I'm with you 100% on that. I only want one thing out of a Michael Bay film -- actions and explosions. Not ten thousand bit characters nobody cares about.
Summary judgment is allowed if there is no genuine dispute over the material facts. Motions for summary judgment are often brought after discovery and before the trial. Many issues are often decided at summary judgment.
I thought that it was also the case that a motion for summary judgment could be granted when the facts were in dispute, but even if you consider the facts under dispute in the way most favorable to the one defending against the motion, they would still lose as a matter of law.
E.g. I'm suing you for breach of a written contract where you promised to give me your first born child as a slave in return for the time I deleted spyware from your computer. You dispute ever signing such a contract, but even if you did, the terms would be unenforceable so you could still probably get a summary judgment to dismiss my case.
Maybe that example sucks, but that's the gist of what I had heard.
Taken by itself, if Raiders or Star Wars had never been made, what do you think the worlds reaction to Temple of Doom would have been? or the Phantom Menace?
Um, without Star Wars, the reaction to Phantom Menace would have been a lambasting in the press, poor box office sales, and it quickly being forgotten among the huge pile of mediocre CGI drivel that has been produced at break neck speed in the last decade? It would have been to pop sci-fi what Eragon was for fantasy. Which is to say, not much.
Seriously, without the connection to Star Wars I wouldn't have given a rats ass about Phantom Menace at all. The only reason I could stand that annoying little prat Anakin was because I knew that someday he would grow up to be Darth Vader, and I was seeing how it happened. The only reason I could stand all the pointless and ham-fisted politics was knowing that it was all part of a plan to create The Empire. Hell would Obi-Wan have even been an interesting character if it didn't evoke memories of Sir Alec Guinness' performance in Star Wars?
No, PM isn't a victim of nostalgia. It leaned on nostalgia to make the audience care about the characters when otherwise they wouldn't have.
Temple of Doom without Raiders? B-grade comedy/action flick nobody remembers at best.
Yeah, I'm torn on the issue. After all, anything that kills fire ants is good in my book. But is the cure worse than the disease? They don't have stingers, but they do bite. And they are fast, swarm by the billions, foul electronics and machinery, and are resistant to normal OTC pesticides. Instead of killing the other ants which are the food of the horny toad, it kills ladybugs and endangered birds.
Fire ants are endemic and cause lots of problems, but they can be somewhat controlled. Who knows how far these ants will get out of control before we find effective means to fight them?
In the end, I think I'm going to have to call this a "bad thing", with the fire-ant-eating part the "silver lining".
Realising that its referring to types or models is an interpretation, extrapolating meaning from missing words and from the text of the summary.
Not really. Like I said, "360s" could refer to classes of machine or individual machines, just like "birds" can refer to individual birds or species of birds. No extra word is necessary strictly speaking.
If you aren't "interpreting" things people say or write, then you are probably getting the wrong meaning much of the time. For example if you heard someone say "I didn't see any new birds", and you took that to mean they didn't see any individual bird that they hadn't seen before, you would almost certainly be incorrect. I think "literalism" is a better word for this than pedantry. It is rarely a helpful way to read or listen.
Obviously it didnt take me very long to realise my mistake, but the fact is I saw the headline, and was momentarily taken aback by the decision not to produce any new 360s at all next year.
I saw the headline, had both meanings pop into my head at basically the same time, and immediately rejected the obviously wrong one without much of a conscious thought. And I'm not saying I'm smart or abnormal. I'm saying that some people seem to have a tendency towards literalism and pedantry in non-technical writing where it is usually inappropriate.
The plural also didnt help. If the headline read "No New Xbox 360 In 2009" it would be much more obvious, but having it as a plural further confuses.
We're not being pedantic, thats a straight forward interpretation of what is written.
Yes, that's a straightforward interpretation. Another straightforward interpretation is that there'd be no new types of 360s (360s could possibly refer to either individual machines, or classes of machines, much like "I didn't see any new birds" could refer to individuals, or species). And since a sentence having multiple straight forward interpretations is completely bog-standard in English -- it can take a great deal of effort to write in such a way that there isn't multiple possible meanings -- most people are very used to holding these multiple definitions in their head, and selecting the most likely one based on context and experience. Or all of them, which is how puns work.
So of the two meanings, which is more likely? MS isn't going to manufacture any xbox hardware of any kind in 2009? Or they are not going to release a new design for their hardware in 2009?
Maybe pedantry isn't the right word. What is the right word for assuming there to be only one possible correct interpretation of a sentence?
Though to be fair, adding the word "types" or "kinds" would have certainly made the meaning more clear. I'm all for that.
If we found out there were extraterrestrials there isn't going to be a 'freak out' or panic.
Of course there would be, that'd be nothing like finding out that there were natives on a distant land. But, as you note...
There is no solid evidence. Think about it. Going public would be a great way to get billions and billions of dollars into a space race and a great excuse to militarize space. The military would have a base on Mars by now.
Exactly, and how better than to get the funding to militarize space than by having everyone freaked out over aliens? The whole notion that a panic is what the government would try to avoid is what doesn't hold up as a valid conspiracy theory. Have we learned nothing from the government's reaction to 9/11 or the WMD in Iraq? They'd love to have a new "threat" like that, and they aren't even that picky about the evidence.
Well, wait, maybe they are trying to cover up the aliens because they've talked to the aliens and they're actually totally peacenik hippies that emit psychic waves of love and empathy, so the government has convinced the aliens to hide themselves because we couldn't handle them... In reality they're just waiting until they figure out a way to make the hippy-beings seem like a threat. Okay, now we're back in viable conspiracy theory land.;)
No alien civilization is expending the mammoth amount of resources needed to traverse the vast distances of interstellar space just to stick a probe up your ass. Deal with it.
One of the greatest moments in the history of TV occurred on a show I can't even remember now, though it was probably an old episode of the Daily Show.
The show featured three different and independent UFO crazies who all claimed to have had close contact with aliens, and it brought them together to tell their tales.
One of the guys claimed that he had been abducted and raped on a repeated basis. Not probed, raped, because the aliens intent was to impregnate him with their alien eggs, and I guess the human rectum was a viable implantation spot.
One of the other crazies, who if I recall claimed that she had seen aliens wandering around the woods by her house, chimed in to say something along the lines of "That's just silly; nobody is gonna travel half way across the galaxy just to have anal sex with you."
How do you know you're a true UFO crazy? When another UFO crazy tells you off for being too damn crazy! Oh man I about died that day; and it would have been okay because my life was complete.
So is the pope God's representative on Earth, or God's representative for everywhere outside of heaven ?
Well the Andromedan Catholic Church representatives approved Ratzo's Pope-ification (or whatever the word is) and I think Bishops from Sagittarius were there too, so I think he's at least God's representative in our Local Group.
AFAIK there is nothing in the C language spec that makes something semantically an "output buffer".
There's also nothing in the C language spec that makes a heap buffer semantically a "stack", "queue", or anything else that is solely a function of how it was manipulated. There's no way to specify whether an integer variable is a loop counter, an accumulator, or a saturating event counter. Much of the high-level structure of how a program is supposed to work isn't "semantically" explicit, it's implicit in the lower-level operations that are performed.
Also, the code was written intentionally to read from uninitialized memory. Maybe the code will write to that location at a later point, but, how again is it an "output buffer" rather than something declared as an array somewhere and used in multiple ways?
Well the whole point here is that a bug was introduced by the person reading the code interpreting it differently from how the original author intended. For the purposes of that post, it was a good description that explained the problem well. You can pick nits if you want, but it serves no illuminating purpose.
*insert the same criticism of this rebuttal as being uselessly pedantic (i.e. the situation where literally nothing changes is virtually non-existent in real life) as I made in like half a dozen other replies here*
If you don't live in the Madison, WI area and have Charter as the local franchise, find out when your municipality holds its regulatory meetings.
Yeah, sorry, but I escaped Charter a long time ago. I have Grande instead, which is proving to be good local competition with Time Warner. They're the only service company of any kind whose sales rep has actually tried to talk me down in my package selection. Since I stayed with the higher BW one and had great results, I'm assuming it's not because they're afraid of overselling their capacity.
Will you please quit making up terminology like "output buffer", as if to say that some memory is somehow designated write-only? The buffer is uninitialized , not an "output buffer"... Memory is memory is memory, and valgrind is only checking to see if it's been properly written before.
The memory is logically designated as write-only, which is why it was not initialized. Program semantics are at least as important as actual memory behavior. Memory is memory is memory is still a broken program if you only intended to write to a buffer, but read from it instead. "Output buffer" is a perfectly valid term for the way in which the program operated and why the buffer was uninitialized.
Uninitialised data doesn't seem to be a good source of randomness to depend on, since depending on where it happens you may consistently end up with a buffer that previously contained all zeroes (or some default memory test pattern), the same part of the same shared library header, or a series of stack frames that for whatever reason happen to be the same frames on every run.
Well yeah, especially because a byte of "uninitialized" memory, like all memory regardless of how many times it has been initialized, is much more likely to contain the value zero than any other. That'd be like using a 6-sided die as a source of randomness when the '1' side was ten times the area of the '6' side.
However as mentioned, that's not the only or main source of randomness, and getting rid of that randomness was not the bug. It was getting rid of other sources of randomness in the process, because they -resembled- the function that used uninitialized memory.
I shouldn't be, but I am. I know that you refer to a lawyer by their specialty, i.e. a "patent lawyer" is a lawyer who specializes in patents, not a lawyer who themselves is patented or was created by a patent.
But is it really all that much to ask that the world's first "space lawyer" actually be from space? Or live there now? I don't care what they specialize in, they just have to have a law degree and either hail from or emigrate to outer space.
Slashdot Mirror
Lisa: And there's the cane from Citizen Kane. Wait, there was no cane in Citizen Kane.
I'm with you 100% on that. I only want one thing out of a Michael Bay film -- actions and explosions. Not ten thousand bit characters nobody cares about.
Summary judgment is allowed if there is no genuine dispute over the material facts. Motions for summary judgment are often brought after discovery and before the trial. Many issues are often decided at summary judgment.
I thought that it was also the case that a motion for summary judgment could be granted when the facts were in dispute, but even if you consider the facts under dispute in the way most favorable to the one defending against the motion, they would still lose as a matter of law.
E.g. I'm suing you for breach of a written contract where you promised to give me your first born child as a slave in return for the time I deleted spyware from your computer. You dispute ever signing such a contract, but even if you did, the terms would be unenforceable so you could still probably get a summary judgment to dismiss my case.
Maybe that example sucks, but that's the gist of what I had heard.
Taken by itself, if Raiders or Star Wars had never been made, what do you think the worlds reaction to Temple of Doom would have been? or the Phantom Menace?
Um, without Star Wars, the reaction to Phantom Menace would have been a lambasting in the press, poor box office sales, and it quickly being forgotten among the huge pile of mediocre CGI drivel that has been produced at break neck speed in the last decade? It would have been to pop sci-fi what Eragon was for fantasy. Which is to say, not much.
Seriously, without the connection to Star Wars I wouldn't have given a rats ass about Phantom Menace at all. The only reason I could stand that annoying little prat Anakin was because I knew that someday he would grow up to be Darth Vader, and I was seeing how it happened. The only reason I could stand all the pointless and ham-fisted politics was knowing that it was all part of a plan to create The Empire. Hell would Obi-Wan have even been an interesting character if it didn't evoke memories of Sir Alec Guinness' performance in Star Wars?
No, PM isn't a victim of nostalgia. It leaned on nostalgia to make the audience care about the characters when otherwise they wouldn't have.
Temple of Doom without Raiders? B-grade comedy/action flick nobody remembers at best.
I wish Michael Bay movies were only three minutes long!
They are, they just get looped to pad out the film to two hours.
Yeah, I'm torn on the issue. After all, anything that kills fire ants is good in my book. But is the cure worse than the disease? They don't have stingers, but they do bite. And they are fast, swarm by the billions, foul electronics and machinery, and are resistant to normal OTC pesticides. Instead of killing the other ants which are the food of the horny toad, it kills ladybugs and endangered birds.
Fire ants are endemic and cause lots of problems, but they can be somewhat controlled. Who knows how far these ants will get out of control before we find effective means to fight them?
In the end, I think I'm going to have to call this a "bad thing", with the fire-ant-eating part the "silver lining".
Realising that its referring to types or models is an interpretation, extrapolating meaning from missing words and from the text of the summary.
Not really. Like I said, "360s" could refer to classes of machine or individual machines, just like "birds" can refer to individual birds or species of birds. No extra word is necessary strictly speaking.
If you aren't "interpreting" things people say or write, then you are probably getting the wrong meaning much of the time. For example if you heard someone say "I didn't see any new birds", and you took that to mean they didn't see any individual bird that they hadn't seen before, you would almost certainly be incorrect. I think "literalism" is a better word for this than pedantry. It is rarely a helpful way to read or listen.
Obviously it didnt take me very long to realise my mistake, but the fact is I saw the headline, and was momentarily taken aback by the decision not to produce any new 360s at all next year.
I saw the headline, had both meanings pop into my head at basically the same time, and immediately rejected the obviously wrong one without much of a conscious thought. And I'm not saying I'm smart or abnormal. I'm saying that some people seem to have a tendency towards literalism and pedantry in non-technical writing where it is usually inappropriate.
The plural also didnt help. If the headline read "No New Xbox 360 In 2009" it would be much more obvious, but having it as a plural further confuses.
Yeah, I agree with that.
We're not being pedantic, thats a straight forward interpretation of what is written.
Yes, that's a straightforward interpretation. Another straightforward interpretation is that there'd be no new types of 360s (360s could possibly refer to either individual machines, or classes of machines, much like "I didn't see any new birds" could refer to individuals, or species). And since a sentence having multiple straight forward interpretations is completely bog-standard in English -- it can take a great deal of effort to write in such a way that there isn't multiple possible meanings -- most people are very used to holding these multiple definitions in their head, and selecting the most likely one based on context and experience. Or all of them, which is how puns work.
So of the two meanings, which is more likely? MS isn't going to manufacture any xbox hardware of any kind in 2009? Or they are not going to release a new design for their hardware in 2009?
Maybe pedantry isn't the right word. What is the right word for assuming there to be only one possible correct interpretation of a sentence?
Though to be fair, adding the word "types" or "kinds" would have certainly made the meaning more clear. I'm all for that.
File this one under "Ways in which pedantry and literalism have damaged your brain".
Boy you're going to be confused the day Slashdot's front page reads "Aliens discovered".
Just like I was the day I got a fortune cookie that read "Between the sheets isn't where you'd prefer to be"
If we found out there were extraterrestrials there isn't going to be a 'freak out' or panic.
;)
Of course there would be, that'd be nothing like finding out that there were natives on a distant land. But, as you note...
There is no solid evidence. Think about it. Going public would be a great way to get billions and billions of dollars into a space race and a great excuse to militarize space. The military would have a base on Mars by now.
Exactly, and how better than to get the funding to militarize space than by having everyone freaked out over aliens? The whole notion that a panic is what the government would try to avoid is what doesn't hold up as a valid conspiracy theory. Have we learned nothing from the government's reaction to 9/11 or the WMD in Iraq? They'd love to have a new "threat" like that, and they aren't even that picky about the evidence.
Well, wait, maybe they are trying to cover up the aliens because they've talked to the aliens and they're actually totally peacenik hippies that emit psychic waves of love and empathy, so the government has convinced the aliens to hide themselves because we couldn't handle them... In reality they're just waiting until they figure out a way to make the hippy-beings seem like a threat. Okay, now we're back in viable conspiracy theory land.
No alien civilization is expending the mammoth amount of resources needed to traverse the vast distances of interstellar space just to stick a probe up your ass. Deal with it.
One of the greatest moments in the history of TV occurred on a show I can't even remember now, though it was probably an old episode of the Daily Show.
The show featured three different and independent UFO crazies who all claimed to have had close contact with aliens, and it brought them together to tell their tales.
One of the guys claimed that he had been abducted and raped on a repeated basis. Not probed, raped, because the aliens intent was to impregnate him with their alien eggs, and I guess the human rectum was a viable implantation spot.
One of the other crazies, who if I recall claimed that she had seen aliens wandering around the woods by her house, chimed in to say something along the lines of "That's just silly; nobody is gonna travel half way across the galaxy just to have anal sex with you."
How do you know you're a true UFO crazy? When another UFO crazy tells you off for being too damn crazy! Oh man I about died that day; and it would have been okay because my life was complete.
So is the pope God's representative on Earth, or God's representative for everywhere outside of heaven ?
Well the Andromedan Catholic Church representatives approved Ratzo's Pope-ification (or whatever the word is) and I think Bishops from Sagittarius were there too, so I think he's at least God's representative in our Local Group.
I think the joy was sucked out of the allegedly facetious remark by it being repeated roughly forty times in this thread.
The desire to somehow, in any way, second guess the article has become nearly as annoying as the desire to get First Post.
AFAIK there is nothing in the C language spec that makes something semantically an "output buffer".
There's also nothing in the C language spec that makes a heap buffer semantically a "stack", "queue", or anything else that is solely a function of how it was manipulated. There's no way to specify whether an integer variable is a loop counter, an accumulator, or a saturating event counter. Much of the high-level structure of how a program is supposed to work isn't "semantically" explicit, it's implicit in the lower-level operations that are performed.
Also, the code was written intentionally to read from uninitialized memory. Maybe the code will write to that location at a later point, but, how again is it an "output buffer" rather than something declared as an array somewhere and used in multiple ways?
Well the whole point here is that a bug was introduced by the person reading the code interpreting it differently from how the original author intended. For the purposes of that post, it was a good description that explained the problem well. You can pick nits if you want, but it serves no illuminating purpose.
*insert the same criticism of this rebuttal as being uselessly pedantic (i.e. the situation where literally nothing changes is virtually non-existent in real life) as I made in like half a dozen other replies here*
If you don't live in the Madison, WI area and have Charter as the local franchise, find out when your municipality holds its regulatory meetings.
Yeah, sorry, but I escaped Charter a long time ago. I have Grande instead, which is proving to be good local competition with Time Warner. They're the only service company of any kind whose sales rep has actually tried to talk me down in my package selection. Since I stayed with the higher BW one and had great results, I'm assuming it's not because they're afraid of overselling their capacity.
This post explains it fairly well.
Will you please quit making up terminology like "output buffer", as if to say that some memory is somehow designated write-only? The buffer is uninitialized , not an "output buffer"... Memory is memory is memory, and valgrind is only checking to see if it's been properly written before.
The memory is logically designated as write-only, which is why it was not initialized. Program semantics are at least as important as actual memory behavior. Memory is memory is memory is still a broken program if you only intended to write to a buffer, but read from it instead. "Output buffer" is a perfectly valid term for the way in which the program operated and why the buffer was uninitialized.
Uninitialised data doesn't seem to be a good source of randomness to depend on, since depending on where it happens you may consistently end up with a buffer that previously contained all zeroes (or some default memory test pattern), the same part of the same shared library header, or a series of stack frames that for whatever reason happen to be the same frames on every run.
Well yeah, especially because a byte of "uninitialized" memory, like all memory regardless of how many times it has been initialized, is much more likely to contain the value zero than any other. That'd be like using a 6-sided die as a source of randomness when the '1' side was ten times the area of the '6' side.
However as mentioned, that's not the only or main source of randomness, and getting rid of that randomness was not the bug. It was getting rid of other sources of randomness in the process, because they -resembled- the function that used uninitialized memory.
Someone needs to tell Charter that you don't "enhance" suck.
My first thought was, "Wow, that sounds effective."
My second was, "But that is kinda harsh."
My thirs, "Cooooooool."
Wait... are you counting your thoughts, or your Alabama Slammers?
The solution is obvious: US Government Certified Porn.
If it's anything like Government Cheese, then I fear for the sanity of our troops.
If it's anything like Government Weed, on the other hand, then I implore our troops to post some on teh intertubes for us civvies!
Not just that, but the term "Space Lawyer" seems rather lame, like he's in charge of a big warehouse or something.
Hey, it worked for Space Ghost. Nobody was like "so, do you haunt a warehouse or something?"
So maybe Space Lawyer just needs to hang out with Space Ghost, and then nobody will question him like that.
I shouldn't be, but I am. I know that you refer to a lawyer by their specialty, i.e. a "patent lawyer" is a lawyer who specializes in patents, not a lawyer who themselves is patented or was created by a patent.
But is it really all that much to ask that the world's first "space lawyer" actually be from space? Or live there now? I don't care what they specialize in, they just have to have a law degree and either hail from or emigrate to outer space.
I'll be writing my congressman about this.