> I'm sure there is an obscure utility for every possible situation in windows
You want to talk about obscure utilities in Windows? Try in Linux!
Tell me, if you didn't already know, could you decipher what any of these commands/utilities/directories are for, or even what they are, just from the names?
cat, less, ls,/dev/, |, awk, grep, ln, vi?
At least in Windows those "obscure" tools are named in ways that make them easy to find without a team of experts looking over your shoulder.
> Should the system go bad (virii, etc), which > happens often, the most used solution is to format.
Nonsense! Why should a system "go bad often"? If it's running the proper AV & malware software and is regularly patched, Windows doesn't "go bad often". It hasn't since Win95. Continuing to insist that it does is simply ignorant, IMHO.
I've been running Windoes at home and at various jobs, often for lots of users, and never have to deal with windows "going bad" except when there's a hardware issue or some idiot goes mucking around in the registry while logged in as admin - and those kinds of issues affect Linux just as much as they do windows.
> Remember Contact...That movie was essentially a flop with the public.
Really? It's made about $101 million dollars. That's not far from the top 100 movies of all time, and is probably somewhere near 150th, because things drop off pretty quickly, as most mainstream (read: released in major theatres, widely available, etc) films make much less.
> Experience in building stuff and making things work > take them high above most couch scientists and > technoblabbers anyway.
Amen to that.
In spite of my general dislike of their methodologies, I still like this aspect of what they do. It's nice to see people who respect the "try it and see if it works" mentality over dogmatic "Here's the policy, make the 'science' fit" mentality so common in these Bush years.
The fact is that the mythbusters guys often engage in poorly constructed 'experiments' which a scientifically literate person would recognize as being inadequate for the purposes in question. Many of their efforts are laughably incomplete or rely on misunderstandings of the phenomena that contibute to whatever they're testing.
Actually, I did read the wikipedia article. What I am doing is pointing out that wikipedia is not an authority on this, or many other, matters. The Xenon, Argon and Krypton ratios used for dating aren't a mismatch as noted above - this is one wikipedia editor's opinion. The fact that something is on wikipedia doesn't mean much.
The author/editor's opinion is presumably based on the Swindle/Brier/Burkland article in Geochimica et Cosmochimica acta in 1995. I don't believe this is a warranted reading of the evidence, and the scientific community doesn't either.
Moreover, I'm an astronomer. With a degree. So my idea of what science is - and more importantly, how it's done - has little little or nothing to do with cable tv.
Actually, I grew up on a boat. Not a "yacht" - we had a REAL boat.
SO you lived on a "200 foor [sic] yacht" for ONE WHOLE WEEK (OMG!), or on vacation, and you feel qualified to discuss how much motion a boat experiences?
"Mythubusters" doesn't account for the FACT that the ships using the "death ray" ARE MOVING. And thuis can't account for the TEN MINUTES needed for ignition. Lame.
Actually, there are some good ones. The guy behind this is a favorite former professor of mine here at Boulder, and he came to speak at our astronomy club meeting last fall about this project. He had a nice talk, with images, about this project.
I don't have any quick links to good images, but I suspect they'll be available soon to the public.
And just in case anyone was wondering, in addition to being really smart, he's also a really good guy who tells great war stories about NASA, science funding, etc.
I started using opera back in version 5.something, and found that I liked many things about it enough to use it as my primary browser. I've never gone back. Back then, I decided to pay them the minimal fee they wanted to turn off the built-in ads, and did so gladly. It's a good product, and I was willing to pay something to be ad-free. The fact that they included ads didn't make me angry, because they gave me an easy way to avoid them.
Same goes for/., Salon, etc.
But when I'm just surfing, especially on non-commercial sites (blogs, perhaps, or people's other silly pages), I still block ads. And this is the one situation in which I feel at least a little bad about it, because people do need to pay to keep their sites up (not that they have some sort of positive right to shift that cost to me!). Which is why I don't mind the little Google ads on people's pages - they're unobtrusive, and still manage to generate a (small) stream of cash.
But banner ads? I'll always block 'em and won't look back.
> I think you forget that Ads are paying for the content > of whatever page you are reading...including this one.
Actually, no. This web page was paid for by my subscription to/.
That's why I subscribe. I block ads, but since I like/. and don't want to see ads, I pay for my page views. Just as I do on a half-dozen other sites that offer similar setups. As has been said previously here, nobody is entitled to my eyeballs.
Don't want people to view your content without paying? FINE. Either GET OFF THE WEB, institute a subscription system, or be prepared for people to block your ads. It's that simple.
> If the author can't figure out the difference between a > solar system, a group of stars WITH solar systems, and a > galaxy of Earths, he ain't writing science fiction
While I agree with your frustration, I must point out that "science fiction" is not dependent in any way on the presence of specific technologies, specific scientific descriptions, or specific storylines. So, Serenity isn't a starship. So what? There's great science fiction that has no space settings at all.
I think that Orson Scott Card (with whom I have many, many beefs...but not this one) said it best, when describing what he sees as the useful decription of the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy: Science Fiction is the "fiction of what could be but is not", while fantasy is the fiction of what is not and could not be".
By these definitions, Serenity (and Firefly) are clearly science fiction...as is a large body of work that you'd think wasn't because it had no starships or laser blasters.
This is also why Star Wars is fantasy, not science fiction.
Slashdot Mirror
This is rich.
/dev/, |, awk, grep, ln, vi?
> I'm sure there is an obscure utility for every possible situation in windows
You want to talk about obscure utilities in Windows? Try in Linux!
Tell me, if you didn't already know, could you decipher what any of these commands/utilities/directories are for, or even what they are, just from the names?
cat, less, ls,
At least in Windows those "obscure" tools are named in ways that make them easy to find without a team of experts looking over your shoulder.
> Should the system go bad (virii, etc), which
> happens often, the most used solution is to format.
Nonsense! Why should a system "go bad often"? If it's running the proper AV & malware software and is regularly patched, Windows doesn't "go bad often". It hasn't since Win95. Continuing to insist that it does is simply ignorant, IMHO.
I've been running Windoes at home and at various jobs, often for lots of users, and never have to deal with windows "going bad" except when there's a hardware issue or some idiot goes mucking around in the registry while logged in as admin - and those kinds of issues affect Linux just as much as they do windows.
As was this: "...a cylinder filled with radiation..."
Radiation is a phenomenon, not a thing. The cylinder was filled with materials which were radioactive.
Sigh.
> as there is a strong influence of the
> Chrisitan church which is a communist
> organization.
??????????
Tell that to W.
Please .
> Also, not every new discovery is "revolutionary".
Seems to me that EVERYONE in this thread really ought to go out and purchase, and then READ Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".
And...you know this HOW?
> The only thing quantum mechanics has going
> for it is that it's unquestionably correct,
> mathematically speaking.
That, and, oh yes....experimental evidence.
> Remember Contact...That movie was essentially a flop with the public.
Really? It's made about $101 million dollars. That's not far from the top 100 movies of all time, and is probably somewhere near 150th, because things drop off pretty quickly, as most mainstream (read: released in major theatres, widely available, etc) films make much less.
No problem!
/.'s comments with aggressivly know-it-all corrections. :)
Just doing my part to fill
> Experience in building stuff and making things work
> take them high above most couch scientists and
> technoblabbers anyway.
Amen to that.
In spite of my general dislike of their methodologies, I still like this aspect of what they do. It's nice to see people who respect the "try it and see if it works" mentality over dogmatic "Here's the policy, make the 'science' fit" mentality so common in these Bush years.
The solar flux at Venus is NOT four times higher. It's about 2x.
In fact, chauvinists and misogynists get laid more than nice, sensitive guys.
Women WANT nice, sensitive guys.
As friends.
The fact is that the mythbusters guys often engage in poorly constructed 'experiments' which a scientifically literate person would recognize as being inadequate for the purposes in question. Many of their efforts are laughably incomplete or rely on misunderstandings of the phenomena that contibute to whatever they're testing.
Actually, I did read the wikipedia article. What I am doing is pointing out that wikipedia is not an authority on this, or many other, matters. The Xenon, Argon and Krypton ratios used for dating aren't a mismatch as noted above - this is one wikipedia editor's opinion. The fact that something is on wikipedia doesn't mean much.
The author/editor's opinion is presumably based on the Swindle/Brier/Burkland article in Geochimica et Cosmochimica acta in 1995. I don't believe this is a warranted reading of the evidence, and the scientific community doesn't either.
Moreover, I'm an astronomer. With a degree. So my idea of what science is - and more importantly, how it's done - has little little or nothing to do with cable tv.
Yes, well, we all know that Wikipedia is the final arbiter of truth, now don't we?
Isotope comparison is well understood. It's not "making shit up". And it certainly is "science".
Perhaps you're using some sort of weird alternate definition of the word?
Actually, I grew up on a boat. Not a "yacht" - we had a REAL boat.
SO you lived on a "200 foor [sic] yacht" for ONE WHOLE WEEK (OMG!), or on vacation, and you feel qualified to discuss how much motion a boat experiences?
Heh.
Still a moving target. Ever been to the ocean?
"Mythubusters" doesn't account for the FACT that the ships using the "death ray" ARE MOVING.
And thuis can't account for the TEN MINUTES needed for ignition.
Lame.
Actually, there are some good ones. The guy behind this is a favorite former professor of mine here at Boulder, and he came to speak at our astronomy club meeting last fall about this project. He had a nice talk, with images, about this project.
I don't have any quick links to good images, but I suspect they'll be available soon to the public.
And just in case anyone was wondering, in addition to being really smart, he's also a really good guy who tells great war stories about NASA, science funding, etc.
Blah, blah, blah.
Well said.
/., Salon, etc.
I started using opera back in version 5.something, and found that I liked many things about it enough to use it as my primary browser. I've never gone back. Back then, I decided to pay them the minimal fee they wanted to turn off the built-in ads, and did so gladly. It's a good product, and I was willing to pay something to be ad-free. The fact that they included ads didn't make me angry, because they gave me an easy way to avoid them.
Same goes for
But when I'm just surfing, especially on non-commercial sites (blogs, perhaps, or people's other silly pages), I still block ads. And this is the one situation in which I feel at least a little bad about it, because people do need to pay to keep their sites up (not that they have some sort of positive right to shift that cost to me!). Which is why I don't mind the little Google ads on people's pages - they're unobtrusive, and still manage to generate a (small) stream of cash.
But banner ads? I'll always block 'em and won't look back.
Cultural relativism! Woohoo!
People engaged in insipid, useless, self-referential activities are not just 'playing a different game'. They're playing a dumb game, demonstrably.
No, the ads tell them what styles the designers and marketers want to be in and where 'fashion is going'. It's pure pretense.
> I think you forget that Ads are paying for the content
/.
/. and don't want to see ads, I pay for my page views. Just as I do on a half-dozen other sites that offer similar setups. As has been said previously here, nobody is entitled to my eyeballs.
> of whatever page you are reading...including this one.
Actually, no. This web page was paid for by my subscription to
That's why I subscribe. I block ads, but since I like
Don't want people to view your content without paying? FINE. Either GET OFF THE WEB, institute a subscription system, or be prepared for people to block your ads. It's that simple.
> If the author can't figure out the difference between a
> solar system, a group of stars WITH solar systems, and a
> galaxy of Earths, he ain't writing science fiction
While I agree with your frustration, I must point out that "science fiction" is not dependent in any way on the presence of specific technologies, specific scientific descriptions, or specific storylines. So, Serenity isn't a starship. So what? There's great science fiction that has no space settings at all.
I think that Orson Scott Card (with whom I have many, many beefs...but not this one) said it best, when describing what he sees as the useful decription of the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy: Science Fiction is the "fiction of what could be but is not", while fantasy is the fiction of what is not and could not be".
By these definitions, Serenity (and Firefly) are clearly science fiction...as is a large body of work that you'd think wasn't because it had no starships or laser blasters.
This is also why Star Wars is fantasy, not science fiction.
Duh. off by a decimal with those. Sry.