Maybe Berman doesn't know why it tanked, but the rest of us sure do. The franchise is boring, modern Star Trek productions are, as Roger Ebert put it so well, "a copy of a copy of a copy." There's nothing new, it's all the same material rehashed over and over again, except with less and less detail to consistency and more emphasis on technobabble and deus ex machina.
Take the latest installment: A cloned Data! Wow, what a revolutionary concept! Wait, we had that going all the way through the Next Generation; he was called Lore. From the trailer alone you can write the (boring) script from extrapolation easily enough.
It's time to stop making copies, and make something else.
That's got to be one of the most embarrassing products of wannabe fanfic (like that isn't in and of itself a capital crime) I've seen in a long time. Take special note of the misspelling of the word asterisk in the first paragraph: a premonition of the value of this piece. I'm amazed it was even deemed worthy for inclusion.
Great, let's get our science from the New York Times again, a publication that predicted that Goddard's idea of spaceflight could never work because in space there's nothing to push against! Duh!
A word of advice: Don't get our science news reporting from popular magazines and newspapers. They have a knack for not only getting things mixed up, but getting them exactly wrong.
What's being discussed is yet another crackpot theory that very few scientists take seriously. Saying "Whoo hoo, Einstein may be wrong!" sells papers, but a scientific analysis of the situation is a whole different story.
The IAU (International Astronomical Union) is the organization in charge of designation the class of objects. At present, and as it should be, there are no objective classifications for names like planet, asteroid, comet, etc. These classification systems, after all, are artificial ones imposed by us on nature; there's no reason to think that there's anything special when you call an object a planet vs. an asteroid.
In the real world, we're imposing an arbitrary classification on a system involving many dimensional characteristics (distance from primary, inclination, eccentricity, size, and on and on). It's not surprising that the names that we got from antiquity aren't very good. After all, even the words themselves hint that there's nothing special here: planet comes from the Greek for "wanderer," and asteroid just means "star-like."
Any objectivized definition will be arbitrary (where do you define the cutoffs), and will probably include things we don't want to include. The classification system the above poster gave, for instance:
If it freely orbits a star, is IN THAT STAR'S PLANE OF THE ECLIPTIC, it's a planet (note: this knocks Pluto off the list).
Mercury's orbit is actually fairly inlined, and Mars' is rather eccentric; do these then not qualify as planets? Furthermore, there are plenty of main belt asteroids that would then qualify as planets, which is almost certainly not what the original poster wanted.
The bottom line is that for astronomers to do their jobs, they don't need any reformation of current classification systems. It doesn't matter what you call the bodies in question; whether you call Pluto a planet, an asteroid, or a Kuiperoid doesn't change anything about its inherent nature. It's worth pointing out that pioneering such reclassifications is restricted almost entirely to amateurs, for the simple fact that the professionals don't care.
Something had to have happened in these places and many others
throughout the globe to engender such speculation and argument.
This is a form of logical fallacy called ad populum. The fact that a lot of people think something does not make it true, nor does it even mean there's good reason to believe that it's true. According to polls that are routinely conducted, an embarassing number of Americans think that the Sun orbits around the Earth, rather than the other way around? Does that then mean that their case warrants consideration? After all, if enough people think it, there must be something to it.
The fact that there have been so many claims and absolutely no verifiable evidence is a strong indication on general principles that your skepticism meter should be dialed up to maximum.
The title is rather silly as presently stated. It's pretty much never been in contention that life originated underwater. What you guys mean is that it might have originated really deep underwater...
Obviously what is being discussed is the unification of quantum mechanics with general relativity. Physicists have had no problem unifiying QM with special relativity; the result is simply called relativistic quantum mechanics.
There's no benefit in burning bridges unnecessarily, but there's also no benefit in doing work for an ex-employer gratis. Not only do you (obviously) not get paid for your trouble, but you now have a "sucker" sticker on your head. They'll call again, and you'll probably help them again. For nothing.
It's quite frankly outrageous that an ex-employer would call you up and demand that you do work for her. At the very least this shows a serious lack of professionalism on the part of your former employer. Perhaps it's best that you're no longer working for her anymore after all.
If an ex-employer calls you up and asks you to do some work (that is not explicitly included as part of an exit package), then you tell them you are more than happy to do it... and your hourly rate.
I don't remember the precise model number, but one of the old TRS-80 machines (Model I, Model II, something like that) would had some positively helpful syntax errors that consistent entirely of "HUH?" or "WHAT?"
Indeed. Suggesting that PCs are "losing out" to console markets is a pretty distorted view of the state of gaming today. It's true that some types of games, such as kids' games, mostly come out on consoles, but that's a tiny fraction of the total number of games in existence. Who wants to play Pokmon? Sure, some kids do, but not most gamers.
By comparison, consoles are dead ends in hardware -- why would I buy a console system when I already have a PC for gaming, one which I can upgrade? The latest console always comes with impressive hardware, but that hardware is obsolete in six months or less. My PC can stay perpetually state of the art, and for much less cost than buying the latest console.
The relative lack of success of the Xbox is just the most obvious example of this. And it's true that Microsoft is offering huge rewards to game companies to make their Xbox releases first, but this is hardly a massive problem in the entire industry so far; there are just a few isolated cases.
Despite all our fond memories, the turtle graphics portion of Logo isn't all there is to it, and in fact is an optional (although obviously very common) element. Logo (which means word in Greek) was originally developed to manipulate words and sentences. In fact, the core Logo language, of which we were only exposed to a little, is really a cute little Lisp-like language.
For a taste of a more full Logo (which also includes the turtle graphics), check out UCBLogo, a widely ported and robust implementation of Logo.
There was extensive discussion of Graham's spam filtering algorithm and potential improvements on comp.lang.python in mid-to-late August. Check Google Groups for the subjects "Lisp to Python translation criticism?" and "Graham's spam filter."
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Genetic mutations pretty much gave us all our characteristics that distinguish us from the other animals, you know.
Whaddaya mena, "Faded Sun"? The Sun's steadily brightened ever since it reached zero age main sequence, 5 billion years ago. :-)
Onward.
Maybe Berman doesn't know why it tanked, but the rest of us sure do. The franchise is boring, modern Star Trek productions are, as Roger Ebert put it so well, "a copy of a copy of a copy." There's nothing new, it's all the same material rehashed over and over again, except with less and less detail to consistency and more emphasis on technobabble and deus ex machina.
Take the latest installment: A cloned Data! Wow, what a revolutionary concept! Wait, we had that going all the way through the Next Generation; he was called Lore. From the trailer alone you can write the (boring) script from extrapolation easily enough.
It's time to stop making copies, and make something else.
That's got to be one of the most embarrassing products of wannabe fanfic (like that isn't in and of itself a capital crime) I've seen in a long time. Take special note of the misspelling of the word asterisk in the first paragraph: a premonition of the value of this piece. I'm amazed it was even deemed worthy for inclusion.
Wow, you mean exponential growth can't last forever? Who'da thunk it?
Would have been nice if the crucial parts of the slides where attempts to rationalize why GPL is bad weren't too blurry to read.
This is seriously old news. I was thinking about getting one of these (thought better of it) in 1998.
Great, let's get our science from the New York Times again, a publication that predicted that Goddard's idea of spaceflight could never work because in space there's nothing to push against! Duh!
A word of advice: Don't get our science news reporting from popular magazines and newspapers. They have a knack for not only getting things mixed up, but getting them exactly wrong.
What's being discussed is yet another crackpot theory that very few scientists take seriously. Saying "Whoo hoo, Einstein may be wrong!" sells papers, but a scientific analysis of the situation is a whole different story.
There are many other translations of Beowulf available on the Web; see for instance here.
The IAU (International Astronomical Union) is the organization in charge of designation the class of objects. At present, and as it should be, there are no objective classifications for names like planet, asteroid, comet, etc. These classification systems, after all, are artificial ones imposed by us on nature; there's no reason to think that there's anything special when you call an object a planet vs. an asteroid.
In the real world, we're imposing an arbitrary classification on a system involving many dimensional characteristics (distance from primary, inclination, eccentricity, size, and on and on). It's not surprising that the names that we got from antiquity aren't very good. After all, even the words themselves hint that there's nothing special here: planet comes from the Greek for "wanderer," and asteroid just means "star-like."
Any objectivized definition will be arbitrary (where do you define the cutoffs), and will probably include things we don't want to include. The classification system the above poster gave, for instance:
Mercury's orbit is actually fairly inlined, and Mars' is rather eccentric; do these then not qualify as planets? Furthermore, there are plenty of main belt asteroids that would then qualify as planets, which is almost certainly not what the original poster wanted.
The bottom line is that for astronomers to do their jobs, they don't need any reformation of current classification systems. It doesn't matter what you call the bodies in question; whether you call Pluto a planet, an asteroid, or a Kuiperoid doesn't change anything about its inherent nature. It's worth pointing out that pioneering such reclassifications is restricted almost entirely to amateurs, for the simple fact that the professionals don't care.
Its orbit is entirely too far out and way too inclined to conceiveably be thought of as one of its ring particles.
See here for Web design tips.
That's what Usenet is for :-).
This is a form of logical fallacy called ad populum. The fact that a lot of people think something does not make it true, nor does it even mean there's good reason to believe that it's true. According to polls that are routinely conducted, an embarassing number of Americans think that the Sun orbits around the Earth, rather than the other way around? Does that then mean that their case warrants consideration? After all, if enough people think it, there must be something to it.
The fact that there have been so many claims and absolutely no verifiable evidence is a strong indication on general principles that your skepticism meter should be dialed up to maximum.
Not only is copyright misspelled, but it's not even about copyrights, it's about trademarks. Bravo.
The title is rather silly as presently stated. It's pretty much never been in contention that life originated underwater. What you guys mean is that it might have originated really deep underwater ...
Obviously what is being discussed is the unification of quantum mechanics with general relativity. Physicists have had no problem unifiying QM with special relativity; the result is simply called relativistic quantum mechanics.
There's no benefit in burning bridges unnecessarily, but there's also no benefit in doing work for an ex-employer gratis. Not only do you (obviously) not get paid for your trouble, but you now have a "sucker" sticker on your head. They'll call again, and you'll probably help them again. For nothing.
It's quite frankly outrageous that an ex-employer would call you up and demand that you do work for her. At the very least this shows a serious lack of professionalism on the part of your former employer. Perhaps it's best that you're no longer working for her anymore after all.
If an ex-employer calls you up and asks you to do some work (that is not explicitly included as part of an exit package), then you tell them you are more than happy to do it ... and your hourly rate.
I don't remember the precise model number, but one of the old TRS-80 machines (Model I, Model II, something like that) would had some positively helpful syntax errors that consistent entirely of "HUH?" or "WHAT?"
Indeed. Suggesting that PCs are "losing out" to console markets is a pretty distorted view of the state of gaming today. It's true that some types of games, such as kids' games, mostly come out on consoles, but that's a tiny fraction of the total number of games in existence. Who wants to play Pokmon? Sure, some kids do, but not most gamers.
By comparison, consoles are dead ends in hardware -- why would I buy a console system when I already have a PC for gaming, one which I can upgrade? The latest console always comes with impressive hardware, but that hardware is obsolete in six months or less. My PC can stay perpetually state of the art, and for much less cost than buying the latest console.
The relative lack of success of the Xbox is just the most obvious example of this. And it's true that Microsoft is offering huge rewards to game companies to make their Xbox releases first, but this is hardly a massive problem in the entire industry so far; there are just a few isolated cases.
Despite all our fond memories, the turtle graphics portion of Logo isn't all there is to it, and in fact is an optional (although obviously very common) element. Logo (which means word in Greek) was originally developed to manipulate words and sentences. In fact, the core Logo language, of which we were only exposed to a little, is really a cute little Lisp-like language.
For a taste of a more full Logo (which also includes the turtle graphics), check out UCBLogo, a widely ported and robust implementation of Logo.
There was extensive discussion of Graham's spam filtering algorithm and potential improvements on comp.lang.python in mid-to-late August. Check Google Groups for the subjects "Lisp to Python translation criticism?" and "Graham's spam filter."
Yep. The black dot and the secret room make an experience in the Quake III level as well.
There are several Mario inspired levels in Counter-Strike, for instance.