>>I think it's pretty sad really that the politicians believe that we're even on the bad guy's hit-list.
>You're not really that naive are you? Does Bali ring a bell?
The Bali bombers were actually targetting Americans; unfortunately we all look the same to them. Though they were happy enough with the result.
"...a buyer for Tesco" would, perhaps, have been a bit clearer
The words "Tesco buyer" are unambiguous. What else could it have meant? Someone making a takeover bid for the Tesco company? A "Tesco customer" is a person who "buys from Tesco".
But I imagine it is an advantage for the teacher to be able to ge feedback from the whole class to see if he has been clear enough or should elaborate?
Back in my day, we raised our hands. Also, a yes/no response is hardly useful to the lecturer. What's he going to do: "Did you understand Point A, B C,...?"
* take, for example, the TV series "Lost" or "Alias". The technical ignorance (and the general quality, for that matter) of the writing is staggeringly bad.
Alias is entertaining in an Austin Powers does X-Files way. My suspension of disbelief failed at the Pentagon's "tracking people by their brainwaves" satellite, especially when it was never used before or later, despite its staggering usefulness. Haven't seen much of Lost, looks like it's going to entangle itself in self-contradictions and silliness like the end of X-Files. Just where the hell are those 47 castaways getting their food from?
not that $60M box-office is nothing, but there's plenty of sketchy science movies that did way better at the box office.
The point is, not that real science can make a movie, but that good science won't necessarily kill it; and it really doesn't cost any more not to be stupid about science.
Hollywood (in general) does cheap ascientific things because it makes better movies than the real stuff.
No, they do it because they think their audience is stupid. But if someone makes the effort to get it right, it can succeed. 2001 proved that you could do space travel without pretending you were flying WWII biplanes; A Beautiful Mind showed you could do a movie with real maths, and more-or-less realistic math geeks.
two major SF authors went to watch it. They'd already agreed that if there were a surfer on a tsunami, they were calling their lawyers
I don't think Niven & Pournelle would have got far.
Gilligan's Island, episode 21, (1965) - "Big Man on Little Stick"
The castaways have an unexpected visitor: a surfer from Hawaii who came in on a tsunami.
And
Escape from LA (1996)
Pipeline kneels, positions his surfboard in his hands.
PIPELINE: Get ready, Snake. It's gonna be some kinda ride.
Plissken looks behind him...
POV - THE FRONT EDGE OF THE TSUNAMI is blasting down the Wilshire Canyon, coming right for them. It is a 25-foot wall of ocean water, moving fast, bellowing like a thunderclap.
But how is it that Baidu are deemed responsible for the IP infringement? It's just a search engine
According to TFA: "Beijing New Picture Film Co., copyright owner of ``House of Flying Daggers,'' filed suit last month against Baidu for allowing users to download the movie for a fee". So their MP3 search and similar free services are nothing to do with this case. They were allegedly actually selling illegal downloads.
but you can't synchronize paper documentation. So you always run the risk that someone will grab a pre-leap second document of say geometry dependant events on a spacecraft and use it to say plan pointing for an observation... and then be one second off and miss the observation.
Spaceships aren't controlled by paper documents. And I do not believe that any observation will be made once only at an exact time specifed years in advance. From casually following space missions, observations are rescheduled, adjusted, cancelled and inserted as the situation allows or demands. Since we've had leap seconds almost every year for over 20 years, I can safely assume that astronomers have methods to cope. In fact, as TFA says, they're the main scientific group opposing the obolition of leap seconds because it will fuck up their earth-based pointing systems, which tend to be huge, expensive and not easy to refit.
from TFA: the bill would require online pornographers to use age-verification software to block children's access.. Mostly this seems to be based on credit cards. How on earth can someone reliably "verify" the age of a person of the web? Any CC numbers, etc used will be traded and swapped around. And of course, what about overseas-based sites? For a saving of 25%, they'll all be in a short time.
Follow up to myself: aside from fucking up the/b closing mark, I see that Geoff was in fact the submitter, though he didn't make the error in his blog.
So, is this genuinely how government is spelt in Australia
No, if you RTFA Geoffrey Huntley says "Early last week eighteen IBM RS/6000 E20 servers went up for sale at an government auction for ~$20 AUD a server,...", so it was the retarded submitter. (Though Geoff might reconsider the "an".) As is longstanding Slashdot policy, the editors don't edit (I don't know what they do, aside from randomly choosing an article subitted by some naive noobie or self-promoting asshole).
That was a minor plot point in the first SF story I ever wrote.
The grand-daddy of time-correction plot points must be Around the World in 80 days, when Phileas Fogg neglects to add a day when crossing the Date Line and thinks he's lost the bet. Something similar in one of Isaac Asimov's stories set on Mars, when the date line inconveniently runs through the centre of a Martian Colony.
That's what I meant; true they can't be determined over longer times, but I'm having a hard time imagining a situation where it would matter. Who schedules something years in advance that has to happen at a precise time by UTC? There is always a synchronisation, most time critical tasks will be run to a private time for the duration of a "mission" or whatever the task is; somewhat like the practice you saw in WWII movies of "Gentleman, synchronise your watches" before a bombing mission. It only matters that events are coordinated, not what the exact universal time is. Every time keeping system has to be able to be corrected or synchronised. If people are too stupid or arrogant (this is the US govt we're talking about) to manage to make a one-second correction with 6 months' notice I have no sympathy for them.
Where does this "500 years" come from? There has been one leap second most years for the last several years. If it keeps at that rate, it's at least 3600 years to add up to one hour.
In addition to the weirdness of having second 60 in a minute, you get that added headache that leap seconds are non-deterministic.
They're scheduled; they're deterministic.
Imagine you make a very precise schedule in advance (e.g. scheduled events on a spacecraft) and then a leap second is announced and everything is then off by a second.
I really think Nasa is up to sychronising their clocks. They must be able to do so should there be any drift on the onboard clock anyway.
2. Design, build, and launch a bunch of probes to nearby stars.
This is pretty pointless to do so early in your program. Anything we launch in the near future (next 100 years or so) will take thousands of years to travel to their destination. If and when we get a real breakthrough -- cheap antimatter, Bussard ramjet, laser-boosted solar sail -- then we can get started on interstellar exploration. Also you don't seem to have any faith in non-planetary colonies, eg O'Neill cylinders, which will be much easier to get going than Martian colonies, let alone further afield.
Having free WiFi attracts these types b/c by definiton, living outside the mainstream usually means being poor in relation to the hyper consumer mainstream.
And these non-consumerist poor people have laptops?
Just on a technical level, it would be much easier for MS to put a Linux/Unix-compatibility layer on top of Windows (and they already have to a certain extent), rather than attempt to run all of the Windows infrastructure on top of Linux.
If they stripped out all the cruft kept for compatibility with ancient software; and changed the policy of entangling non-essential components deep in the system, that could make a solid OS. Something like OSX. Jobs has never been afraid of pulling the rug out as far as backward compatibility goes, which causes short term pain and a lot of bitching, but a much better system in the end.
Some people have manged to do a lot of this independently; eg LitePC, and several projects at MSFN like nLite.
Slashdot Mirror
>You're not really that naive are you? Does Bali ring a bell?
The Bali bombers were actually targetting Americans; unfortunately we all look the same to them. Though they were happy enough with the result.
Would that they were.
"Us" is shorter, so more double plus good.
The words "Tesco buyer" are unambiguous. What else could it have meant? Someone making a takeover bid for the Tesco company? A "Tesco customer" is a person who "buys from Tesco".
Back in my day, we raised our hands. Also, a yes/no response is hardly useful to the lecturer. What's he going to do: "Did you understand Point A, B C,...?"
Alias is entertaining in an Austin Powers does X-Files way. My suspension of disbelief failed at the Pentagon's "tracking people by their brainwaves" satellite, especially when it was never used before or later, despite its staggering usefulness. Haven't seen much of Lost, looks like it's going to entangle itself in self-contradictions and silliness like the end of X-Files. Just where the hell are those 47 castaways getting their food from?
The point is, not that real science can make a movie, but that good science won't necessarily kill it; and it really doesn't cost any more not to be stupid about science.
No, they do it because they think their audience is stupid. But if someone makes the effort to get it right, it can succeed. 2001 proved that you could do space travel without pretending you were flying WWII biplanes; A Beautiful Mind showed you could do a movie with real maths, and more-or-less realistic math geeks.
I don't think Niven & Pournelle would have got far.
And
Having a search engine doesn't preclude them from doing other business. Most search engines have a portal to pages selling stuff.
I did. R T F A.
According to TFA: "Beijing New Picture Film Co., copyright owner of ``House of Flying Daggers,'' filed suit last month against Baidu for allowing users to download the movie for a fee". So their MP3 search and similar free services are nothing to do with this case. They were allegedly actually selling illegal downloads.
Chinese prisons only part out convicts after they've been executed.
While "guvmint" might be acceptable Strine, "agin" sounds rather more Redneck to me.
Spaceships aren't controlled by paper documents. And I do not believe that any observation will be made once only at an exact time specifed years in advance. From casually following space missions, observations are rescheduled, adjusted, cancelled and inserted as the situation allows or demands. Since we've had leap seconds almost every year for over 20 years, I can safely assume that astronomers have methods to cope. In fact, as TFA says, they're the main scientific group opposing the obolition of leap seconds because it will fuck up their earth-based pointing systems, which tend to be huge, expensive and not easy to refit.
from TFA: the bill would require online pornographers to use age-verification software to block children's access.. Mostly this seems to be based on credit cards. How on earth can someone reliably "verify" the age of a person of the web? Any CC numbers, etc used will be traded and swapped around. And of course, what about overseas-based sites? For a saving of 25%, they'll all be in a short time.
Follow up to myself: aside from fucking up the /b closing mark, I see that Geoff was in fact the submitter, though he didn't make the error in his blog.
No, if you RTFA Geoffrey Huntley says "Early last week eighteen IBM RS/6000 E20 servers went up for sale at an government auction for ~$20 AUD a server,...", so it was the retarded submitter. (Though Geoff might reconsider the "an".) As is longstanding Slashdot policy, the editors don't edit (I don't know what they do, aside from randomly choosing an article subitted by some naive noobie or self-promoting asshole).
The grand-daddy of time-correction plot points must be Around the World in 80 days, when Phileas Fogg neglects to add a day when crossing the Date Line and thinks he's lost the bet. Something similar in one of Isaac Asimov's stories set on Mars, when the date line inconveniently runs through the centre of a Martian Colony.
That's what I meant; true they can't be determined over longer times, but I'm having a hard time imagining a situation where it would matter. Who schedules something years in advance that has to happen at a precise time by UTC? There is always a synchronisation, most time critical tasks will be run to a private time for the duration of a "mission" or whatever the task is; somewhat like the practice you saw in WWII movies of "Gentleman, synchronise your watches" before a bombing mission. It only matters that events are coordinated, not what the exact universal time is. Every time keeping system has to be able to be corrected or synchronised. If people are too stupid or arrogant (this is the US govt we're talking about) to manage to make a one-second correction with 6 months' notice I have no sympathy for them.
Where does this "500 years" come from? There has been one leap second most years for the last several years. If it keeps at that rate, it's at least 3600 years to add up to one hour.
They're scheduled; they're deterministic.
Imagine you make a very precise schedule in advance (e.g. scheduled events on a spacecraft) and then a leap second is announced and everything is then off by a second.
I really think Nasa is up to sychronising their clocks. They must be able to do so should there be any drift on the onboard clock anyway.
This is pretty pointless to do so early in your program. Anything we launch in the near future (next 100 years or so) will take thousands of years to travel to their destination. If and when we get a real breakthrough -- cheap antimatter, Bussard ramjet, laser-boosted solar sail -- then we can get started on interstellar exploration. Also you don't seem to have any faith in non-planetary colonies, eg O'Neill cylinders, which will be much easier to get going than Martian colonies, let alone further afield.
And these non-consumerist poor people have laptops?
If they stripped out all the cruft kept for compatibility with ancient software; and changed the policy of entangling non-essential components deep in the system, that could make a solid OS. Something like OSX. Jobs has never been afraid of pulling the rug out as far as backward compatibility goes, which causes short term pain and a lot of bitching, but a much better system in the end.
Some people have manged to do a lot of this independently; eg LitePC, and several projects at MSFN like nLite.