Yes, they completely see the potential... insofar as Adobe would love to see entire phones running with Flash as the front-end, and have demoed such devices (from Asia) already. Adobe wants to rule the smartphone market just like everybody else. The question is whether Adobe really has more clout than everybody else.
What the heck? How old are you? I only ask because in your list of "classics," only Hitchhiker's Guide was published before 1997 -- and you could argue that Adams was more comedy than science fiction.
All joking aside, I can't see why this class is necessary. Science Fiction and Fantasy are meant to be enjoyed.
I'd argue that all reading is meant to be enjoyed. It may also be meant to inspire, edify, anger, provoke, confound, confuse, amuse, and many other things.
If, on the other hand, your argument is that science fiction and fantasy are "just for fun," I'd say you couldn't be more wrong.
If you force children who aren't interested, they still won't like it.
That's certainly true of regular old English class. It's a shame that so many high school (and college) classes are taught so poorly. Still, I don't see any other way to encourage the love of reading in children than to try.
Your Moby Dick example is a straw man argument, and I don't know if I should simply laugh at you, or if you are able to grasp the point, that what Melville believes to be true in that world, is not actually what is true in that world. Which is the very point of the book. He's fucked up (much like you), but he is not the story. He's a character in the story.
Actually, Smart Guy, Herman Melville is the author of the story, and the observations on whales in Moby-Dick were taken from his own firsthand experience. This doesn't change the fact that, for a book about whales, it contains a lot of pretty erroneous information.
You obviously put no thought into that Star Trek example. Because then you would have noticed that they do not actually travel faster than light, but bend the universe around them. Something which theoretically is entirely possible in our current theories of the universe. And: Oh yes! I checked this. Or else I would not have watched the series.
Wow. Just wow. So you really are just as blinkered and myopic as you claim to be.
The thing is, that every story, every game, book, movie or whatever, as soon as it loses its believability, it loses the viewer . . . So Fantasy can not ever possibly be a good story for anyone who understands physics. We can follow bullshit like that. It disgusts us. And therefore loses us. Then again, if someone's dumb enough to be unable to detect its failure, he will love it. Simple as that.
Yeeee-eeaaahhhh, so what you're saying is that you can't deal with any form of fiction that's not science fiction?
Seriously: Consider the Twilight Zone episode where the aliens come down to Maple Street and turn on and off the lights and mess with people's cars and everything turns into chaos. That was clearly impossible. The aliens at the end were just a couple of dudes with some wireless box full of buttons. That disgusts you?
On a related note, there's a chapter in Moby Dick where Melville explains that some people have supposed that whales are mammals, but he has it on good authority that this is bullshit and they are in fact fish. What a garbage book, huh? The guy doesn't even know his marine biology.
And since you brought up physics, faster-than-light travel is impossible. So there goes your Star Trek analogy.
If you designation is a racial one, I always think Hebrew
Your definition is too narrow. Ashkenazi Jews are clearly an ethnic lineage -- they are known to be predisposed to various genetic disorders disproportionate to other ethnic groups -- and the language with which they are most identified is Yiddish, not Hebrew.
Why talk about browser plug-ins? Microsoft Office is a suite of applications, each of which can open documents. If the suite makes use of a flawed library when opening documents, then every application in the suite is vulnerable until the library is patched. Anybody could e-mail you a document that's designed to exploit the flaw and you'd be hosed. As the GP said, in the shared-library model, the fix is to replace the flawed library with a version that patches the exploit, and instantly every application in the suite is fixed. In the statically-linked version, you'd need to download patches for every single application in Microsoft Office -- and potentially a lot of other apps on your system, too.
Pneumonia is the most common complication of the flu, say that doctors -- and that's ANY flu, not anything specific to any Scary Flu you may have heard about. I should know; I got a bout of it myself while recovering from a nasty flu when I was a kid. (When I was in the throes of the flu I spiked a fever high enough that I hallucinated.)
Then again, lots and lots and LOTS of people get the flu without ever getting pneumonia. There are so many variables involved in a influenza infection that anecdotal evidence means next to nothing.
No offense, but tough cookies. That's law in most any country: If you have a passport issued by the country, then you enter and leave that country using that passport. Speaking as someone with triple citizenship myself, if traveling to Pakistan was more important to your friend than being an American she didn't have to get the U.S. citizenship.
Err... Green cards expire after ten years now, so your argument with respect to them being permanent no longer applies. Further, you have to prove at least half your time over the last ten years have been spent physically in the US, or you lose LPR status.
I think you're pretty much restating what I said with your first sentence. The card expires, but your status does not -- except that you put your status in jeopardy by failing to observe the laws about permanent residency, one of which is that you must maintain a valid card.
As for your second sentence, the way I remember it, if you merely left the U.S. for longer than 12 consecutive months without obtaining special permission you could be denied re-entry at the border. The rules for permanent residency have always been different than those for citizens -- which is the main reason why I went ahead and became a U.S. citizen after living here for a number of years.
At the time, becoming a citizen was actually easier than maintaining permanent residency. Once they started requiring everybody to keep updating their cards, the delays on processing the forms for the green cards became longer than the time it took to process a citizenship application. And the fees were about half that of the citizenship fees. Really, it was a no-brainer.
I am a U.S. Citizen who travels on a U.S. passport. The last time I came back from an overseas trip, I showed the security guy my passport and was subjected to the following interview:
Interviewer: Where will you be going once you land? Me: Uh. Home? Interviewer: And what will you do once you're in the U.S.? Me:...
I had been hopping between airports for a long time that day and was tired and eager to get home, so you can imagine how ridiculous this situation seemed. Part of me wanted to say, "Oh, you know, the usual... smoke some weed, hang out with my buddies at the mosque, maybe get on welfare..." I mean, technically I could have said "rob banks" and as a U.S. citizen I would still have every right to return to my own country! (And I mean that literally...the Right to return to my country.)
But you can fill in my real answer yourself; I'm sure you get the idea. Expedience was necessary here, as I had a connecting flight to catch. But it still galled me that I had to talk to some droid as if I were interviewing for a job at McDonald's just to return home after a trip.
Not trying to make any particular argument here, but I'll just give a counter-anecdote.
I am a single white male who travels alone with a very small amount of baggage. The last time I crossed the U.S. border was in March, when I went to Mexico.
I realized only after leaving for my trip that I had planned my return trip poorly. I had a flight from Mexico to JFK airport in New York, and then a separate connecting flight that would take me back to San Francisco. Unfortunately, I didn't leave enough time between flights.
What that meant was that I would need to deplane at JFK (I was in something like row 28 out of 30), travel through the International terminal (JFK is a high-traffic airport, so distances are far) to the immigration line, wait in a line of travelers coming from all over the world (including MANY from Israel and the Middle East), show my passport and clear immigration, move on to customs, tell the guy I had nothing to declare, continue on to the monorail that would take me from the international terminal at JFK to one of the domestic terminals, find my gate, clear security again, then make it all the way through the terminal to my connecting flight -- all in about 55 minutes.
And you know what? I made it. I arrived at my gate right as they were calling pre-board passengers.
So while I agree that U.S. border security is completely overblown and does little to protect anybody, it's not totally broken.
Unlikely. They made a big stink in the 90s about requiring everybody to get new Green Cards (which actually stopped being green a long time ago). They told everybody that, in essence, the old cards had "expired"...which caused a huge hubbub because, of course, permanent resident status is supposed to be permanent. Eventually they settled on some legal language that says your status doesn't expire but your green card has to be up-to-date, but I've since become a citizen so I dunno what the exact rule is.
To be fair, they had a point. At the time they switched to the new green card format with the fingerprint on it, the photo on my then-current green card was taken when I was five years old. Worse, it actually had a cancellation stamp over the photo -- not like a thing that said "canceled," but like canceling a postage stamp. For some reason, they had printed a pattern of wavy lines right over the photo, so even if the photo of me as a preschool child didn't look sufficiently like my 19-year-old self, you could barely read the photo to begin with.
So what you're saying is you have a hard time with any kind of fiction that's not science fiction?
The Twilight Zone was never pitched as a science fiction show. In his intros during the opening credits, Serling specifically says things like, "It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge."
The point was not to tell you a cool story with aliens and space ships in it, or to speculate on what the future would be like (though some episodes had these elements). The point was to present teleplays that used elements of the fantastic as shortcuts that allowed the show to present universal moral dilemmas and commentary on the human condition within its half-hour format. If you can't deal with that because it doesn't include aliens, then I suspect you've been missing out on a vast world of literature and ideas.
So often I read Slashdot and I see all these smart people, and then every kind of discussion of any fiction or entertainment is always science fiction. And then there's always one of those "Star Trek vs. Star Wars" nerd who will jump in and scream, "That's not really science fiction, it's fantasy! IT'S FANTASY!!!!" Y'know... who cares? Good stories are good stories.
This is the best type of bill: one that's put forward because someone sees that something being done now could be done in a better way. But publishers have lobbyists and cash, and those always trump the public interest in the US House of Representatives.
Not to mention the fact that the people who put the bill forward still get to say "we tried," even if they never expected it to pass in the first place. But maybe I'm cynical.
No offense, but I clicked, I read, and all I saw is the same banal, mind-numbing blow-by-blow of some guy's dull, ordinary day that I see on every other Twitter feed.
Listen to the man. My last company went out of business. I ran home and brought back all the cases of Post-It Notes, but they told me it was already too late. The locks had been changed.
holy shit... being Jewish is genetic now?! AWESOME!
Uhhhh... yes. It is. Or it can be. Ashkenazi Jews, in particular, have a much higher precedence of a variety of genetic disorders. In case you never heard of them, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy are both Ashkenazi Jews. (So much for "looking Jewish.")
Seriously, it amounts to the same thing, but it eliminates all the funds that would be spent on all of these DNA tests. Because after all, if the accident of someone's birth is enough to determine their worthiness for British society, why not just do it on sight? "Get lost, coon!" It'll save a fortune.
P.S. Sure, a bunch of American Japanese did fight in the U.S. Army against Japan in World War II. The alternative, of course, was internment camp. Funny how war, fear, and poverty can make xenophobes out of even the most enlightened cultures.
Is there really a big demand out there for outsourced spidering? I had not heard of this market. They seem to be implying that there are all these start-up outfits out there who have invented really amazing, unique UIs that allow people to find exactly what they need on the Web, and all they need to be successful is access to a searchable index. Huh??
I mean, if you're going to be some kind of start-up search engine or "semantic company" (whatever that means), shouldn't Web spidering be your core competency? If you're going to differentiate yourself in the market, how can you buy spidering as a commodity? How to you expect to attract any investment if you're telling potential investors that you rent your spidering capability from another start-up -- let alone one that uses some kind of half-baked P2P technology to do the work?
Seriously, in a world where Google seems willing to partner with just about anybody who needs any kind of searching for reasonable rates, what is this company's proposed customer base? (And no, the Technology Review article includes no quotes from customers at all.)
Slashdot Mirror
Care to explain why you wouldn't use apt on a server? You don't like security patches?
Yes, they completely see the potential... insofar as Adobe would love to see entire phones running with Flash as the front-end, and have demoed such devices (from Asia) already. Adobe wants to rule the smartphone market just like everybody else. The question is whether Adobe really has more clout than everybody else.
What the heck? How old are you? I only ask because in your list of "classics," only Hitchhiker's Guide was published before 1997 -- and you could argue that Adams was more comedy than science fiction.
All joking aside, I can't see why this class is necessary. Science Fiction and Fantasy are meant to be enjoyed.
I'd argue that all reading is meant to be enjoyed. It may also be meant to inspire, edify, anger, provoke, confound, confuse, amuse, and many other things.
If, on the other hand, your argument is that science fiction and fantasy are "just for fun," I'd say you couldn't be more wrong.
If you force children who aren't interested, they still won't like it.
That's certainly true of regular old English class. It's a shame that so many high school (and college) classes are taught so poorly. Still, I don't see any other way to encourage the love of reading in children than to try.
I never watched Twilight Zone.
So why comment in a thread about it?
Your Moby Dick example is a straw man argument, and I don't know if I should simply laugh at you, or if you are able to grasp the point, that what Melville believes to be true in that world, is not actually what is true in that world. Which is the very point of the book. He's fucked up (much like you), but he is not the story. He's a character in the story.
Actually, Smart Guy, Herman Melville is the author of the story, and the observations on whales in Moby-Dick were taken from his own firsthand experience. This doesn't change the fact that, for a book about whales, it contains a lot of pretty erroneous information.
You obviously put no thought into that Star Trek example. Because then you would have noticed that they do not actually travel faster than light, but bend the universe around them. Something which theoretically is entirely possible in our current theories of the universe. And: Oh yes! I checked this. Or else I would not have watched the series.
Wow. Just wow. So you really are just as blinkered and myopic as you claim to be.
In my case, all I remember was breathing.
As in, that's what I spent my day doing. All day. Just breathing.
The thing is, that every story, every game, book, movie or whatever, as soon as it loses its believability, it loses the viewer . . . So Fantasy can not ever possibly be a good story for anyone who understands physics. We can follow bullshit like that. It disgusts us. And therefore loses us.
Then again, if someone's dumb enough to be unable to detect its failure, he will love it. Simple as that.
Yeeee-eeaaahhhh, so what you're saying is that you can't deal with any form of fiction that's not science fiction?
Seriously: Consider the Twilight Zone episode where the aliens come down to Maple Street and turn on and off the lights and mess with people's cars and everything turns into chaos. That was clearly impossible. The aliens at the end were just a couple of dudes with some wireless box full of buttons. That disgusts you?
On a related note, there's a chapter in Moby Dick where Melville explains that some people have supposed that whales are mammals, but he has it on good authority that this is bullshit and they are in fact fish. What a garbage book, huh? The guy doesn't even know his marine biology.
And since you brought up physics, faster-than-light travel is impossible. So there goes your Star Trek analogy.
If you designation is a racial one, I always think Hebrew
Your definition is too narrow. Ashkenazi Jews are clearly an ethnic lineage -- they are known to be predisposed to various genetic disorders disproportionate to other ethnic groups -- and the language with which they are most identified is Yiddish, not Hebrew.
Why talk about browser plug-ins? Microsoft Office is a suite of applications, each of which can open documents. If the suite makes use of a flawed library when opening documents, then every application in the suite is vulnerable until the library is patched. Anybody could e-mail you a document that's designed to exploit the flaw and you'd be hosed. As the GP said, in the shared-library model, the fix is to replace the flawed library with a version that patches the exploit, and instantly every application in the suite is fixed. In the statically-linked version, you'd need to download patches for every single application in Microsoft Office -- and potentially a lot of other apps on your system, too.
Pneumonia is the most common complication of the flu, say that doctors -- and that's ANY flu, not anything specific to any Scary Flu you may have heard about. I should know; I got a bout of it myself while recovering from a nasty flu when I was a kid. (When I was in the throes of the flu I spiked a fever high enough that I hallucinated.)
Then again, lots and lots and LOTS of people get the flu without ever getting pneumonia. There are so many variables involved in a influenza infection that anecdotal evidence means next to nothing.
Glad you're feeling better.
Oh... but there's nothing that says she couldn't have flashed her UK passport instead, once she got to Pakistan. Hopefully she brought both?
No offense, but tough cookies. That's law in most any country: If you have a passport issued by the country, then you enter and leave that country using that passport. Speaking as someone with triple citizenship myself, if traveling to Pakistan was more important to your friend than being an American she didn't have to get the U.S. citizenship.
Err... Green cards expire after ten years now, so your argument with respect to them being permanent no longer applies. Further, you have to prove at least half your time over the last ten years have been spent physically in the US, or you lose LPR status.
I think you're pretty much restating what I said with your first sentence. The card expires, but your status does not -- except that you put your status in jeopardy by failing to observe the laws about permanent residency, one of which is that you must maintain a valid card.
As for your second sentence, the way I remember it, if you merely left the U.S. for longer than 12 consecutive months without obtaining special permission you could be denied re-entry at the border. The rules for permanent residency have always been different than those for citizens -- which is the main reason why I went ahead and became a U.S. citizen after living here for a number of years.
At the time, becoming a citizen was actually easier than maintaining permanent residency. Once they started requiring everybody to keep updating their cards, the delays on processing the forms for the green cards became longer than the time it took to process a citizenship application. And the fees were about half that of the citizenship fees. Really, it was a no-brainer.
I am a U.S. Citizen who travels on a U.S. passport. The last time I came back from an overseas trip, I showed the security guy my passport and was subjected to the following interview:
Interviewer: Where will you be going once you land? ...
Me: Uh. Home?
Interviewer: And what will you do once you're in the U.S.?
Me:
I had been hopping between airports for a long time that day and was tired and eager to get home, so you can imagine how ridiculous this situation seemed. Part of me wanted to say, "Oh, you know, the usual... smoke some weed, hang out with my buddies at the mosque, maybe get on welfare..." I mean, technically I could have said "rob banks" and as a U.S. citizen I would still have every right to return to my own country! (And I mean that literally...the Right to return to my country.)
But you can fill in my real answer yourself; I'm sure you get the idea. Expedience was necessary here, as I had a connecting flight to catch. But it still galled me that I had to talk to some droid as if I were interviewing for a job at McDonald's just to return home after a trip.
Not trying to make any particular argument here, but I'll just give a counter-anecdote.
I am a single white male who travels alone with a very small amount of baggage. The last time I crossed the U.S. border was in March, when I went to Mexico.
I realized only after leaving for my trip that I had planned my return trip poorly. I had a flight from Mexico to JFK airport in New York, and then a separate connecting flight that would take me back to San Francisco. Unfortunately, I didn't leave enough time between flights.
What that meant was that I would need to deplane at JFK (I was in something like row 28 out of 30), travel through the International terminal (JFK is a high-traffic airport, so distances are far) to the immigration line, wait in a line of travelers coming from all over the world (including MANY from Israel and the Middle East), show my passport and clear immigration, move on to customs, tell the guy I had nothing to declare, continue on to the monorail that would take me from the international terminal at JFK to one of the domestic terminals, find my gate, clear security again, then make it all the way through the terminal to my connecting flight -- all in about 55 minutes.
And you know what? I made it. I arrived at my gate right as they were calling pre-board passengers.
So while I agree that U.S. border security is completely overblown and does little to protect anybody, it's not totally broken.
Unlikely. They made a big stink in the 90s about requiring everybody to get new Green Cards (which actually stopped being green a long time ago). They told everybody that, in essence, the old cards had "expired"...which caused a huge hubbub because, of course, permanent resident status is supposed to be permanent. Eventually they settled on some legal language that says your status doesn't expire but your green card has to be up-to-date, but I've since become a citizen so I dunno what the exact rule is.
To be fair, they had a point. At the time they switched to the new green card format with the fingerprint on it, the photo on my then-current green card was taken when I was five years old. Worse, it actually had a cancellation stamp over the photo -- not like a thing that said "canceled," but like canceling a postage stamp. For some reason, they had printed a pattern of wavy lines right over the photo, so even if the photo of me as a preschool child didn't look sufficiently like my 19-year-old self, you could barely read the photo to begin with.
So what you're saying is you have a hard time with any kind of fiction that's not science fiction?
The Twilight Zone was never pitched as a science fiction show. In his intros during the opening credits, Serling specifically says things like, "It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge."
The point was not to tell you a cool story with aliens and space ships in it, or to speculate on what the future would be like (though some episodes had these elements). The point was to present teleplays that used elements of the fantastic as shortcuts that allowed the show to present universal moral dilemmas and commentary on the human condition within its half-hour format. If you can't deal with that because it doesn't include aliens, then I suspect you've been missing out on a vast world of literature and ideas.
So often I read Slashdot and I see all these smart people, and then every kind of discussion of any fiction or entertainment is always science fiction. And then there's always one of those "Star Trek vs. Star Wars" nerd who will jump in and scream, "That's not really science fiction, it's fantasy! IT'S FANTASY!!!!" Y'know... who cares? Good stories are good stories.
This is the best type of bill: one that's put forward because someone sees that something being done now could be done in a better way. But publishers have lobbyists and cash, and those always trump the public interest in the US House of Representatives.
Not to mention the fact that the people who put the bill forward still get to say "we tried," even if they never expected it to pass in the first place. But maybe I'm cynical.
No offense, but I clicked, I read, and all I saw is the same banal, mind-numbing blow-by-blow of some guy's dull, ordinary day that I see on every other Twitter feed.
Listen to the man. My last company went out of business. I ran home and brought back all the cases of Post-It Notes, but they told me it was already too late. The locks had been changed.
Voyager or DS9 might become classics
Are you a betting man?
No, you're mistaken. Someone repackaged the whole thing without blowing away the closed-source apps. That's the only issue Google had with it.
holy shit... being Jewish is genetic now?! AWESOME!
Uhhhh... yes. It is. Or it can be. Ashkenazi Jews, in particular, have a much higher precedence of a variety of genetic disorders. In case you never heard of them, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy are both Ashkenazi Jews. (So much for "looking Jewish.")
...and write a policy that says, "Wogs, go home"?
Seriously, it amounts to the same thing, but it eliminates all the funds that would be spent on all of these DNA tests. Because after all, if the accident of someone's birth is enough to determine their worthiness for British society, why not just do it on sight? "Get lost, coon!" It'll save a fortune.
P.S. Sure, a bunch of American Japanese did fight in the U.S. Army against Japan in World War II. The alternative, of course, was internment camp. Funny how war, fear, and poverty can make xenophobes out of even the most enlightened cultures.
Is there really a big demand out there for outsourced spidering? I had not heard of this market. They seem to be implying that there are all these start-up outfits out there who have invented really amazing, unique UIs that allow people to find exactly what they need on the Web, and all they need to be successful is access to a searchable index. Huh??
I mean, if you're going to be some kind of start-up search engine or "semantic company" (whatever that means), shouldn't Web spidering be your core competency? If you're going to differentiate yourself in the market, how can you buy spidering as a commodity? How to you expect to attract any investment if you're telling potential investors that you rent your spidering capability from another start-up -- let alone one that uses some kind of half-baked P2P technology to do the work?
Seriously, in a world where Google seems willing to partner with just about anybody who needs any kind of searching for reasonable rates, what is this company's proposed customer base? (And no, the Technology Review article includes no quotes from customers at all.)