Remember Churchill: "The fascists of the future will be called anti-fascists".
Churchill never said that, but it's obviously convenient for your viewpoint to believe that he did. In that sense, your statement is like a microcosm of the entire crusade against supposed "SJWs".
Oops, Word does have a Word function, which does seem like maybe it implements a 3-way merge in some sense. But personally I've found it a bit hard so get exactly what it does in general, since it only seems to ask for two Word documents to do the merge.
I think that if each contains tracked changes from a common base document then what you get is a 3-way merge. However, if each file contains a revision as the base document with (distinct) tracked changes on top then it's not really clear to me what the heck "merge" does. Since Word doesn't seem to have a notion of recording a history of committed revisions, it doesn't have a way of figuring out the last common ancestor to automagically handle the merge properly.
So if you never have a situation where someone submits changes to an older revision then you're probably okay, but I find this sort of thing happens a lot and with Word that situation is...confusing at the least.
I think the reason for this has to do with Word's commenting and revision tracking features, which are convenient as the document is passed around amongst the publisher's editorial staff.
I've been forced to return to using Word recently, and I find the "track changes" feature to be pretty disappointing, actually. As far as I can tell, it only supports a sort of "diff" via the "compare" function and lacks any concept of a 3-way merge. I find this makes it a real pain integrating together changes from different people (especially if they're on different revisions). Since I'm a n00b as far as this feature goes, it's quite possible I'm doing it wrong, but to me Word seems pretty bad for this purpose.
In fact, I find myself pining for my last workflow, using LaTeX with Mercurial, which I think is saying a lot about how poor the new one is.
Yeah, I think here you have the double whammy that it's "common knowledge" and that it seems to fit with a basic knowledge of biology (i.e., simple sugar causes a very quick rise in blood sugar and blood sugar provides energy), so it's very easy to believe. I just happened to see an article on such a study at some point.
Honestly, I've been tricked so many times by "common knowledge" at this point that I actually often stop and google before making anything like health claims. Another example of this is when I looked up the "fact" that vitamin C prevents the cold. Turns out there's no evidence of that (at least not under vaguely normal circumstances), but I always took this as medically validated fact.
Of course I think those observations are mostly about double blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trails where neither the child nor the observer knows the child has gotten sugar. I don't know if the results of this survey-based cohort study are due to the placebo effect, spurious correlations, or actual new effect.
(Caveat: I don't know that much about biology/medicine, so take all that with a grain of salt.)
I doubt that minimum wage changes affect prices much. But by raising the cost of labor, they certainly affect unemployment among the least well off, because there are fewer jobs that are profitable to hire out at, say, $9 per hour than at, say, $6 per hour.
While that is what naive intuition (or ECON 101) would suggest, reality sometimes doesn't conform to our simplisitic expectations (especially in economics). Apparently more recent empirical studies cast some serious doubt on the idea that a higher minimum wage has a significant upward effect on unemployment. AFAIK it is the subject of some disagreement among economists.
For that matter forget alchemy, if we adopt this idea then presumably it should apply to all subjects. History would be especially problematic. Quite a few people believe in things like aliens influencing early civilizations, Atlantis, or worse yet doubt the reality of the Holocaust.
I realize you were probably just going for comic effect, but FYI for anyone who cares: you can link to a specific version of a page so that you don't have to worry about how it might change later.
What is the practical difference between "closed wifi" and "open wifi with a mandatory log-in"? In both cases you must obtain a credential (and thus implied permission) to use the network. You've just moved the access limit from the radio to the wire side.
The practical difference is that someone can use it without having to knock on random people's doors to find someone willing to share the necessary key/credentials. It's an automated process. That's a huge functional difference. (Whether it's effective is a different question.)
In general, though, the reason this movement will fail is the same reason why people want it to work. Selfishness. The same person that says "I would like to have wifi without paying for it when I am somewhere not home" has already said "I don't want to pay for my own 3g/data plan so I can have network access when I am not home".
There's a very good alternative motivation, the same one that drives all sorts of stuff engineers, computer scientists, and natural scientists do: efficiency. We've got all these cables laid; why not use them? And we can maybe get better speed (and better reception indoors) in the process. Other practical questions aside, I'd like it if I could use other people's wifi/broadband connections and they could use mine because it would make more efficient use of existing infrastructure and cut down on congestion in the limited brands of spectrum allocated for such RF broadcasts.
I personally have little desire to freeload off anyone. I had actually even considered if there would be a way to setup some service where people could offer access to their wifi to other users of the service (essentially "I'll share my wifi if you share yours") and/or offer a mechanism to pay something to defray the broadband bill of the open wifi operators. The specific goal I had in mind was eliminating free riders and sharing costs along with access.
In the end I decided it probably wouldn't catch on if it were only for the initiated (others running open wifi), and payment would be too problematic because 1) it would be practically difficult to charge a reasonable fee due to flat transaction costs on things like credit cards and 2) it would probably end up with people spoofing access points to phish for credit card numbers. The point is, though, that not everyone who wants this stuff is interested in being a moocher.
It should also be said that companies offering wireless data service and wired broadband tend to be relatively uncompetitive cartels, so it open wifi allowed consumers as a group to effectively get a better deal from these companies (utilizing the bandwidth they pay the ISP for while avoiding unreasonable wireless data charges) that would be good too.
The differentiation you're making is important, that the network can discriminate based on what the packet is but not whose it is. I think even then, though, there's the possibility of trouble. If network QoS decides what sorts of uses get what sorts of service it still means the network operator is in the position of making value judgements on the different uses. This is a fundamental departure from what I (admittedly a layman) understand as the central design principle of the Internet: smart endpoints and dumb pipes enabling novel and unforeseen uses.
I understand the idea of QOS is supposed to be just ensuring low latency or jitter for connections where those things matter (steaming, games, VIOP, etc.) at the expense of things where they don't matter much (http, ftp, torrents, etc.), But when there's congestion some things are going to get priority and some are not. Some sorts of protocols may be pretty specific to a certain group/device, so that the QoS decisions on them in effect amount to putting certain users ahead of others. And then there's the question of new, previously unknown uses. If someone devises a new sort of service that requires low latency or jitter but is not recognized by the network, it will presumably be placed below recognized things like VOIP and streaming, and if it competes with existing tech in those spheres it will be de-facto discriminated against.
So, it's certainly bad for the network to discriminate between certain users, but I think it can still be problematic to discriminate between different sorts of communications.
They did the usual movie./TV sci-fi thing of having all the ships, including the big capital ships, engage at ranges of a few hundred metres, instead of a few million miles. And no real explanation of why they didn't just nuke each other with guided missiles instead of shooting more or less conventional guns at each other.
Well, clearly the short answer to why they didn't nuke each other at long distance is that it wouldn't make very interesting television. As far as I recall, BSG didn't really discuss what factors determined the tactics of space battles. If you played the game Mass Effect, I was impressed by how much detail was in the codex about space battles and how the physics and practical considerations shaped the tactics.
In that case they have FTL travel and "kinetic barriers" (i.e. shields), but they state that most engagements would occur at thousands or millions of kilometers, since the main weapons are large rail runs that fire slugs of material at very high speeds (e.g. 0.1 c) as a kinetic weapon. Then it's just a question of the speed at which a ship can fire slugs versus the speed at which it can dodge its opponents' slugs. They do, however, outline certain tactical situations where ships may be forced to engage at close range (e.g. defending a planet). The ships have very effective laser-based missile defence systems, so guided missiles are only useful in a large barrage that can overwhelm the system. They also make the very astute point that dissipating heat (generated by engines, defence, and weapons systems) may actually be one of the biggest problems in a space battle and limit the length of engagements.
Of course, when you finally see space battles in that game (and the following ones) they appear more-or-less as in your typical space opera. My impression was that they threw out all the good sci-fi they'd written about earlier because it would make for uninteresting battles, although now that I think of it they may have fit them all into those tactical exceptions.
I remember that the American Physical Society (the professional organization of physicists) studied various boost-phase missile defense schemes years ago. They found that the various options, including air-borne lasers, weren't likely to be very useful in realistic scenarios (even under otherwise optimistic assumptions).
The Airborne Laser currently in development has the potential to intercept liquid-propellant ICBMs, but its range would be limited and it would therefore be vulnerable to counterattack. The Airborne Laser would not be able to disable solid-propellant ICBMs at ranges useful for defending the United States.
Few of the components exist for deploying an effective boost-phase defense against liquid-propellant ICBMs and some essential components would take at least 10 years to develop, said Study Group co-chair Daniel Kleppner. According to U.S. intelligence estimates, North Korea and Iran could develop or acquire solid-propellant ICBMs within the next 10 to 15 years. Consequently, a boost-phase defense effective only against liquid-propellant ICBMs would risk being obsolete when deployed.
You can also read the full report. I don't know how the relative states of the technologies stand today.
I agree that ultimately what is the oldest living thing comes down to a question of semantics. A distinction that's often made is clonal versus non-clonal organisms. I've seen Methuselah called the oldest non-clonal organism. The creosote bush that you mention is a clonal organism, as is Pando, a clonal colony of aspen thought to be something like 80,000 years old.
Remember, though, that the mass itself is not really the important part. The question is what is the surface gravity. Using your assumption of identical density (maybe not likely, but I don't know offhand what density is likely), the mass of this new planet in terms of the density rho will be M = rho*4/3*pi*R^3. The gravitational acceleration at the surface will be
a = (G M) / R^2
Combining that with the expression for the mass gives
a = G*rho*4/3*pi*R^3 / R^2 = (G*rho*4/3*pi) R.
All the stuff inside the parenthesis is assumed to be the same for both planets, so if we want to write it in terms of the surface gravity of Earth, g, and radius of Earth, r, then we'd have
a = g*(R/r). Thus, the surface gravity (under the assumption of identical density) is only 2.4 times greater.
Of course, if you're going to visit this place and plan to leave again (maybe not so useful without warp drive, given) then you might also be concerned with the energetic depth of the gravity well. For an object of mass m to escape to interstellar space from the surface will require an amount of energy
E = G*M*m/R
and in terms of the earth value E_earth this would be
E = (E_earth)*(R/r)^2
meaning it will take about 6 times as much energy as getting off Earth.
I was actually just thinking about this issue the other day while playing Mass Effect, because I was wondering if they'd done their numbers right on the planet properties (they had).
My girlfriend and I both read and liked the comic, and we were both pretty happy with the movie. We went with a couple of friends who had not read the comic but actually were the ones who suggested seeing the movie. They really did not like it. From talking to them, the problem seemed to basically be one of unfulfilled expectations. They knew it was a movie about superheroes and were expecting a typical superhero movie, which is to say an action-packed movie with pretty light themes. What they got was something that was dark and more dialog and ennui than action, so they were not happy.
Maybe if they'd been expecting something different going in they would have liked it better or perhaps not. Maybe there were other people who it would have suited better, but they decided not to see it assuming it was just another dumb superhero movie. I don't know, but I wouldn't discount the effect of mistaken expectations.
No ISP has ever done that. Mostly because if they did so they would cease to be a common carrier and be liable for every torrent. Do you see how the system is self-regulating to prevent this issue?
Broadband ISPs are not common carriers. In fact, for the reason you point out, if they were common carriers then I believe we would effectively have net neutrality enforced (just as with phone service), and some have suggested this as a solution.
I'm actually curious, what sorts of things are you talking about? I assume things like adblock, but it sounds like you're thinking of a lot more than that.
The correct decision depends on the numbers. If enough accidents are caused by cell phone use while driving, and you can effectively stop that cell phone use, then you may save more lives than are lost by people in accidents not being able to use their cell phones. I don't know what the numbers are, and in fact I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't really reliable numbers on cell phones as a cause of accidents (seems like that could he hard to determine accurately).
That being said, the decision between those two choices may be a false dichotomy; there might be a 3rd way that's better than both. And even if a cell phone blocking measure did net good, good luck to the politician trying to explain that when some mother of 3 dies trapped in her crashed car because she couldn't call 911. Of course, it shouldn't be so hard to make any jamming device turn off when, say, the airbags deploy.
I generally find the idea of not being able to use my phone, mobile broadband device, etc. when I'm a passenger pretty annoying. It seems like a overly broad approach to the problem. I also wonder what about all the other devices that distract drivers, like navigation systems. Will this really change the level of distraction or just change which things people are distracted by. Still, if the numbers tell us that enough lives will be saved, it's hard to argue against that (given that this is not really a fundamental issue of liberty or something).
The fact that they disagree with you on the interpretation of one of the amendments doesn't really constitute an agenda. But in any case, I always find this objection to make little sense. Do you support the many civil rights they do vigorously defend? They are often defending your 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th amendment rights. For me this would be reason enough to support them, even leaving aside the 2nd amendment.
Then you have to take into account the fact that there is another organization, the NRA, that exists largely for the purpose of protecting the 2nd amendment, and it is one of the best funded and most influential lobbying groups in the country. A quick Google search suggests that the NRA has an annual budget of over $200M while the ACLU has a budget of something like $60-80M. The NRA has apparently often been ranked by members of congress as the most influential lobbying group. In that context, it would be absolutely crazy for the ACLU to spend money defending the 2nd amendment (even if they supported your interpretation), when they have all the other constitutional rights to defend. In view of this reality, it really makes no sense to me to use the 2nd amendment as a reason not to support the ACLU.
Interesting. Unfortunately the XBox is not in a convenient location to connect an ethernet cable. I guess maybe what one needs is a bridge that does some buffering of its own.:-) Regardless, of course, it's crazy that networking problems would cause it to crash and lose your place.
As a long-time Linux user, I certainly have my own gripes about Linux as a desktop OS, but a lot of these criticisms you're bringing up don't ring so true in my experience.
I've been using Linux for about 10 years now, and using it as my primary desktop for probably about 8. I'm definitely a geek, but I'm not a serious programmer nor a hard core computer nerd. In all that time, I think I've recompiled the kernel once many years ago (maybe 6-8 years ago), and in that case I was using the tools provided with the kernel source deb, so it was pretty easy. I can think of one other instance (probably 2-3 years ago) where I had to compile kernel modules for some hardware that was pretty new and not yet supported in the kernel. It was annoying but relatively easy, and I only had to do it a few times before the drivers started being included by default. Now, it's not really desirable to have to do any of that, but spread out over 8 or so years that's really a pretty minimal amount of extra work for anyone with a bent toward computers. People always make it sound like you have to recompile the kernel every few months, and that has never been my experience, so I always assume they're talking about the early days before I was really using Linux.
As for the easy of use issues: My girlfriend is a life long Mac user. Several of my friends had Macs. I find there are some things that are easy for them and hard for me, but then there are some things that are a pain for then and trivial for me. There have certainly been times where a Mac user can view some media that I can't play or will get much better performance playing it, but there have also been times where they can't play some video file that mplayer has no problem with. There is hardware that I can use for lack of drivers, but just the other day my gf got some bar code scanner she couldn't get to work with OS X that was plug and play on my Ubuntu machine. It's probably true that on balance you'll have more issues with Linux, but I haven't found it to be night-and-day the way it's often described.
In more general terms, I have yet to see an OS for a general purpose computer (i.e., something that's not dedicated or a specialized piece of consumer electronics) that can be accurately described by the slogan, "It just works!" To quote the Dread Pirate Roberts, "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something." I've seen Macs, especially notebooks, with all manner of weird malfunctions. Again, it could be that statistically they're better than other computers (although I doubt it for the notebooks), but it's not night-and-day.
I can see reasons to use a Mac (or Windows), but for me they would come down to more supported hardware and software. Most of the other criticisms had not loomed large in my experience as a (layman) user.
On the XBox 360 I'd simply take a client was a bit more stable. Heck, I'd probably even be willing to put in a disk. When I use the Netflix application, trying to fast forward or reverse more than a few seconds leads to probably about a 30% chance of being kicked out of the movie and back to the screen you were on when you selected it. What's more, it seems that most of the time this happens the software loses all record of where you were in the movie.
I'm shocked that the player could have such a basic usability problem on known (locked down) hardware used by so many people. Hardware, I might add, where you have to be signed up for an extra pay service (XBox Live gold) in addition to your Netflix subscription and Internet service just to be able to watch the streaming movies.
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Churchill never said that, but it's obviously convenient for your viewpoint to believe that he did. In that sense, your statement is like a microcosm of the entire crusade against supposed "SJWs".
Oops, Word does have a Word function, which does seem like maybe it implements a 3-way merge in some sense. But personally I've found it a bit hard so get exactly what it does in general, since it only seems to ask for two Word documents to do the merge.
I think that if each contains tracked changes from a common base document then what you get is a 3-way merge. However, if each file contains a revision as the base document with (distinct) tracked changes on top then it's not really clear to me what the heck "merge" does. Since Word doesn't seem to have a notion of recording a history of committed revisions, it doesn't have a way of figuring out the last common ancestor to automagically handle the merge properly.
So if you never have a situation where someone submits changes to an older revision then you're probably okay, but I find this sort of thing happens a lot and with Word that situation is...confusing at the least.
I've been forced to return to using Word recently, and I find the "track changes" feature to be pretty disappointing, actually. As far as I can tell, it only supports a sort of "diff" via the "compare" function and lacks any concept of a 3-way merge. I find this makes it a real pain integrating together changes from different people (especially if they're on different revisions). Since I'm a n00b as far as this feature goes, it's quite possible I'm doing it wrong, but to me Word seems pretty bad for this purpose.
In fact, I find myself pining for my last workflow, using LaTeX with Mercurial, which I think is saying a lot about how poor the new one is.
Yeah, I think here you have the double whammy that it's "common knowledge" and that it seems to fit with a basic knowledge of biology (i.e., simple sugar causes a very quick rise in blood sugar and blood sugar provides energy), so it's very easy to believe. I just happened to see an article on such a study at some point.
Honestly, I've been tricked so many times by "common knowledge" at this point that I actually often stop and google before making anything like health claims. Another example of this is when I looked up the "fact" that vitamin C prevents the cold. Turns out there's no evidence of that (at least not under vaguely normal circumstances), but I always took this as medically validated fact.
Actually the existance of the sugar high has been hotly debated, and as far as I'm aware most of the scientific literature suggests that it doesn't exist.
Of course I think those observations are mostly about double blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trails where neither the child nor the observer knows the child has gotten sugar. I don't know if the results of this survey-based cohort study are due to the placebo effect, spurious correlations, or actual new effect.
(Caveat: I don't know that much about biology/medicine, so take all that with a grain of salt.)
While that is what naive intuition (or ECON 101) would suggest, reality sometimes doesn't conform to our simplisitic expectations (especially in economics). Apparently more recent empirical studies cast some serious doubt on the idea that a higher minimum wage has a significant upward effect on unemployment. AFAIK it is the subject of some disagreement among economists.
This has always been my question. I was very pleased to find my objections conveniently represented in graphical form.
For that matter forget alchemy, if we adopt this idea then presumably it should apply to all subjects. History would be especially problematic. Quite a few people believe in things like aliens influencing early civilizations, Atlantis, or worse yet doubt the reality of the Holocaust.
I realize you were probably just going for comic effect, but FYI for anyone who cares: you can link to a specific version of a page so that you don't have to worry about how it might change later.
The practical difference is that someone can use it without having to knock on random people's doors to find someone willing to share the necessary key/credentials. It's an automated process. That's a huge functional difference. (Whether it's effective is a different question.)
There's a very good alternative motivation, the same one that drives all sorts of stuff engineers, computer scientists, and natural scientists do: efficiency. We've got all these cables laid; why not use them? And we can maybe get better speed (and better reception indoors) in the process. Other practical questions aside, I'd like it if I could use other people's wifi/broadband connections and they could use mine because it would make more efficient use of existing infrastructure and cut down on congestion in the limited brands of spectrum allocated for such RF broadcasts.
I personally have little desire to freeload off anyone. I had actually even considered if there would be a way to setup some service where people could offer access to their wifi to other users of the service (essentially "I'll share my wifi if you share yours") and/or offer a mechanism to pay something to defray the broadband bill of the open wifi operators. The specific goal I had in mind was eliminating free riders and sharing costs along with access.
In the end I decided it probably wouldn't catch on if it were only for the initiated (others running open wifi), and payment would be too problematic because 1) it would be practically difficult to charge a reasonable fee due to flat transaction costs on things like credit cards and 2) it would probably end up with people spoofing access points to phish for credit card numbers. The point is, though, that not everyone who wants this stuff is interested in being a moocher.
It should also be said that companies offering wireless data service and wired broadband tend to be relatively uncompetitive cartels, so it open wifi allowed consumers as a group to effectively get a better deal from these companies (utilizing the bandwidth they pay the ISP for while avoiding unreasonable wireless data charges) that would be good too.
The differentiation you're making is important, that the network can discriminate based on what the packet is but not whose it is. I think even then, though, there's the possibility of trouble. If network QoS decides what sorts of uses get what sorts of service it still means the network operator is in the position of making value judgements on the different uses. This is a fundamental departure from what I (admittedly a layman) understand as the central design principle of the Internet: smart endpoints and dumb pipes enabling novel and unforeseen uses.
I understand the idea of QOS is supposed to be just ensuring low latency or jitter for connections where those things matter (steaming, games, VIOP, etc.) at the expense of things where they don't matter much (http, ftp, torrents, etc.), But when there's congestion some things are going to get priority and some are not. Some sorts of protocols may be pretty specific to a certain group/device, so that the QoS decisions on them in effect amount to putting certain users ahead of others. And then there's the question of new, previously unknown uses. If someone devises a new sort of service that requires low latency or jitter but is not recognized by the network, it will presumably be placed below recognized things like VOIP and streaming, and if it competes with existing tech in those spheres it will be de-facto discriminated against.
So, it's certainly bad for the network to discriminate between certain users, but I think it can still be problematic to discriminate between different sorts of communications.
Well, clearly the short answer to why they didn't nuke each other at long distance is that it wouldn't make very interesting television. As far as I recall, BSG didn't really discuss what factors determined the tactics of space battles. If you played the game Mass Effect, I was impressed by how much detail was in the codex about space battles and how the physics and practical considerations shaped the tactics.
In that case they have FTL travel and "kinetic barriers" (i.e. shields), but they state that most engagements would occur at thousands or millions of kilometers, since the main weapons are large rail runs that fire slugs of material at very high speeds (e.g. 0.1 c) as a kinetic weapon. Then it's just a question of the speed at which a ship can fire slugs versus the speed at which it can dodge its opponents' slugs. They do, however, outline certain tactical situations where ships may be forced to engage at close range (e.g. defending a planet). The ships have very effective laser-based missile defence systems, so guided missiles are only useful in a large barrage that can overwhelm the system. They also make the very astute point that dissipating heat (generated by engines, defence, and weapons systems) may actually be one of the biggest problems in a space battle and limit the length of engagements.
Of course, when you finally see space battles in that game (and the following ones) they appear more-or-less as in your typical space opera. My impression was that they threw out all the good sci-fi they'd written about earlier because it would make for uninteresting battles, although now that I think of it they may have fit them all into those tactical exceptions.
I remember that the American Physical Society (the professional organization of physicists) studied various boost-phase missile defense schemes years ago. They found that the various options, including air-borne lasers, weren't likely to be very useful in realistic scenarios (even under otherwise optimistic assumptions).
The press release says:
You can also read the full report. I don't know how the relative states of the technologies stand today.
A curious Olympic Games. The only winning move is not to play
I agree that ultimately what is the oldest living thing comes down to a question of semantics. A distinction that's often made is clonal versus non-clonal organisms. I've seen Methuselah called the oldest non-clonal organism. The creosote bush that you mention is a clonal organism, as is Pando, a clonal colony of aspen thought to be something like 80,000 years old.
Remember, though, that the mass itself is not really the important part. The question is what is the surface gravity. Using your assumption of identical density (maybe not likely, but I don't know offhand what density is likely), the mass of this new planet in terms of the density rho will be M = rho*4/3*pi*R^3. The gravitational acceleration at the surface will be
a = (G M) / R^2
Combining that with the expression for the mass gives
a = G*rho*4/3*pi*R^3 / R^2 = (G*rho*4/3*pi) R.
All the stuff inside the parenthesis is assumed to be the same for both planets, so if we want to write it in terms of the surface gravity of Earth, g, and radius of Earth, r, then we'd have
a = g*(R/r). Thus, the surface gravity (under the assumption of identical density) is only 2.4 times greater.
Of course, if you're going to visit this place and plan to leave again (maybe not so useful without warp drive, given) then you might also be concerned with the energetic depth of the gravity well. For an object of mass m to escape to interstellar space from the surface will require an amount of energy
E = G*M*m/R
and in terms of the earth value E_earth this would be
E = (E_earth)*(R/r)^2
meaning it will take about 6 times as much energy as getting off Earth.
I was actually just thinking about this issue the other day while playing Mass Effect, because I was wondering if they'd done their numbers right on the planet properties (they had).
You would accept "masked adventurers"?
Firefly was pretty well liked and dates from the 21st century.
My girlfriend and I both read and liked the comic, and we were both pretty happy with the movie. We went with a couple of friends who had not read the comic but actually were the ones who suggested seeing the movie. They really did not like it. From talking to them, the problem seemed to basically be one of unfulfilled expectations. They knew it was a movie about superheroes and were expecting a typical superhero movie, which is to say an action-packed movie with pretty light themes. What they got was something that was dark and more dialog and ennui than action, so they were not happy.
Maybe if they'd been expecting something different going in they would have liked it better or perhaps not. Maybe there were other people who it would have suited better, but they decided not to see it assuming it was just another dumb superhero movie. I don't know, but I wouldn't discount the effect of mistaken expectations.
Broadband ISPs are not common carriers. In fact, for the reason you point out, if they were common carriers then I believe we would effectively have net neutrality enforced (just as with phone service), and some have suggested this as a solution.
I'm actually curious, what sorts of things are you talking about? I assume things like adblock, but it sounds like you're thinking of a lot more than that.
The correct decision depends on the numbers. If enough accidents are caused by cell phone use while driving, and you can effectively stop that cell phone use, then you may save more lives than are lost by people in accidents not being able to use their cell phones. I don't know what the numbers are, and in fact I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't really reliable numbers on cell phones as a cause of accidents (seems like that could he hard to determine accurately).
That being said, the decision between those two choices may be a false dichotomy; there might be a 3rd way that's better than both. And even if a cell phone blocking measure did net good, good luck to the politician trying to explain that when some mother of 3 dies trapped in her crashed car because she couldn't call 911. Of course, it shouldn't be so hard to make any jamming device turn off when, say, the airbags deploy.
I generally find the idea of not being able to use my phone, mobile broadband device, etc. when I'm a passenger pretty annoying. It seems like a overly broad approach to the problem. I also wonder what about all the other devices that distract drivers, like navigation systems. Will this really change the level of distraction or just change which things people are distracted by. Still, if the numbers tell us that enough lives will be saved, it's hard to argue against that (given that this is not really a fundamental issue of liberty or something).
The fact that they disagree with you on the interpretation of one of the amendments doesn't really constitute an agenda. But in any case, I always find this objection to make little sense. Do you support the many civil rights they do vigorously defend? They are often defending your 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th amendment rights. For me this would be reason enough to support them, even leaving aside the 2nd amendment.
Then you have to take into account the fact that there is another organization, the NRA, that exists largely for the purpose of protecting the 2nd amendment, and it is one of the best funded and most influential lobbying groups in the country. A quick Google search suggests that the NRA has an annual budget of over $200M while the ACLU has a budget of something like $60-80M. The NRA has apparently often been ranked by members of congress as the most influential lobbying group. In that context, it would be absolutely crazy for the ACLU to spend money defending the 2nd amendment (even if they supported your interpretation), when they have all the other constitutional rights to defend. In view of this reality, it really makes no sense to me to use the 2nd amendment as a reason not to support the ACLU.
Interesting. Unfortunately the XBox is not in a convenient location to connect an ethernet cable. I guess maybe what one needs is a bridge that does some buffering of its own. :-) Regardless, of course, it's crazy that networking problems would cause it to crash and lose your place.
As a long-time Linux user, I certainly have my own gripes about Linux as a desktop OS, but a lot of these criticisms you're bringing up don't ring so true in my experience.
I've been using Linux for about 10 years now, and using it as my primary desktop for probably about 8. I'm definitely a geek, but I'm not a serious programmer nor a hard core computer nerd. In all that time, I think I've recompiled the kernel once many years ago (maybe 6-8 years ago), and in that case I was using the tools provided with the kernel source deb, so it was pretty easy. I can think of one other instance (probably 2-3 years ago) where I had to compile kernel modules for some hardware that was pretty new and not yet supported in the kernel. It was annoying but relatively easy, and I only had to do it a few times before the drivers started being included by default. Now, it's not really desirable to have to do any of that, but spread out over 8 or so years that's really a pretty minimal amount of extra work for anyone with a bent toward computers. People always make it sound like you have to recompile the kernel every few months, and that has never been my experience, so I always assume they're talking about the early days before I was really using Linux.
As for the easy of use issues: My girlfriend is a life long Mac user. Several of my friends had Macs. I find there are some things that are easy for them and hard for me, but then there are some things that are a pain for then and trivial for me. There have certainly been times where a Mac user can view some media that I can't play or will get much better performance playing it, but there have also been times where they can't play some video file that mplayer has no problem with. There is hardware that I can use for lack of drivers, but just the other day my gf got some bar code scanner she couldn't get to work with OS X that was plug and play on my Ubuntu machine. It's probably true that on balance you'll have more issues with Linux, but I haven't found it to be night-and-day the way it's often described.
In more general terms, I have yet to see an OS for a general purpose computer (i.e., something that's not dedicated or a specialized piece of consumer electronics) that can be accurately described by the slogan, "It just works!" To quote the Dread Pirate Roberts, "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something." I've seen Macs, especially notebooks, with all manner of weird malfunctions. Again, it could be that statistically they're better than other computers (although I doubt it for the notebooks), but it's not night-and-day.
I can see reasons to use a Mac (or Windows), but for me they would come down to more supported hardware and software. Most of the other criticisms had not loomed large in my experience as a (layman) user.
On the XBox 360 I'd simply take a client was a bit more stable. Heck, I'd probably even be willing to put in a disk. When I use the Netflix application, trying to fast forward or reverse more than a few seconds leads to probably about a 30% chance of being kicked out of the movie and back to the screen you were on when you selected it. What's more, it seems that most of the time this happens the software loses all record of where you were in the movie.
I'm shocked that the player could have such a basic usability problem on known (locked down) hardware used by so many people. Hardware, I might add, where you have to be signed up for an extra pay service (XBox Live gold) in addition to your Netflix subscription and Internet service just to be able to watch the streaming movies.