Script writers do that for a very good reason: timing considerations. A TV drama has a one-hour time slot, minus time for commercials, opening and closing; probably about 40 minutes or so for the story. Fiddling around with creative misspellings of names takes time and doesn't move the story along. It's the same reason, BTW, why when somebody on TV turns on the news, the story they're looking for is just starting.
It's also not even vaguely clear to me why people feel that regular password changes are helpful or a good idea.
I spent time doing tech support for an ISP. As part of my job, I needed to log into a web page. The server was inside the office firewall, and nobody outside it could log in. Not only were we required to use ten-character passwords (Upper, lower, numeric and punctuation all required.) they expired every sixty days. There was no possible way for an outside attacker to reach that web server, no way that constantly changing our passwords made anything more secure, but we had to do it, probably because somebody in IT realized that they could set it up that way and decided that if they could force passwords to expire, they should, whether it helped or not. What made it worse was, all the Certificates expired and nobody ever bothered to update them. This wouldn't have been so bad (You tell your browser to accept it, and the problem goes away.) but our boxes were locked down so badly that telling the browser that the cert's OK didn't survive a reboot, meaning you had to go through the same song-and-dance several times a day.
No, Germany was the biggest threat to our allies Britain and Russia. And if you don't think Germany could ever have defeated Britain, consider the Battle of The Atlantic. Don't be more of a fool than you have to.
Do the governments of countries inhabitated by strongly, religious people tend to filter Internet content?
AFAIK, Italy has no interest in censoring the Internet and it's certainly inhabited by strongly religious people. The same goes for Israel, I might add.
but at that point its more straightforward to just start off fresh.
And then, of course, they reinstall everything they "need," and they're back where they started. Seriously, I'm not talking about people like that, I'm talking about computer geeks who routinely reinstall Windows on their own boxes and think nothing of it. I once knew a man who insisted that NT 4 was completely stable, but he still reapplied the latest service pack every month because if he didn't, his system started crashing. It's that mindset that I just can't understand.
So, what does one do when one has to reinstall Windows? That happens often enough
And you don't see anything wrong with that? Seriously. Why should you have to install the same version of he same OS more than once on a machine? Since I've been using Linux, I've only had to reinstall it twice. Once because just after an upgrade I did something foolish and trashed my Linux partition and once because an upgrade didn't work out well. (The newer version couldn't find my NIC no matter what I did so I ended up wiping and reinstalling the older version. Thank Ghod for backups!) I'm not saying that there's never a reason to reinstall Windows, I'm just saying that I don't understand why you people think regularly reinstalling your OS is normal. Please enlighten me.
There's another two-dimensional representation that was devised by Jerry Pournelle. One axis goes from people who try to persuade by reason alone to those who depend on pure emotion. The other shows how much the party is interested in change for its own sake. Thus, Libertarians depend on logic ("Just listen to us and you'll see that we're right.") while the nazis moved the masses with appeals to emotion, but they both wanted considerable change.
I've always been one for renaming icons. Back when I was still running Windows, the icon was always renamed to "Not My Computer," especially on a work box.
"I'm an OSS advocate and I practice what I preach. However, I'm not a fanatic or a bigot. If Windows is best for the job, then use it."
At least, that's how I read it. Of course, it's also my own position. I use Linux and I try to get other people to try it. If they're happy with Windows, or they try Linux and it doesn't suit them, that's OK with me. After all, it's their computer, not mine.
Let me get this straight: you not only reboot several times a day, you think it's normal. Right now, my Fedora 10 box hasn't been rebooted in just over five days, and that was because a circuit breaker popped. Before that, I had just over thirty days of uptime since the last kernel update, and I've had it running longer than that a few times. (Just for the record, it's running BOINC 24/7, so it's not like I'm wasting power keeping it running all the time.)
I can remember back when I ran Windows, I didn't see anything wrong with all those reboots, either. Now that I've gone over to Linux, I'm finding it harder and harder to remember why I put up with it. However, it's your computer, not mine, and you're the one who has to use it. If you're happy with Windows and don't mind all of those (to me, at least) inconveniences, there's no reason to change.
Not as long as you remembered that F3 was Help and F7 was Exit. I've not used WordPerfect in at least five or six years and I still remember those two.
If a legislator cannot understand a law that is put before him/her, that legislator should vote against it.
BO's new health-care bill is over a thousand pages. Nobody is even pretending they've had enough time to read it through, let alone understand it. And, BO is doing everything he can to get it pushed through Congress as quickly as possible. Clearly, he doesn't want anybody to know what they're voting on. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
That's because you were comparing it to programs that'd had the benefit of 20 more years of development. Compared to other programs of the same era it was great.
consider that the robot has *all* the instruments, so it doesn't need to do that.
Not so. The robot only has the instruments that were installed before it was sent off. There are limits on the space, mass and energy supply, so it won't ever have *all* the instruments as you so foolishly claimed.
Incidentally, I might add that both MS Word and OpenOffice Writer are still poor shadows of what WordPerfect used to be in terms of its power, even for serious publishing.
How true. Back in the days of WP 5.1, it was the standard word processing program for the legal industry. And, I might add, you never had to fumble with a document trying to figure out what formatting was being applied where. All you needed was to go into Reveal Codes mode, and you could look at the lower half of the screen and see for yourself exactly where the codes were.
If you're talking about Macgyvering tools together, then the human controllers could do that with robots too. The only problem currently is that our robots aren't advanced enough.
Of course not. A human can, however, react to an unexpected circumstance, record the details without being told and do whatever they can to get samples or other information by using whatever equipment they've got and their own initiative. Somehow, I find it hard to believe that a robot is going to be capable of that last.
One thing that bothers me, is that so many young people today act as though they're opposed to anybody, anywhere, risking their lives for any conceivable reason, even if they want to. The Shuttle wasn't put on hold for years after Challanger because the astronauts weren't willing to go up -- they were -- but because the public wasn't willing to let them risk their lives. Pioneers, test pilots, explorers and adventurers expect to risk their lives, and know they won't always survive, but they're willing to try anyway and it's a good thing. Without people like them, we'd still all be back in Europe because Columbus would never have set sail.
say we run into a interesting microbe, and the guy we send down doesn't really know microbes?
How would he even know? If you're going to try a strawman argument, at least erect a plausible one. And, I'm not saying that we shouldn't use robots for a preliminary survey, but that we should plan on getting somebody's boots on the ground as part of the mission.
If a probe scrapes up a soil sample, and there's an odd-colored pebble exposed, that's something unexpected. The probe could do nothing about it, but a human could pick it up and examine it. Yes, that's a trivial example, but it does go to show that there's always room for the unexpected. And, if the odds of there being anything unexpected are so small, why go at all? Looking for the unexpected is what exploration is all about.
Sending robotic probes down from a manned orbiter is not the way to explore Mars, or anyplace else that we can send people. All a probe like that can do is things we planned for before the mission set out. If the designers didn't think of an experiment, there's little if any chance that the probe can be adapted on the spot to do it. Even if there's a way to load different instrument/manipulation packages into a robot before sending it down, you're still limited to what whoever it's loaded with. The whole point of exploration is that you don't (and can't) know in advance what you're going to encounter or what you might need to examine it and robots can't improvise. Yes, the team running the Mars Rovers has done wonders, but only within the narrow limits of what was built into the rovers in the first place. Robots can't react to the unexpected; you need a human for that, and sooner or later, it's going to happen.
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Script writers do that for a very good reason: timing considerations. A TV drama has a one-hour time slot, minus time for commercials, opening and closing; probably about 40 minutes or so for the story. Fiddling around with creative misspellings of names takes time and doesn't move the story along. It's the same reason, BTW, why when somebody on TV turns on the news, the story they're looking for is just starting.
I spent time doing tech support for an ISP. As part of my job, I needed to log into a web page. The server was inside the office firewall, and nobody outside it could log in. Not only were we required to use ten-character passwords (Upper, lower, numeric and punctuation all required.) they expired every sixty days. There was no possible way for an outside attacker to reach that web server, no way that constantly changing our passwords made anything more secure, but we had to do it, probably because somebody in IT realized that they could set it up that way and decided that if they could force passwords to expire, they should, whether it helped or not. What made it worse was, all the Certificates expired and nobody ever bothered to update them. This wouldn't have been so bad (You tell your browser to accept it, and the problem goes away.) but our boxes were locked down so badly that telling the browser that the cert's OK didn't survive a reboot, meaning you had to go through the same song-and-dance several times a day.
No, Germany was the biggest threat to our allies Britain and Russia. And if you don't think Germany could ever have defeated Britain, consider the Battle of The Atlantic. Don't be more of a fool than you have to.
This was because Germany was viewed (and rightly, IMO) as the bigger threat, and the policy was well publicized as "Get Hitler First."
AFAIK, Italy has no interest in censoring the Internet and it's certainly inhabited by strongly religious people. The same goes for Israel, I might add.
And then, of course, they reinstall everything they "need," and they're back where they started. Seriously, I'm not talking about people like that, I'm talking about computer geeks who routinely reinstall Windows on their own boxes and think nothing of it. I once knew a man who insisted that NT 4 was completely stable, but he still reapplied the latest service pack every month because if he didn't, his system started crashing. It's that mindset that I just can't understand.
And you don't see anything wrong with that? Seriously. Why should you have to install the same version of he same OS more than once on a machine? Since I've been using Linux, I've only had to reinstall it twice. Once because just after an upgrade I did something foolish and trashed my Linux partition and once because an upgrade didn't work out well. (The newer version couldn't find my NIC no matter what I did so I ended up wiping and reinstalling the older version. Thank Ghod for backups!) I'm not saying that there's never a reason to reinstall Windows, I'm just saying that I don't understand why you people think regularly reinstalling your OS is normal. Please enlighten me.
Just remember: Nancy Pelosi's district includes San Francisco. Her constituents consider her "middle-of-the-road."
There's another two-dimensional representation that was devised by Jerry Pournelle. One axis goes from people who try to persuade by reason alone to those who depend on pure emotion. The other shows how much the party is interested in change for its own sake. Thus, Libertarians depend on logic ("Just listen to us and you'll see that we're right.") while the nazis moved the masses with appeals to emotion, but they both wanted considerable change.
I've always been one for renaming icons. Back when I was still running Windows, the icon was always renamed to "Not My Computer," especially on a work box.
At least, that's how I read it. Of course, it's also my own position. I use Linux and I try to get other people to try it. If they're happy with Windows, or they try Linux and it doesn't suit them, that's OK with me. After all, it's their computer, not mine.
Oh, I don't know. It sort of reminds me of Blake's 7. I wonder: would that make Balmer Travis or Servalan?
I can remember back when I ran Windows, I didn't see anything wrong with all those reboots, either. Now that I've gone over to Linux, I'm finding it harder and harder to remember why I put up with it. However, it's your computer, not mine, and you're the one who has to use it. If you're happy with Windows and don't mind all of those (to me, at least) inconveniences, there's no reason to change.
Not as long as you remembered that F3 was Help and F7 was Exit. I've not used WordPerfect in at least five or six years and I still remember those two.
BO's new health-care bill is over a thousand pages. Nobody is even pretending they've had enough time to read it through, let alone understand it. And, BO is doing everything he can to get it pushed through Congress as quickly as possible. Clearly, he doesn't want anybody to know what they're voting on. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Background sound in a server room is likely to be a fairly regular hum. Better yet is a geiger counter picking up background radiation.
That's because you were comparing it to programs that'd had the benefit of 20 more years of development. Compared to other programs of the same era it was great.
Not so. The robot only has the instruments that were installed before it was sent off. There are limits on the space, mass and energy supply, so it won't ever have *all* the instruments as you so foolishly claimed.
How true. Back in the days of WP 5.1, it was the standard word processing program for the legal industry. And, I might add, you never had to fumble with a document trying to figure out what formatting was being applied where. All you needed was to go into Reveal Codes mode, and you could look at the lower half of the screen and see for yourself exactly where the codes were.
Of course not. A human can, however, react to an unexpected circumstance, record the details without being told and do whatever they can to get samples or other information by using whatever equipment they've got and their own initiative. Somehow, I find it hard to believe that a robot is going to be capable of that last.
One thing that bothers me, is that so many young people today act as though they're opposed to anybody, anywhere, risking their lives for any conceivable reason, even if they want to. The Shuttle wasn't put on hold for years after Challanger because the astronauts weren't willing to go up -- they were -- but because the public wasn't willing to let them risk their lives. Pioneers, test pilots, explorers and adventurers expect to risk their lives, and know they won't always survive, but they're willing to try anyway and it's a good thing. Without people like them, we'd still all be back in Europe because Columbus would never have set sail.
No, as opposed to a man on Mars who sees an interesting pebble, picks it up and brings it back with him to be studied later.
How would he even know? If you're going to try a strawman argument, at least erect a plausible one. And, I'm not saying that we shouldn't use robots for a preliminary survey, but that we should plan on getting somebody's boots on the ground as part of the mission.
If a probe scrapes up a soil sample, and there's an odd-colored pebble exposed, that's something unexpected. The probe could do nothing about it, but a human could pick it up and examine it. Yes, that's a trivial example, but it does go to show that there's always room for the unexpected. And, if the odds of there being anything unexpected are so small, why go at all? Looking for the unexpected is what exploration is all about.
Low Earth Orbit is halfway to anyplace else in the Solar System.
Sending robotic probes down from a manned orbiter is not the way to explore Mars, or anyplace else that we can send people. All a probe like that can do is things we planned for before the mission set out. If the designers didn't think of an experiment, there's little if any chance that the probe can be adapted on the spot to do it. Even if there's a way to load different instrument/manipulation packages into a robot before sending it down, you're still limited to what whoever it's loaded with. The whole point of exploration is that you don't (and can't) know in advance what you're going to encounter or what you might need to examine it and robots can't improvise. Yes, the team running the Mars Rovers has done wonders, but only within the narrow limits of what was built into the rovers in the first place. Robots can't react to the unexpected; you need a human for that, and sooner or later, it's going to happen.