Nonsense. Religion isn't going away, nor should it. Roddenberry's biases is one aspect of his work that dates it. In general, one of Scifi's greatest flaws is despite its portrayal of fascinating scenarios and technological wonders it is difficult to apply to actual people because its main characters are often not people. Instead they are agnostic idealogues that come across as shallow. Its wooden/unrealistic portrayal of human depth due to many authors who insist in creating a caricature of religion for the sake of either making it either a cliche'd villain or the elimination of meaning altogether makes many of the great ideas presented therein flawed...
Good scifi takes into account that intelligent people can and do acknowlege a higher power without turning all evil or into one-dimensional automatons.
A series takes a while to get going because of a number of factors. Not just the series writers, but also the actors don't know their characters well enough to know how to act their parts. The production crew, the effects, everything is new up front. What is stiff and wooden, often is eliminated as it receives feedback from discriminating fans, honest feedback, and producers who spot what works and what doesn't.
Very few series start out "fresh", and if they do, it's often based on a gimmick that's unsustainable. (like Lost, or The Event, for example)
The data on pirate sites tends to reflect a target demographic that pirates movies, which may be ineffective if you're attempting to sell ads.
Also, some shows don't show up on Hulu, or netflix... so many networks have their own websites, like cbs shows are on their own network website cbs.com, which Hulu will point to, but really is not a reflection of the viewership. Hulu really gets nothing for pointing to their site, other than an indication that people are searching for the show. Some Shows have sites dedicated to their shows too... And that's if you can find it. And YouTube performs the same sort of service... or amazon, and then that doesn't count cable and digital broadcasting... but is there something that puts all this information together?
PinkiePie is one of the My Little Ponies. That handle's kinda cute, considering that that those that are pwn'd are sometimes called Pwnies and there are the Pwnie Awards. And all the bronies know that PinkiePie is the funniest of the ponies... not that I'd admit watching the show... wink, wink... ahem...
The problem with too much fragmentation is that you never gain mainstream acceptance and it confusese developers who don't want to rewrite the tools that are fragmenting. Toolsets lose support, and if you developed your particular software on their toolsets then you're screwed.
It's nice to have options, unless you're the guy that chooses to implement your system on an option that is a deadend. Then you kinda wish for a Microsoft platform--something that's going to be around for a couple decades and you don't have to continually be redeveloping expertise in it just to build a stupid gui window...
Not to mention that with smaller government, the work that needs to be done gets sent to contractors that tend to charge a lot more for the same services. (defense contractors are quite adept at this). Anyone who's worked in government knows if you want a high paying salary you don't work in government--you contract to government.
And you can only imagine just how much lobbying goes on to get those contracts... So smaller government can be a recipe for more aggressive lobbying.
There was a time when the creative minds of this country were discredited, blacklisted and even arrested because they were accused of being Communists, Radicals, Social Deviants and Homosexuals. Now the Homosexuals have their turn, and have proven they never really objected to McCarthyism, their righteous self-will knows no bounds, and they will oppress as they were oppressed.
Where is the tolerance that they strove for when they were not a mainstream religion of thought? Is this the price of tolerance: More Oppression?!
Ridiculous. This whole scandal, its hypocrisy is galling. Judge the art, not the artist. Some of our very best classics in science fiction are from people who were nonconformists in their day. In fact that goes for most authors... perhaps it is their outspoken natures that drives them to do things the rest of us can do little more than wish we did.
OSC's comments seem almost prophetic in the face of what's occurred.
The problem with encouraging a person to program for the sheer joy of it is that they start to adopt useful/fun programming languages that managers don't know... like Perl... and that's just too dangerous. It's best to keep programming soulless...:)
I would not be surprised if introverted personalities do precisely this sort of thing or something similar. Not just for sexual or even silly reasons, but because it creates a barrier to communication that at some level introverted personalities would prefer. Psychologically the ability to do this sort of thing could become very addictive. These devices form a buffer between the uncertainties of cold hard reality and ourselves.They enable (or at least give us the perception of such) us to be more clever than we really are.
We already see this happening a lot with people that would rather text you than talk with you in person. There's a subliminal dislike to actual conversations, and the uncertainty that comes from an immediate action/reaction--that lack of control and the inability to formulate the perfect response, I suspect, is part of the reason why people do this. Texting and other forms of communication that require a time-lag or deny you of personal one-on-one exchanges, enable both parties the ability to be conveniently (and purposefully) ambiguous. iow, we feel smarter, more emboldened, and even more able to objectify one (which sounds bad, but at some level serves us because if people aren't objects the stakes are just too high) another with this sort of technology.
Unfortunately, a technology that is supposed to assist us in communicating and seeing one another in greater clarity, will most likely have the opposite effect. It will enable those who wish it, to put on another costume atop all their other ones. . . but then social media is all one giant masquerade of smiling idyllic snapshots of who we all wish we could be.
This company sounds absolutely reptillian in their nature. Like some massive hungry slithering bottom-dwelling reptile that strikes out at any warm-blooded thing that's good, and wraps itself around it for its own selfish enrichment, squeezing the life out of its prey. Dunno why they'd want to be named Python, it's a lovely language... and friendly... unless you don't like indenting.
I use Python (and C, C++, C#, Java, etc), but love Perl. It allows me to be as eloquent or dilinquent as I want to be. If I want to blast out a concept, nothing gets there faster than Perl. Learning Idiomatic Perl requires a shift in the way one approaches programming. To do it well, it does require learning Perl from a Perl-perspective, and I think that's where most new programmers stumble. They want a C-based language that won't require them to change how they think about programming code--because they all code in C even when they're using Java, or Python.
C programmers can program Perl too, of course... (that's how I started). Perl allows that, but you'll never really touch its brilliance if you stick to that approach. A great way to get started learning it is to find a community like http://perlmonks.org/ and start reading and posting questions about how to approach problems with a Perl-brain, rather than a C(Python, Java, whatever)-brain.
I believe doing so will actually make you a better C(Python, Java, whatever) programmer as well...
Perl's a great choice for sysadmins, especially Linux. It's extremely popular among sysadmins. Perl didn't get popular because of sysadmin, it's never lost that following, that's the de facto standard language for tying all shells and tools together as a sysadmin in Unix based operating systems.
If you stay entirely in windows, you'll probably want to head in the direction of a microsoft-only language, just because you'll probably get more help in administering your system if you are familiar with their languages... I've seen a lot of Visual Basic in Windows-only sysadmin tasks.
There are other considerations as well. For example, I understand that many newer mobile OS's like android use python for many of their sysadmin tasks and developer tools, so it may be advisable to consider as well. Python's quite popular in unix-based operating systems as well, but not in Windows.
A variable's type and variable sigils are not the same thing. The sigils help create context for the data operations that will occur. an @ tells the interpreter to prepare for list context, while $ tells the interpreter to prepare scalar context. Arguably one of the nicest contexts in Perl is the Hash (known as associative arrays in PHP, and sometimes called dictionaries in other lingos) context, which uses the sigil %.
When you mix contexts from variables, you actually perform operations, because in Perl no symbol is merely a decoration, they are operators--including sigils. This shorthandish sort of approach has enabled the Perl language to really master data manipulation. You can treat a hash like a list, using hash slices, or take scalar context of a list and Perl will return the list size.
Ironically, I find Perl to be one of the most consistent and deep languages available and in use these days.
The problem with Perl is that it is its own language and programmers are lazy and want to program in languages that force them to do a lot of unnecessary busy-work not because they like it, but because that's what they've been taught to do. Managers are even lazier, and everyone wants to be able to understand your code, even if they haven't actually taken the time to learn the language.
Learning Perl is a great way to improve your own coding approach, even if you don't use the language regularly, because it opens the mind to possibilities.
Please don't visit Thailand for sex tourism. It only perpetuates the tragedy of human trafficking, many young people are sold and enslaved for a short, disease-ridden, and trashy life, due to the wealth and privilege of those who think they can use people like objects. It is a haunting horrific thing that needs to stop. We humans should treat one another better.
I do think that kids are schooled in violence pretty young these days. Even if there's no blood, there's always a battle, or conflict, and we're conditioned from a very young age to cheer when the good guy kills the bad guy. Gun violence is but a small part of the problem that our culture faces as a result of entertainment forms being so ensconced in the need for a decisive ending. We all know that if the good guy merely catches the bad guy, then he's going to come back and cause a lot more damage later--so the best way to solve the problem is to kill the bad guy. There's almost a relief when the show kills off the bad guy who keeps coming back, often from the brink of death. Nowadays some of the most popular channels on youtube are simply shoot-out scenes, one after another, of the most action packed sections of movies... with splatterfest special effects and no access control on the content or consideration on who's watching what.
Never been a fan of banning much of anything, but when you mix that with guns and perhaps a little mental illness to boot...
I do wonder what if there were some regulation on gun owners to prove they didn't consumer a certain quota of such media, and prove a certain level of civic responsibility through firearms training and gun care...
Disney has been eying this space for nearly two decades, trying to find a way to monetize digital content streaming. Starz has been an impediment to content distrubtion, forcing content to go through pay-channel services first... Netflix has made a huge win here. The legalities of these contracts are insane too. They have release windows for TV, streaming, DVD distribution--it's all factored into these contracts.
People don't want to lug around DVDs to watch movies, and now they don't have to with smart phones and tablets and other media rich devices. Personally I want to get rid of my DVD collection altogether--it'd free up a closet's worth of space in my house. I want to be able to log into my favorite website and watch stuff on my flatscreen tv, that's connected out there to some cloud activated device, or better yet put it in the display, more than just a cable service and get rid of the old model altogether.
Hopefully Netflix can profit from this deal. Of course if they go under, I wouldn't be surprised to find a company like Disney buying them outright.
They should create a mannequin that morphs into the person it's observing, maybe it could just steal the face of the person since body sizes are so drastically different, but then you could "see yourself" in the clothes that the mannequin is modeling. That'd be cool, and super creepy. Just the sort of future we here at Slashdot prefer!:)
It really is a triumph of human intelligence and there's a LOT of combined science and technology employed in this solution. It demonstrates the sort of ingenuity that happens in a highly cooperative intellectual landscape, when one puts aside their malicious intent, and thinks more on the need to protect rather than to kill.
Combined, great minds can do great things. It's a shame too often great minds are wasted on revenge and retaliation, egos and avarice.
Ethical intelligence is true intelligence.
I wouldn't know the majority of news sites if it weren't for Google's aggregation. So I wouldn't click their sites at all. This seems like they're wanting compensation for something that already compensates them by listing them and making their site more visible.
Slashdot Mirror
Just more evidence that SpongeBob SquarePants got it right all along (See Sandy Cheeks)
Based upon the fact there's no Unobtainium on our planet, I suspect they've already been here and taken it all.
I guess Moores Law proves Intelligent Design! :) Oh wait... Intel... I mean Intel Design... :)
Nonsense. Religion isn't going away, nor should it. Roddenberry's biases is one aspect of his work that dates it. In general, one of Scifi's greatest flaws is despite its portrayal of fascinating scenarios and technological wonders it is difficult to apply to actual people because its main characters are often not people. Instead they are agnostic idealogues that come across as shallow. Its wooden/unrealistic portrayal of human depth due to many authors who insist in creating a caricature of religion for the sake of either making it either a cliche'd villain or the elimination of meaning altogether makes many of the great ideas presented therein flawed...
Good scifi takes into account that intelligent people can and do acknowlege a higher power without turning all evil or into one-dimensional automatons.
A series takes a while to get going because of a number of factors. Not just the series writers, but also the actors don't know their characters well enough to know how to act their parts. The production crew, the effects, everything is new up front. What is stiff and wooden, often is eliminated as it receives feedback from discriminating fans, honest feedback, and producers who spot what works and what doesn't.
Very few series start out "fresh", and if they do, it's often based on a gimmick that's unsustainable. (like Lost, or The Event, for example)
The data on pirate sites tends to reflect a target demographic that pirates movies, which may be ineffective if you're attempting to sell ads.
Also, some shows don't show up on Hulu, or netflix... so many networks have their own websites, like cbs shows are on their own network website cbs.com, which Hulu will point to, but really is not a reflection of the viewership. Hulu really gets nothing for pointing to their site, other than an indication that people are searching for the show. Some Shows have sites dedicated to their shows too... And that's if you can find it. And YouTube performs the same sort of service... or amazon, and then that doesn't count cable and digital broadcasting... but is there something that puts all this information together?
PinkiePie is one of the My Little Ponies. That handle's kinda cute, considering that that those that are pwn'd are sometimes called Pwnies and there are the Pwnie Awards. And all the bronies know that PinkiePie is the funniest of the ponies... not that I'd admit watching the show... wink, wink... ahem...
The problem with too much fragmentation is that you never gain mainstream acceptance and it confusese developers who don't want to rewrite the tools that are fragmenting. Toolsets lose support, and if you developed your particular software on their toolsets then you're screwed.
It's nice to have options, unless you're the guy that chooses to implement your system on an option that is a deadend. Then you kinda wish for a Microsoft platform--something that's going to be around for a couple decades and you don't have to continually be redeveloping expertise in it just to build a stupid gui window...
Not to mention that with smaller government, the work that needs to be done gets sent to contractors that tend to charge a lot more for the same services. (defense contractors are quite adept at this). Anyone who's worked in government knows if you want a high paying salary you don't work in government--you contract to government.
And you can only imagine just how much lobbying goes on to get those contracts... So smaller government can be a recipe for more aggressive lobbying.
There was a time when the creative minds of this country were discredited, blacklisted and even arrested because they were accused of being Communists, Radicals, Social Deviants and Homosexuals. Now the Homosexuals have their turn, and have proven they never really objected to McCarthyism, their righteous self-will knows no bounds, and they will oppress as they were oppressed.
Where is the tolerance that they strove for when they were not a mainstream religion of thought? Is this the price of tolerance: More Oppression?!
Ridiculous. This whole scandal, its hypocrisy is galling. Judge the art, not the artist. Some of our very best classics in science fiction are from people who were nonconformists in their day. In fact that goes for most authors... perhaps it is their outspoken natures that drives them to do things the rest of us can do little more than wish we did.
OSC's comments seem almost prophetic in the face of what's occurred.
The problem with encouraging a person to program for the sheer joy of it is that they start to adopt useful/fun programming languages that managers don't know... like Perl... and that's just too dangerous. It's best to keep programming soulless... :)
I would not be surprised if introverted personalities do precisely this sort of thing or something similar. Not just for sexual or even silly reasons, but because it creates a barrier to communication that at some level introverted personalities would prefer. Psychologically the ability to do this sort of thing could become very addictive. These devices form a buffer between the uncertainties of cold hard reality and ourselves.They enable (or at least give us the perception of such) us to be more clever than we really are.
We already see this happening a lot with people that would rather text you than talk with you in person. There's a subliminal dislike to actual conversations, and the uncertainty that comes from an immediate action/reaction--that lack of control and the inability to formulate the perfect response, I suspect, is part of the reason why people do this. Texting and other forms of communication that require a time-lag or deny you of personal one-on-one exchanges, enable both parties the ability to be conveniently (and purposefully) ambiguous. iow, we feel smarter, more emboldened, and even more able to objectify one (which sounds bad, but at some level serves us because if people aren't objects the stakes are just too high) another with this sort of technology.
Unfortunately, a technology that is supposed to assist us in communicating and seeing one another in greater clarity, will most likely have the opposite effect. It will enable those who wish it, to put on another costume atop all their other ones. . . but then social media is all one giant masquerade of smiling idyllic snapshots of who we all wish we could be.
This company sounds absolutely reptillian in their nature. Like some massive hungry slithering bottom-dwelling reptile that strikes out at any warm-blooded thing that's good, and wraps itself around it for its own selfish enrichment, squeezing the life out of its prey. Dunno why they'd want to be named Python, it's a lovely language... and friendly... unless you don't like indenting.
Why should anyone care?
"640K ought to be enough for anybody..."
also...
"The internet is just a passing fad" and "We will never make a 32 bit operating system..."
I use Python (and C, C++, C#, Java, etc), but love Perl.
It allows me to be as eloquent or dilinquent as I want to be.
If I want to blast out a concept, nothing gets there faster than Perl.
Learning Idiomatic Perl requires a shift in the way one approaches programming. To do it well, it does require learning Perl from a Perl-perspective, and I think that's where most new programmers stumble. They want a C-based language that won't require them to change how they think about programming code--because they all code in C even when they're using Java, or Python.
C programmers can program Perl too, of course... (that's how I started). Perl allows that, but you'll never really touch its brilliance if you stick to that approach. A great way to get started learning it is to find a community like http://perlmonks.org/ and start reading and posting questions about how to approach problems with a Perl-brain, rather than a C(Python, Java, whatever)-brain.
I believe doing so will actually make you a better C(Python, Java, whatever) programmer as well...
Perl's a great choice for sysadmins, especially Linux. It's extremely popular among sysadmins. Perl didn't get popular because of sysadmin, it's never lost that following, that's the de facto standard language for tying all shells and tools together as a sysadmin in Unix based operating systems.
If you stay entirely in windows, you'll probably want to head in the direction of a microsoft-only language, just because you'll probably get more help in administering your system if you are familiar with their languages... I've seen a lot of Visual Basic in Windows-only sysadmin tasks.
There are other considerations as well. For example, I understand that many newer mobile OS's like android use python for many of their sysadmin tasks and developer tools, so it may be advisable to consider as well. Python's quite popular in unix-based operating systems as well, but not in Windows.
Good luck...
A variable's type and variable sigils are not the same thing. The sigils help create context for the data operations that will occur. an @ tells the interpreter to prepare for list context, while $ tells the interpreter to prepare scalar context. Arguably one of the nicest contexts in Perl is the Hash (known as associative arrays in PHP, and sometimes called dictionaries in other lingos) context, which uses the sigil %.
When you mix contexts from variables, you actually perform operations, because in Perl no symbol is merely a decoration, they are operators--including sigils. This shorthandish sort of approach has enabled the Perl language to really master data manipulation. You can treat a hash like a list, using hash slices, or take scalar context of a list and Perl will return the list size.
Ironically, I find Perl to be one of the most consistent and deep languages available and in use these days.
The problem with Perl is that it is its own language and programmers are lazy and want to program in languages that force them to do a lot of unnecessary busy-work not because they like it, but because that's what they've been taught to do. Managers are even lazier, and everyone wants to be able to understand your code, even if they haven't actually taken the time to learn the language.
Learning Perl is a great way to improve your own coding approach, even if you don't use the language regularly, because it opens the mind to possibilities.
Please don't visit Thailand for sex tourism. It only perpetuates the tragedy of human trafficking, many young people are sold and enslaved for a short, disease-ridden, and trashy life, due to the wealth and privilege of those who think they can use people like objects. It is a haunting horrific thing that needs to stop. We humans should treat one another better.
I do think that kids are schooled in violence pretty young these days. Even if there's no blood, there's always a battle, or conflict, and we're conditioned from a very young age to cheer when the good guy kills the bad guy. Gun violence is but a small part of the problem that our culture faces as a result of entertainment forms being so ensconced in the need for a decisive ending. We all know that if the good guy merely catches the bad guy, then he's going to come back and cause a lot more damage later--so the best way to solve the problem is to kill the bad guy. There's almost a relief when the show kills off the bad guy who keeps coming back, often from the brink of death. Nowadays some of the most popular channels on youtube are simply shoot-out scenes, one after another, of the most action packed sections of movies... with splatterfest special effects and no access control on the content or consideration on who's watching what.
Never been a fan of banning much of anything, but when you mix that with guns and perhaps a little mental illness to boot...
I do wonder what if there were some regulation on gun owners to prove they didn't consumer a certain quota of such media, and prove a certain level of civic responsibility through firearms training and gun care...
...is it's a slow death spiral of constant consumer disappointments and unmet expectations... with no obvious competitor to steal from.
Disney has been eying this space for nearly two decades, trying to find a way to monetize digital content streaming. Starz has been an impediment to content distrubtion, forcing content to go through pay-channel services first... Netflix has made a huge win here. The legalities of these contracts are insane too. They have release windows for TV, streaming, DVD distribution--it's all factored into these contracts.
People don't want to lug around DVDs to watch movies, and now they don't have to with smart phones and tablets and other media rich devices. Personally I want to get rid of my DVD collection altogether--it'd free up a closet's worth of space in my house. I want to be able to log into my favorite website and watch stuff on my flatscreen tv, that's connected out there to some cloud activated device, or better yet put it in the display, more than just a cable service and get rid of the old model altogether.
Hopefully Netflix can profit from this deal. Of course if they go under, I wouldn't be surprised to find a company like Disney buying them outright.
They should create a mannequin that morphs into the person it's observing, maybe it could just steal the face of the person since body sizes are so drastically different, but then you could "see yourself" in the clothes that the mannequin is modeling. That'd be cool, and super creepy. Just the sort of future we here at Slashdot prefer! :)
"Culture of Fear" has been the unsaid logo of HP for the past 15 years. That, and "Screw the HP Way"... So yeah, good guess... :)
It really is a triumph of human intelligence and there's a LOT of combined science and technology employed in this solution. It demonstrates the sort of ingenuity that happens in a highly cooperative intellectual landscape, when one puts aside their malicious intent, and thinks more on the need to protect rather than to kill. Combined, great minds can do great things. It's a shame too often great minds are wasted on revenge and retaliation, egos and avarice. Ethical intelligence is true intelligence.
I wouldn't know the majority of news sites if it weren't for Google's aggregation. So I wouldn't click their sites at all. This seems like they're wanting compensation for something that already compensates them by listing them and making their site more visible.