputting it, regardless of how good the input method is: there's no tactility. That's great for answering the phone when I've got my glasses off, or when I want to disable the alarm in the morning.
Unfortunately, all the newer phones seem to be coming out without a slide-out chickpea qwerty board. As crappy as they are, you get used to them, and input can be quite fast. Add that with capacitive screens being crap for anything but the crudest input and the newer, screen-only models being more expensive due to the 'ooo big screen' marketability, and these things have essentially become clumsy feature phones.
(Hell, newer phones have operating threshold specifications that are so narrow, they're basically designed for indoor use. Why not just use a landline?)
I think most mail clients are 100% IMAP and POP3 compatible.
Outlook isn't. It's completely buggered for the IMAP implementation. http://www.hmailserver.com/documentation/latest/?page=ts_outlook_crashes
I believe Adobe Flash player is 100% compatible with Flash.
Judging by how often flash sites like hulu or youtube "don't work" out of the blue, I'd say that no, Adobe Flash player isn't 100% compatible with Flash.
IE6 was crap when it came out, too. It had gobs of issues with older sites and was horribly unstable. It really did not offer much over the Firefox/Mozilla builds of the day other than being shackled to Microsoft's proprietary 'platform' browser implementation and server-side nightmare that only caters to said browser.
IE6 took a lot of ground because IE5 automatically upgraded to it, and one or the other have been shipped with Windows for 4+ years.
What we got out of the deal was huge, unsupportable, and difficult to migrate applications costing as much as, if not more than, the annual salary of several full-time employees.
If you're used to Microsoft's rendering, Apple's text will look slightly blurry. If you're used to Apple's rendering, Microsoft's will look weirdly spaced.
As a Linux user, Apple fonts look blurry; Microsoft fonts (AA'd or not) look like jagged crags of ugly (very difficult to read, at times - see the powershell font).