For the most part, TNG was competent. At its best it was brilliant. I'm with people
on episodes like The Inner Light and The Measure of a Man.
Add in, for me, Cause and Effect, The Emissary, a few others.
The human condition, in space. Good stuff.
Unlike many, I actually liked The Dauphin.
I thought Darmok was an interesting idea. How do you make aliens who are, well, alien, but not so
alien that you can't interact with them? This was an issue with the Borg, badass aliens who could kick the
shit out of Klingons and not work up a sweat, but who were so alien that no meaningful interaction
was possible.
Bad episodes? Yeah, there were a few. I prefer to remember the good ones.
Do you need to know how your car is performing? Yes.
Do you need to know where you are and where you're going? Yes.
We already have head-up displays that show car parameters, as well as navigation systems
that help you get where you're going. This could be incorporated in to an HUD ("turn here ->").
Anything more would be information overload. I do not need ads to tell me how cool the
store I'm driving by is (i.e. how much they paid for the ad), nor do I need neat pictures other people have taken in the vicinity.
Look at how they do it in airplanes: the pilots have
the essential information in front of them, but can access other information as needed.
I've always thought ARM was a cool design. Simple, minimalist, sort of a latter-day PDP-11,
one of those canonical architectures that just works. Simple chip, not many transistors, low power, good chip
for mobile devices. It seems so
obvious in retrospect. Especially since that's not what the designers had in mind. They were designing a simple
chip because they only had a couple of people and that was all they could afford.
In one of the later scenes in
Micro Men there is a whiteboard in the background with the original ARM
requirements, right down to the barrel shifter.
I sometimes wonder if Google Glass is going to be another
CueCat. Somebody
thought it was a really neat idea and pushed it hard, but nobody else thought it was a neat idea
and it died.
People view Google Glass as creepy and weird. That's hard sell, even for Google.
Is current GA activity intrinsically low, or is it low compared to the Good Old Days of the 1950s and 1960s
general aviation boom?
Our GA airports are somewhat less than inviting to visitors. There was an editorial/blog in
Flying magazine on this
subject recently.
Airplanes really are expensive to buy and to operate.
Does anybody learn to fly for fun or for private transportation anymore? Everybody nowadays gets their PPL because it's the prerequisite for everything else.
After the novelty wore off I too came to the realization that a PPL was sterile, a dead end, and am now working on my commercial license.
Right, and this is why the viewer was supposed to make the assumption that the AI had emotions programmed in. No stupidity here.
Remember the discussion in 2001. HAL was programmed to sound emotional, since it made it
easier to talk to him. Whether he actually felt emotions was much harder to say.
the horsepower per hour of engine life? That thing looks like it'll last 20 hours before it needs rebuilding.
A point the story ignores. Any idiot can get buttloads of power
out of an engine if it doesn't have to do so for very long. Two-stroke engines are particularly good for
this if fuel consumption and exhaust emissions are minor considerations.
As a city dweller public transport and the occasional rental car were all I needed for a long time.
A few years ago I got a nice bonus from my employers and bought a little car to see what I might do with it.
I can't say it's changed my driving habits all that much: I still take the bus to work, but drive on weekends. The
price of gasoline is certainly a factor, but will have to be quite a bit more before I cut back further on driving.
I'd love to drive an electric car, but the infrastructure isn't there. I live in an apartment and have nowhere to plug one in,
despite numerous discussions with the building management.
There are a few destinations around here (like downtown Vancouver) where I still prefer to take the bus, because the traffic
and parking are impossible.
I remember that morning. I was watching the launch on TV as I was getting ready to go to work, and had to
head out
during a launch hold. Later that morning one of our part-time folks came in and asked if
we had heard about Challenger? I felt myself go grey and took the rest of the
day off.
Every generation has events where everybody remembers exactly
where they were. I wasn't born when Sputnik 1 was launched,
and I was a bit young to remember Kennedy. But I do remember Apollo 8, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Challenger, Lady Di and 9/11.
Funny that four of those events are related to space...
Side note: a shame the pictures only show the left SRB, not the right one that caused all the trouble.
A few years ago I moved to a new place and needed to line up a new home for a very sweet
stray cat who had turned up on my doorstep. So he went to live with my Mom in the country.
At first he was puzzled by his new surroundings, but eventually he figured things out. It took him
about six weeks to go from playing with mice the other cat brought in, to catching his own and playing
with them, to discovering they were edible. And much tastier than cat food. Crunch crunch crunch.
Indeed. That will, eventually, kill YouTube far more effectively than intrusive ads or changes in terms of service.
I first noticed playback issues earlier this year. Everybody is complaining about it. The support forums are full
of platitudes about updating plugins and flushing one's cache. None of which makes any difference: YouTube is broken.
And if it doesn't actually work, i.e. deliver content, the advertising is going to be irrelevant.
My preferred browser is Chrome, BTW. If YouTube doesn't work properly with Google's own browser,
we're in big trouble.
When Nelson Mandela turned 70 there was quite a bit of coverage in the news here. He was
still in jail, so I called Cape Town information, got the number, phoned the jail and left a
message ("Happy Birthday!") for him.
The man who answered the phone sounded like he'd been on the phone a lot that day.
He was also very careful to take down my name and where I was calling from. I suspect
that until the government changed there would have been little point in trying to get a visa
to visit South Africa...
A question that comes up a lot is if Delicas do so well in Canada, why didn't Mitsubishi sell them here at the time?
My answer: all Mitsubishi products in Canada at the time were captive imports, sold as Dodge products (e.g. Dodge Colt). Would you still
want one if it said "Dodge" on it?
Mitsubishi sold a 2 wheel drive gas-engine L300 in the U.S.A. as the Mitsubishi Vanwagon. They were largely ignored
at the time, and are pretty well extinct now.
Here in B.C. we had a stink a few years ago over privately imported vehicles from Japan. Under Canadian law you can
privately import
anything you like if it's over 15 years old, and in the mid-noughties a lot of interesting
vehicles started to turn 15. Since they are essentially worthless in Japan, but well looked-after, they're a bargain
for anybody who wants a used car. Japan has made a major industry of exporting their used cars. Unlike
many other jurisdictions, cars with the steering wheel on the "wrong" side are road-legal here.
The car dealers threw a fit. They claimed that right-hand drive vehicles were the enemy of all that is free and right and holy,
but were never to adequately explain why. I wondered why they were concerned about their ability to compete
with 15 year old used cars. Again, they were never able to adequately explain why.
It's died down. For now. But you never know what they're going to try next.
I bought a 1992 Mitsubishi L300 Delica in 2007. I love it.
A touch expensive to run, but ridiculously practical and it will go anywhere with shift-on-the-fly 4WD. It
also has a delightfully quirky style.
My bank card PIN is four digits. It's not the year I was born, nor is it any other year (or other four-digit number, for that matter) that you will find in my personal information.
For computer passwords I like the "first letter of a phrase" algorithm, producing passwords like TbontbTitQ and MRwiTDtESSahtuwws. Or pick a phrase, l33t it up a bit, and come up with something like W1nd0ze1sTehSux0r3. Long passwords are good.
The worst public web site I've encountered for silly password requirements is
U.S. Customs eAPIS, which you use to send your
information if you're going to fly privately to the U.S.A. Not only does it enforce silly password requirements, it doesn't tell you about them
until after you have typed in your new password and it tells you why your password sucks. Yes, I end up writing them down.
I live in an apartment building. I've discussed the matter with the building management but
we haven't come up with an answer. While new buildings must have electrical hookups
for electric cars, there is no incentive to retrofit old buildings.
Working for the NSA or any of their ilk is probably like any other job: day-to-day routine stuff and some really cool shit.
With, of course, the proviso that you can never breathe a word of it to anybody, and they'd rather you not discuss the fact that you even work there.
The MI5 recruiting web site discusses
some of this.
If you want the approval of others on what a neat job you
have, think again. This certainly limits the pool of available candidates. I wonder what it means for the intelligence community
in general.
Hang on a sec...there's somebody at the door. GIDYW*(YW*DHNDW
Canadian pilots licenses have pictures on them. The stickers you get for your ratings and stuff have a
watermark derived from your picture. They are government-issued photo ID, and I have used mine to check in for
flights many times.
When Transport Canada started talking about upping security on licenses, the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association
successfully lobbied the Powers That Be that security was their problem, not the pilot's problem, therefore
pilots shouldn't have to pay for it.
Reminds me of a recent experience writing a new system to replace a legacy system.
A key part of one of the homegrown network protocols was a CRC. This sounds OK, but the implementation
was wrong. I spent a lot of time trying to reverse-engineer
just what the original engineers had implemented. The fact that it was written in ADSP2181 assembler didn't help.
It had never been an issue before because both ends of the link used the same wrong implementation, so the errors cancelled
out.
I ended up writing an instruction-level simulation of the ADSP2181 processor (only needed a handful of instructions)
and executing the original code directly. It works fine. Performance isn't an issue, though moving from a 33 MHz DSP chip
to an eight-core 2.8 GHz box certainly helps in that department.:-)
In Canada you must answer all questions put to you in court.
If you should incriminate yourself in the process, it can't be used against you.
The 1980s courtroom drama Street Legal had an episode where this happened: the cops
were so certain of the guilt of a high school student who they thought was selling drugs
that they got a friend of his to testify against him, without checking to see what he had to say first.
When he said in open court that the drugs were in fact his the cops couldn't do anything about it.
I have heard it suggested that when Messier was compiling his list of things not to look at because they're
not comets, the Crab Nebula was prominently in his list because it was
significantly smaller and brighter in his day than it is now. It's far from conspicuous today...
If you didn't know the time scale had been messed with, the video looks like very thick oil or honey dripping. Some sort of invariant
with liquids, I suppose. I thought it was kind of interesting.
I've done time-lapse videos of clouds and things. Haven't done one of paint drying or grass growing.
Slashdot Mirror
For the most part, TNG was competent. At its best it was brilliant. I'm with people on episodes like The Inner Light and The Measure of a Man. Add in, for me, Cause and Effect, The Emissary, a few others. The human condition, in space. Good stuff.
Unlike many, I actually liked The Dauphin.
I thought Darmok was an interesting idea. How do you make aliens who are, well, alien, but not so alien that you can't interact with them? This was an issue with the Borg, badass aliens who could kick the shit out of Klingons and not work up a sweat, but who were so alien that no meaningful interaction was possible.
Bad episodes? Yeah, there were a few. I prefer to remember the good ones.
...laura
Do you need to know how fast you're going? Yes.
Do you need to know how your car is performing? Yes.
Do you need to know where you are and where you're going? Yes.
We already have head-up displays that show car parameters, as well as navigation systems that help you get where you're going. This could be incorporated in to an HUD ("turn here ->").
Anything more would be information overload. I do not need ads to tell me how cool the store I'm driving by is (i.e. how much they paid for the ad), nor do I need neat pictures other people have taken in the vicinity.
Look at how they do it in airplanes: the pilots have the essential information in front of them, but can access other information as needed.
...laura
I've always thought ARM was a cool design. Simple, minimalist, sort of a latter-day PDP-11, one of those canonical architectures that just works. Simple chip, not many transistors, low power, good chip for mobile devices. It seems so obvious in retrospect. Especially since that's not what the designers had in mind. They were designing a simple chip because they only had a couple of people and that was all they could afford.
In one of the later scenes in Micro Men there is a whiteboard in the background with the original ARM requirements, right down to the barrel shifter.
...laura
I sometimes wonder if Google Glass is going to be another CueCat. Somebody thought it was a really neat idea and pushed it hard, but nobody else thought it was a neat idea and it died.
People view Google Glass as creepy and weird. That's hard sell, even for Google.
...laura
Is current GA activity intrinsically low, or is it low compared to the Good Old Days of the 1950s and 1960s general aviation boom?
Our GA airports are somewhat less than inviting to visitors. There was an editorial/blog in Flying magazine on this subject recently.
Airplanes really are expensive to buy and to operate.
Does anybody learn to fly for fun or for private transportation anymore? Everybody nowadays gets their PPL because it's the prerequisite for everything else. After the novelty wore off I too came to the realization that a PPL was sterile, a dead end, and am now working on my commercial license.
...laura
Right, and this is why the viewer was supposed to make the assumption that the AI had emotions programmed in. No stupidity here.
Remember the discussion in 2001. HAL was programmed to sound emotional, since it made it easier to talk to him. Whether he actually felt emotions was much harder to say.
...laura
the horsepower per hour of engine life? That thing looks like it'll last 20 hours before it needs rebuilding.
A point the story ignores. Any idiot can get buttloads of power out of an engine if it doesn't have to do so for very long. Two-stroke engines are particularly good for this if fuel consumption and exhaust emissions are minor considerations.
...laura
As a city dweller public transport and the occasional rental car were all I needed for a long time.
A few years ago I got a nice bonus from my employers and bought a little car to see what I might do with it. I can't say it's changed my driving habits all that much: I still take the bus to work, but drive on weekends. The price of gasoline is certainly a factor, but will have to be quite a bit more before I cut back further on driving. I'd love to drive an electric car, but the infrastructure isn't there. I live in an apartment and have nowhere to plug one in, despite numerous discussions with the building management.
There are a few destinations around here (like downtown Vancouver) where I still prefer to take the bus, because the traffic and parking are impossible.
...laura
I remember that morning. I was watching the launch on TV as I was getting ready to go to work, and had to head out during a launch hold. Later that morning one of our part-time folks came in and asked if we had heard about Challenger? I felt myself go grey and took the rest of the day off.
Every generation has events where everybody remembers exactly where they were. I wasn't born when Sputnik 1 was launched, and I was a bit young to remember Kennedy. But I do remember Apollo 8, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Challenger, Lady Di and 9/11. Funny that four of those events are related to space...
Side note: a shame the pictures only show the left SRB, not the right one that caused all the trouble.
...laura
A few years ago I was doing some development that involved AES encryption, and needed to create some test tools.
One evening I was watching some program about the misdeeds of some computer hacker, and the screen background was perl. It mentioned Crypt::Rijndael.
I had my test tool the next morning... :-)
...laura
A few years ago I moved to a new place and needed to line up a new home for a very sweet stray cat who had turned up on my doorstep. So he went to live with my Mom in the country.
At first he was puzzled by his new surroundings, but eventually he figured things out. It took him about six weeks to go from playing with mice the other cat brought in, to catching his own and playing with them, to discovering they were edible. And much tastier than cat food. Crunch crunch crunch.
...laura
Indeed. That will, eventually, kill YouTube far more effectively than intrusive ads or changes in terms of service.
I first noticed playback issues earlier this year. Everybody is complaining about it. The support forums are full of platitudes about updating plugins and flushing one's cache. None of which makes any difference: YouTube is broken. And if it doesn't actually work, i.e. deliver content, the advertising is going to be irrelevant.
My preferred browser is Chrome, BTW. If YouTube doesn't work properly with Google's own browser, we're in big trouble.
...laura
When Nelson Mandela turned 70 there was quite a bit of coverage in the news here. He was still in jail, so I called Cape Town information, got the number, phoned the jail and left a message ("Happy Birthday!") for him.
The man who answered the phone sounded like he'd been on the phone a lot that day. He was also very careful to take down my name and where I was calling from. I suspect that until the government changed there would have been little point in trying to get a visa to visit South Africa...
...laura
A question that comes up a lot is if Delicas do so well in Canada, why didn't Mitsubishi sell them here at the time?
My answer: all Mitsubishi products in Canada at the time were captive imports, sold as Dodge products (e.g. Dodge Colt). Would you still want one if it said "Dodge" on it?
Mitsubishi sold a 2 wheel drive gas-engine L300 in the U.S.A. as the Mitsubishi Vanwagon. They were largely ignored at the time, and are pretty well extinct now.
...laura
Here in B.C. we had a stink a few years ago over privately imported vehicles from Japan. Under Canadian law you can privately import anything you like if it's over 15 years old, and in the mid-noughties a lot of interesting vehicles started to turn 15. Since they are essentially worthless in Japan, but well looked-after, they're a bargain for anybody who wants a used car. Japan has made a major industry of exporting their used cars. Unlike many other jurisdictions, cars with the steering wheel on the "wrong" side are road-legal here.
The car dealers threw a fit. They claimed that right-hand drive vehicles were the enemy of all that is free and right and holy, but were never to adequately explain why. I wondered why they were concerned about their ability to compete with 15 year old used cars. Again, they were never able to adequately explain why.
It's died down. For now. But you never know what they're going to try next.
I bought a 1992 Mitsubishi L300 Delica in 2007. I love it. A touch expensive to run, but ridiculously practical and it will go anywhere with shift-on-the-fly 4WD. It also has a delightfully quirky style.
...laura
My bank card PIN is four digits. It's not the year I was born, nor is it any other year (or other four-digit number, for that matter) that you will find in my personal information.
For computer passwords I like the "first letter of a phrase" algorithm, producing passwords like TbontbTitQ and MRwiTDtESSahtuwws. Or pick a phrase, l33t it up a bit, and come up with something like W1nd0ze1sTehSux0r3. Long passwords are good.
The worst public web site I've encountered for silly password requirements is U.S. Customs eAPIS, which you use to send your information if you're going to fly privately to the U.S.A. Not only does it enforce silly password requirements, it doesn't tell you about them until after you have typed in your new password and it tells you why your password sucks. Yes, I end up writing them down.
...laura
It's as simple as that.
I live in an apartment building. I've discussed the matter with the building management but we haven't come up with an answer. While new buildings must have electrical hookups for electric cars, there is no incentive to retrofit old buildings.
...laura
Working for the NSA or any of their ilk is probably like any other job: day-to-day routine stuff and some really cool shit. With, of course, the proviso that you can never breathe a word of it to anybody, and they'd rather you not discuss the fact that you even work there.
The MI5 recruiting web site discusses some of this. If you want the approval of others on what a neat job you have, think again. This certainly limits the pool of available candidates. I wonder what it means for the intelligence community in general.
Hang on a sec...there's somebody at the door. GIDYW*(YW*DHNDW
NO CARRIER
Canadian pilots licenses have pictures on them. The stickers you get for your ratings and stuff have a watermark derived from your picture. They are government-issued photo ID, and I have used mine to check in for flights many times.
When Transport Canada started talking about upping security on licenses, the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association successfully lobbied the Powers That Be that security was their problem, not the pilot's problem, therefore pilots shouldn't have to pay for it.
...laura
My policy on ID for flights is that I never, ever use my passport as ID for domestic flights. That's not what it's for.
I usually use my pilot's license instead. The new ones look like a passport, but they're not.
...laura
Reminds me of a recent experience writing a new system to replace a legacy system.
A key part of one of the homegrown network protocols was a CRC. This sounds OK, but the implementation was wrong. I spent a lot of time trying to reverse-engineer just what the original engineers had implemented. The fact that it was written in ADSP2181 assembler didn't help. It had never been an issue before because both ends of the link used the same wrong implementation, so the errors cancelled out.
I ended up writing an instruction-level simulation of the ADSP2181 processor (only needed a handful of instructions) and executing the original code directly. It works fine. Performance isn't an issue, though moving from a 33 MHz DSP chip to an eight-core 2.8 GHz box certainly helps in that department. :-)
...laura
In Canada you must answer all questions put to you in court. If you should incriminate yourself in the process, it can't be used against you.
The 1980s courtroom drama Street Legal had an episode where this happened: the cops were so certain of the guilt of a high school student who they thought was selling drugs that they got a friend of his to testify against him, without checking to see what he had to say first. When he said in open court that the drugs were in fact his the cops couldn't do anything about it.
...laura
I have heard it suggested that when Messier was compiling his list of things not to look at because they're not comets, the Crab Nebula was prominently in his list because it was significantly smaller and brighter in his day than it is now. It's far from conspicuous today...
...laura
What do you need to light up? Why?
I second the suggestion for full-cutoff lighting. If you need lighting at all.
...laura
If you didn't know the time scale had been messed with, the video looks like very thick oil or honey dripping. Some sort of invariant with liquids, I suppose. I thought it was kind of interesting.
I've done time-lapse videos of clouds and things. Haven't done one of paint drying or grass growing.
Yet. :-)
...laura