Kill the shuttle. Every year we extend the shuttle is a year that it's easier to make excuses for not having Orion ready. The shuttle was a disastrous decision from the start - a joke of a space program that made no progress in exploration, and provides nothing in the way of useful scientific research except inasmuch as it was used to work on the Hubble.
The sooner it is put out to pasture the sooner this country can have a real space program again.
As a geeky but not ideological sort, I care about two things.
1) Software that works. 2) Software that is a reasonable price.
FOSS often accomplishes #2, and often accomplishes #1, but usually with awkward, obnoxious, and clunky interfaces. I'm mostly and consistently willing to trade $10 and source availability for an interface on a simple utility.
I'm sure this company... which appears to be a guy named Tom... will thoroughly corner the market on people who want Mac clones that they have to install the OS on themselves, but who are unwilling to use the free software resources to do it.
Now all they need to do is move onto existent markets.
The marriage of Harmonix and Red Octane was always a great designer of rhythm games and a great hardware engineering company.
The thing is, good game designers are more common than good hardware engineers - especially because the best hardware engineers tend to get scooped up by companies that don't do game design (Apple, Microsoft, Logitech) or are Nintendo. The result was that Activision got the rare talent, and EA got the more common talent. And so, while Rock Band was a better game than Guitar Hero III, I have to say, I never once enjoyed playing the guitar in Rock Band just because there wasn't the sense of bracing haptic feedback that the GH controller gave. And while GH3 had more utterly obnoxious riffs than Rock Band, it always felt more fun to play for me. (I also fundamentally like the interface better on Guitar Hero - the circles, to my mind, are much easier to visually scan up the screen than the raised bumps of Rock Band)
The knowledge that Red Octane is going to pursue drums (and possibly other instruments) makes me even more inclined towards the Guitar Hero series.
This is frankly a poor idea - the sole substantial flaw in the original B7 was its production values, and that's always the flaw in aging sci-fi. The writing was basically spotless, and there's very, very little room to improve on it. B7 has aged pretty well, aside from its effects.
That's a very different situation from BSG, where the original was a good idea that was undone by pretty relentlessly cheesy aesthetics and a sense of writing that often did leave something to be desired. BSG aged poorly and rapidly. A re-imagining thus made sense there, because there was room to work and stuff to jettison as well as keep. It was possible to make a new BSG that a fan could look at and say "Wow, that's better than the original." Not all fans did, but a lot did, and that's significant.
That's going to be very, very hard to do with B7. Frankly, it'll be hard to get a casual fan to say that, little yet a hard core one.
And the other route for a SF revival - the Doctor Who/Star Trek:TNG route where you just continue in-continuity from where the old one left off is, as the article notes, closed to B7.
Actually, it's enormously significant, because it determines whether mathematical predictions can be taken as true or as untested hypotheses. This is an important issue for the sciences - if mathematics is nothing more than a cognitive model then it is of limited predictive use.
Logical positivism would force you to accept "discovered" actually, since mathematics has, as Wigner has pointed out, anticipated empiricism in a number of areas. And, furthermore, since it's very difficult to find a reason to accept logic as metaphysically necessary while rejecting mathematics.
Also significant in this debate is Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," which observes the myriad of ways in which mathematics predicts rather than describes phenomena.
Which has always seemed to me the problem of non-Platonic approaches to mathematics - mathematics is a system more precise than reality that nonetheless approximates and describes it. Atoms do not neatly form right angles, and yet we know many properties of right triangles that are repeatedly borne out in the physical world. Mathematics, in this regard, seems like it must have a metaphysical component. Which would require "discovered" to be the answer.
I don't think "not stupid enough to click a phishing scam in my e-mail" qualifies me as a power user.
My bank has a number of excellent protections against phishing scams. None of them involve blocking my choice of web browsers. I'm all for combatting phishing scams. But this is a moronic way to do it.
There remain a non-trivial number of things for which PayPal is the only, or at least easiest way to pay.
I also ended up, for a while, using it as a de facto wire transfer between two accounts at different banks. Turned out to be faster than writing checks from one to the other.
Why don't you trust me not to be an idiot instead of requiring that I use a different browser due to the fact that other users of my browser are idiots?
It is worth noting, UF has been critical of the practice of profiting off of course materials for some time - and Moulton has been expressly targetted for criticism. This is an older article on the situation.
As someone who teaches at UF, the opportunities to distribute material to students for free or without profiting are numerous - there are multiple places that will print coursepacks within walking distance of the University, and the library provides an excellent electronic reserves system over which digital materials can be distributed. The only reason to distribute course notes for $50-100 electronically, as Professor Moulton does, is to make money off of your students.
Other professors at UF, as described in the article, offer $30 e-workbooks of extra credit through companies they own - in other words, directly allowing students the option of paying the professor for higher grades.
The depth of conflict of interest involved here is disgusting. Regardless of the legal merits of the case (I am not a lawyer and do not know), UF should forbid this sort of naked profiteering off of students.
I trust nobody who refers to "Web 3.0." Or who suggests that the demand for Google Knol, which, you know, doesn't actually exist, is evidence of anything at all.
I can believe that Vista has fewer security flaws than XP. I can even believe that it beats Red Hat, Ubuntu, and OS X.
What I cannot believe is that XP demolishes Red Hat, Ubuntu, and OS X. That makes me think that there's something egregiously wrong with the way that things are being counted here.
Of course, counting problems fixed also does not necessarily mean that lower is better...
Looking at the weekly sales chart for consoles in Japan, it seems as though the Wii dropped about 50% of its weekly sales over a two week period in August, and 2/3 in about a month.
This seems an improbable drop without a causal factor - is it possible that Nintendo simply reduced console output to Japan in an attempt to divert resources to the US holiday market? Production, presumably, is capped at this point, so that's probably their only viable way of increasing US supply.
One challenge for Nintendo is getting news of games out to people like your mother - she should know about Wii Fitness, for example, and whatever the Wii version of Brain Age is - both are targeted at the same not-really-gamer audiences as Wii Sports.
I think there's also going to be a delay here, though - it took developers quite a while to really grok the DS - so much so that a sane and reasonable person could have doubted that the DS was going anywhere early on, when Nintendo lacked any first party stars for the system, and nobody had really figured out a third party game for it. I remember a long period when the only decent DS game was Mario 64.
I agree, except inasmuch as, 6 years into the project, the surprise is starting to wear off, and it seems like it's time to start rethinking our sense of what should and shouldn't work in writing an encyclopedia.
It's good to know that/. has enough committed Wikipedia opponents to raise a completely vapid and contentless post to a 5 in seconds. This explains how shit like the "ZOMG A WIKIPEDIA ADMINISTRATOR IS A SPY" thing got to the front page.
The shortest answer to this post is that Wikipedia isn't trying to publish the truth. It's trying to publish a neutral overview of things that have been claimed to be the truth. People who don't understandt his often have idfficult times on Wikipedia. This is because they are always trying to do what they sincerely believe improves the encyclopedia, and yet are routinely shot down for trying.
It is, however, not a bug in our method. It's a feature.
Actually, if there's one thing WikiScanner showed, it was that not requiring registration is useful to us in identifying problems.
Registration is a small hurdle. While it's impossible to bot-register accounts, and thus requiring registration would provide a layer of insulation from vandalbot accounts, we haven't actually had a serious vandalbot attack in years. For your garden variety fuckwittery, registering an account doesn't fix much - most of our total fuckwits are registered.
I dunno. Out of the 30 articles featured and to-be-featured on the main page in September, 7 are popular culture articles. (An article on D&D, the "Bus Uncle" video clip, the pilot episode of Smallville, OutKast's "Hey Ya," Alison Bechdel's graphic novel "Fun Home, the Indian film Lage Raho Munna Bhai, and tomorrow's featured article on Blood Sugar Sex Magik) Yes, that list skews a bit geek (Though the Bechdel graphic novel is about as far from a geek comic as one can get), but there's still 23 featured articles this month on such geeky topics as meteorology, European rugby, Soviet history, and American industrial disasters.
It's more accurate to say that we, compared to similar reference works, have a disproportionately good coverage of geeky topics. That does not appear to have come at the cost of our coverage of other topics.
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Kill the shuttle. Every year we extend the shuttle is a year that it's easier to make excuses for not having Orion ready. The shuttle was a disastrous decision from the start - a joke of a space program that made no progress in exploration, and provides nothing in the way of useful scientific research except inasmuch as it was used to work on the Hubble.
The sooner it is put out to pasture the sooner this country can have a real space program again.
As a geeky but not ideological sort, I care about two things.
1) Software that works.
2) Software that is a reasonable price.
FOSS often accomplishes #2, and often accomplishes #1, but usually with awkward, obnoxious, and clunky interfaces. I'm mostly and consistently willing to trade $10 and source availability for an interface on a simple utility.
I'm sure this company... which appears to be a guy named Tom... will thoroughly corner the market on people who want Mac clones that they have to install the OS on themselves, but who are unwilling to use the free software resources to do it.
Now all they need to do is move onto existent markets.
Their website also has something about a Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System that will decide who gets shocks and when.
They also seem to be building some sort of "Enrichment Center."
The marriage of Harmonix and Red Octane was always a great designer of rhythm games and a great hardware engineering company.
The thing is, good game designers are more common than good hardware engineers - especially because the best hardware engineers tend to get scooped up by companies that don't do game design (Apple, Microsoft, Logitech) or are Nintendo. The result was that Activision got the rare talent, and EA got the more common talent. And so, while Rock Band was a better game than Guitar Hero III, I have to say, I never once enjoyed playing the guitar in Rock Band just because there wasn't the sense of bracing haptic feedback that the GH controller gave. And while GH3 had more utterly obnoxious riffs than Rock Band, it always felt more fun to play for me. (I also fundamentally like the interface better on Guitar Hero - the circles, to my mind, are much easier to visually scan up the screen than the raised bumps of Rock Band)
The knowledge that Red Octane is going to pursue drums (and possibly other instruments) makes me even more inclined towards the Guitar Hero series.
This is frankly a poor idea - the sole substantial flaw in the original B7 was its production values, and that's always the flaw in aging sci-fi. The writing was basically spotless, and there's very, very little room to improve on it. B7 has aged pretty well, aside from its effects.
That's a very different situation from BSG, where the original was a good idea that was undone by pretty relentlessly cheesy aesthetics and a sense of writing that often did leave something to be desired. BSG aged poorly and rapidly. A re-imagining thus made sense there, because there was room to work and stuff to jettison as well as keep. It was possible to make a new BSG that a fan could look at and say "Wow, that's better than the original." Not all fans did, but a lot did, and that's significant.
That's going to be very, very hard to do with B7. Frankly, it'll be hard to get a casual fan to say that, little yet a hard core one.
And the other route for a SF revival - the Doctor Who/Star Trek:TNG route where you just continue in-continuity from where the old one left off is, as the article notes, closed to B7.
Making this a poor property to revive.
Actually, it's enormously significant, because it determines whether mathematical predictions can be taken as true or as untested hypotheses. This is an important issue for the sciences - if mathematics is nothing more than a cognitive model then it is of limited predictive use.
Logical positivism would force you to accept "discovered" actually, since mathematics has, as Wigner has pointed out, anticipated empiricism in a number of areas. And, furthermore, since it's very difficult to find a reason to accept logic as metaphysically necessary while rejecting mathematics.
Also significant in this debate is Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," which observes the myriad of ways in which mathematics predicts rather than describes phenomena.
Which has always seemed to me the problem of non-Platonic approaches to mathematics - mathematics is a system more precise than reality that nonetheless approximates and describes it. Atoms do not neatly form right angles, and yet we know many properties of right triangles that are repeatedly borne out in the physical world. Mathematics, in this regard, seems like it must have a metaphysical component. Which would require "discovered" to be the answer.
I don't think "not stupid enough to click a phishing scam in my e-mail" qualifies me as a power user.
My bank has a number of excellent protections against phishing scams. None of them involve blocking my choice of web browsers. I'm all for combatting phishing scams. But this is a moronic way to do it.
There remain a non-trivial number of things for which PayPal is the only, or at least easiest way to pay.
I also ended up, for a while, using it as a de facto wire transfer between two accounts at different banks. Turned out to be faster than writing checks from one to the other.
Why don't you trust me not to be an idiot instead of requiring that I use a different browser due to the fact that other users of my browser are idiots?
It is worth noting, UF has been critical of the practice of profiting off of course materials for some time - and Moulton has been expressly targetted for criticism. This is an older article on the situation.
As someone who teaches at UF, the opportunities to distribute material to students for free or without profiting are numerous - there are multiple places that will print coursepacks within walking distance of the University, and the library provides an excellent electronic reserves system over which digital materials can be distributed. The only reason to distribute course notes for $50-100 electronically, as Professor Moulton does, is to make money off of your students.
Other professors at UF, as described in the article, offer $30 e-workbooks of extra credit through companies they own - in other words, directly allowing students the option of paying the professor for higher grades.
The depth of conflict of interest involved here is disgusting. Regardless of the legal merits of the case (I am not a lawyer and do not know), UF should forbid this sort of naked profiteering off of students.
I trust nobody who refers to "Web 3.0." Or who suggests that the demand for Google Knol, which, you know, doesn't actually exist, is evidence of anything at all.
While it is called industrial music for a reason, most of that reason is that Throbbing Gristle's label was called Industrial Records...
I can believe that Vista has fewer security flaws than XP. I can even believe that it beats Red Hat, Ubuntu, and OS X.
What I cannot believe is that XP demolishes Red Hat, Ubuntu, and OS X. That makes me think that there's something egregiously wrong with the way that things are being counted here.
Of course, counting problems fixed also does not necessarily mean that lower is better...
Why hack it when Linux is already installed on it?
Users of social network talk outside of network, discuss network. News at 11.
He said fix it up, not mod it up!
Looking at the weekly sales chart for consoles in Japan, it seems as though the Wii dropped about 50% of its weekly sales over a two week period in August, and 2/3 in about a month.
This seems an improbable drop without a causal factor - is it possible that Nintendo simply reduced console output to Japan in an attempt to divert resources to the US holiday market? Production, presumably, is capped at this point, so that's probably their only viable way of increasing US supply.
One challenge for Nintendo is getting news of games out to people like your mother - she should know about Wii Fitness, for example, and whatever the Wii version of Brain Age is - both are targeted at the same not-really-gamer audiences as Wii Sports.
I think there's also going to be a delay here, though - it took developers quite a while to really grok the DS - so much so that a sane and reasonable person could have doubted that the DS was going anywhere early on, when Nintendo lacked any first party stars for the system, and nobody had really figured out a third party game for it. I remember a long period when the only decent DS game was Mario 64.
Since the Wii version uses the motion-sensitive controllers, it literally gives players the hands of a killer.
I was unaware that the hands of a killer were constantly wrapped around a white piece of plastic.
I agree, except inasmuch as, 6 years into the project, the surprise is starting to wear off, and it seems like it's time to start rethinking our sense of what should and shouldn't work in writing an encyclopedia.
It's good to know that /. has enough committed Wikipedia opponents to raise a completely vapid and contentless post to a 5 in seconds. This explains how shit like the "ZOMG A WIKIPEDIA ADMINISTRATOR IS A SPY" thing got to the front page.
The shortest answer to this post is that Wikipedia isn't trying to publish the truth. It's trying to publish a neutral overview of things that have been claimed to be the truth. People who don't understandt his often have idfficult times on Wikipedia. This is because they are always trying to do what they sincerely believe improves the encyclopedia, and yet are routinely shot down for trying.
It is, however, not a bug in our method. It's a feature.
Actually, if there's one thing WikiScanner showed, it was that not requiring registration is useful to us in identifying problems.
Registration is a small hurdle. While it's impossible to bot-register accounts, and thus requiring registration would provide a layer of insulation from vandalbot accounts, we haven't actually had a serious vandalbot attack in years. For your garden variety fuckwittery, registering an account doesn't fix much - most of our total fuckwits are registered.
I dunno. Out of the 30 articles featured and to-be-featured on the main page in September, 7 are popular culture articles. (An article on D&D, the "Bus Uncle" video clip, the pilot episode of Smallville, OutKast's "Hey Ya," Alison Bechdel's graphic novel "Fun Home, the Indian film Lage Raho Munna Bhai, and tomorrow's featured article on Blood Sugar Sex Magik) Yes, that list skews a bit geek (Though the Bechdel graphic novel is about as far from a geek comic as one can get), but there's still 23 featured articles this month on such geeky topics as meteorology, European rugby, Soviet history, and American industrial disasters.
It's more accurate to say that we, compared to similar reference works, have a disproportionately good coverage of geeky topics. That does not appear to have come at the cost of our coverage of other topics.