The gender of nouns doesn't really mean anything, in French at least, except that you sound ignorant if you screw it up. It's just a function of the language.
Computer and robot are both masculine in French. Though I would assume if robots begin to be anything other than androdgynous, we'll see "la robotte" start to come into use.
I owned a bunch of Star Trek paperbacks during my impressionable middle school years. They got packed away, and when I was moving out of my parents' house after college, I went back through the collection. Turns out (shock!) that most Star Trek novels are unspeakably bad...but the Diane Duane Vulcan/Romulan books are really, really good. Those are the only ones I still have on my shelf, and really deserve to be canon. (Well, I still have one about talking cat people who are most definitely not Kzin, but only because it's autographed by Nichelle Nichols.)
TAS is so laughably atrocious that it depresses me anyone even bothers to argue about it being "canon."
No, really. While I was interning at JSC, we got a tour of the robotics lab and got to see Robonaut in action. There's a picture floating around out there somewhere where I'm shaking Robonaut's hand. My eyes are closed and I have a really goofy look on my face. Robonaut is bigger than a person, though not by a lot, and has extra degrees of freedom. It can do things like swivel its wrists in a full circle.
While Robonaut is Really Cool, it's not quite as cool as the article implies. It has extremely limited autonomy...they're still teaching it to do things like tell the difference between a wrench and a screwdriver, since machine vision is not a trivial problem, though when I was there they had gotten it to the stage where it was capable of following commands like "Robonaut, get wrench."
It does much better when piloted by a human. The operator puts on a helmet and Power Glove-looking ensemble, and Robonaut will mimic the operator's actions. The operator has to move slowly, however, because Robonaut can't move all that quickly, and if there are too many intervening actions, the program will miss them and it will take the shortest distance between the start condition and end condition, even if there were intervening movements.
I saw it tie a knot in a rope, under operator guidance, and it was able to take a pen from a programmer's hand, hold it correctly (not clenched in a fist, but held between thumb and forefinger) and write with it.
It doesn't have legs. And the head looks like Boba Fett's helmet. When I asked, the explanation I got was that it's designed to look like a Roman Centurion's helmet, but when the designer told me that, he got a really shifty look on his face, so I know the truth.
Even when it's bad, Stargate SG-1 is still pretty good, which I credit mostly to Richard Dean Anderson's snarky Colonel O'Neill. The writers doomed themselves by getting into a feedback loop of ever-more-powerful technology and bad guys, I think. The last season is going to be a lead-in to the spinoff Stargate Atlantis, which I think (don't quote me) is going to be a miniseries that will turn into the pilot of a series if it's any good. (Which I'm not expecting...anyone remember Legend of the Rangers?) Good on the SG-1 guys for ending the series before it started to suck. Andromeda and Mutant X, on the other hand, started out sucking.
Friends whom I would have sworn were going to get married in full SCA attire or dressed like Imperial Stormtroopers have gone meekly to the altar in white dresses and tuxes because of pressure from family and the spouse-to-be. The wedding is traditionally the province of the bride, and paid for by the bride's family, and many a foot has been put down about wedding details. I imagine conversations something like this:
"Honey, I want to dress like Darth Vader for our wedding." "No, you don't, dear." "But I really--" "No. You. Don't. Dear." "...So, tuxedo with tails, then?"
"And then the minstrels are going to go down the aisle--" "Wouldn't you rather have a nice, traditional wedding?" "Well, SCA is really important to us--" "I'm not paying for my daughter to be married in some medieval Halloween costume."
I suspect many, uh, "creative" wedding plans have been scrapped in favor of domestic tranquility and financing. So when you do get a true geek wedding, it's because both partners are hardcore geeks (or one is very tolerant), and they are secure enough financially and in their relationships with their families to do things their way.
That said...if I ever do lose my mind and get married: Vegas. Elvis impersonator. Biker boots and a leather miniskirt. Then a wild night of drunkenness in which my groom and I frighten old ladies and wake up the next evening with no memory of what transpired. Ah, I have such a soft spot for fantasy weddings.
Seriously. Even if LucasArts does manage to keep it under wraps until the release, if it's not available by about 2:00 am on Sept. 21, I'm going to be very disappointed in all those slavering fanboys out there.
But that doesn't make it any less a losing battle. Arguing on the Internet, Special Olympics, driving a point through the thick layer of bone shielding the miniscule forebrain, etc.
This is great, but your team is the exception. Most of the winning robots are built by the engineers who work for the sponsors, not by the students. And if you don't have a filthy rich sponsor, you're at a disadvantage right out of the gate. My high school team was sponsored by a local machine shop. We were competing against teams sponsored by Raytheon and GE. Even if the students on the other teams had done most of the work on the robots by themselves (which it was glaringly obvious they hadn't), they would still have had access to better equipment, and just plain more cash.
Still, free trip to Florida, and cool button-trading. And if you get eliminated early, more time for Disney World.
I tend to generate playlists based on theme and mood. Sure, there are times when I'll dump my entire music collection into the playlist, but there are other times when I really don't want, say, Sisters of Mercy to be followed directly by Tom Lehrer. Random jumps have a way of killing any mood that may have been building.
And there are some albums that just should not be broken up, as other posters have been saying. Tool's Lateralus comes to mind as one I've been listening to rather often recently.
Nonsense. My anecodotal evidence disproves your anecdotal evidence:
Once, at a convention, we had a room party and got blitzed on various forms of booze, from absinthe to...hmm, can't think of something that begins with z...uh, vodka. That's close. Anyway, it eventually wrapped up and our guests stumbled off to their rooms. My much more sober roommate went to the bathroom to brush his teeth, and I managed to crawl into bed, drunk-dial my boyfriend and leave a rambling message on his voicemail, and fall asleep, all in the five minutes before my roommate came back out.
I don't remember this and only believe it because my boyfriend saved the message and played it back for me when I returned from the con. Sure enough, there I was, telling him that it's 3 in the morning and I miss him and why isn't he picking up the phone? (Not my finest hour, I must say.)
So I was able to unlock the keypad, search the phonebook for a number, and tell time, all while blacked out. Clearly, I am either the next step in evolution, or you're a much sloppier drunk than I am.;)
Okay, just checking. Otherwise, I was going to have to cry.
That said, I think most people would recognize Moonlight Sonata (and several dozen other classical pieces), but not be able to put a name to 'em. Which is what this service is supposed to do...but it will take away one of my sources of trivia cred if it works. "What's that beef music?" "Rodeo, you philistine."
is that US law regards corporations as persons, with rights. While I'm not clear whether or not they are considered "artificial" persons (as distinguished from "natural" persons) and thus their rights would in theory be held subordinate to those of natural persons, corporations can afford better lawyers. In a court system where the smoothest-talking legal team often prevails, you can see the problem.
In this case, a corporation is claiming free speech protections under the First Amendment...which is a load of purest bullshit given the nature of their business, but courts have bought into dumber arguments.
A quick Google for "corporate personhood" will give you a pretty good picture of how Americans who are familiar with the issue feel about it.
Forget datajacks; I want cybereyes, a smartlink, bone lacing, and wired reflexes. I'll be the baddest street sam in Seattle. No, really. CP 2020 and Shadowrun are starting to look less and less like games.
If the US Department of Defense incorporates and starts handing out business cards, or kids start getting born with pointy ears, I'm moving to New Zealand.
It's certainly not a great film, but I found it to be a stylishly-executed if not very deep dystopia. Great set design and cinematography, and well-cast, but the script is mediocre.
I had nothing against this movie until I made the mistake of buying it for my boyfriend and was subjected to it three times in a weekend. For the next month: "I wanna learn gun-kata!"
What confused me is that "nominal" in space systems engineering means "operating normally," which I really don't think is what you meant to say at all.
Though nukes are much more likely to kill me than asteroids, death by nuclear first strike lacks the frisson of being wiped out by giant space rocks. Oh, and you must read Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" if you haven't already.
It was not meant to be about race. I had intended the comment to be a mildly humorous one about not putting up with offensively antisocial behavior, and chose an ethnicity that takes a lot of crap and a response that would rapidly put an end to any of the aforementioned behavior...and any "joke" that requires this much explanation can't be anything close to funny.
But I don't think that any of this makes my point less true. I should have substituted either a different minority about whom bigoted jokes are socially unacceptable, or changed the behavior from "punch in the face" to "stern talking to," but the latter lacks rhetorical, uh, punch.
because that's the reaction that most black men have when they sense racism in you. bam! right in the face.
Yeah, I realized that could come off as racist after I posted. Which leaves me wide open to cries of "hypocrite!" based on the content of my post. I should have chosen a different ethnicity, but I would probably still be getting yelled at.
And this post has garnered the most responses of any I have made to Slashdot, even the "+5, Insightful" ones. *sigh* O tempora, o mores!
those sexist jokes are funny because they are so stupid.
That smacks of "the gentleman doth protest too much" to me.
Naw. I'm implying that black men are more upright and forward than anyone else in fulfilling their societal obligation to beat the daylights out of the obnoxious.;)
I'm not clear on your usage of "nominal." I think you mean "minimal."
Anyway, I'm much more scared of the planet's nuclear arsenal, both because of fallout, and because I think it's way more likely someone in a position of power is going to push the big red button than that the orbit of the Earth will intersect with that of a NEA at exactly the right time. Of course, if big scary aliens are mass-driving us for no apparent reason, I guess all bets are off.;)
Slashdot Mirror
The gender of nouns doesn't really mean anything, in French at least, except that you sound ignorant if you screw it up. It's just a function of the language.
Computer and robot are both masculine in French. Though I would assume if robots begin to be anything other than androdgynous, we'll see "la robotte" start to come into use.
-Carolyn
Cowboy Bebop is a series of mood pieces. It definitely doesn't work for everyone, including me.
But, y'know, it's got Ein the cyber-corgi. Who could not like that?
-Carolyn
I owned a bunch of Star Trek paperbacks during my impressionable middle school years. They got packed away, and when I was moving out of my parents' house after college, I went back through the collection. Turns out (shock!) that most Star Trek novels are unspeakably bad...but the Diane Duane Vulcan/Romulan books are really, really good. Those are the only ones I still have on my shelf, and really deserve to be canon. (Well, I still have one about talking cat people who are most definitely not Kzin, but only because it's autographed by Nichelle Nichols.)
TAS is so laughably atrocious that it depresses me anyone even bothers to argue about it being "canon."
-Carolyn
R'lyeh is nothing. The question is, can you find me? ;)
No, really. While I was interning at JSC, we got a tour of the robotics lab and got to see Robonaut in action. There's a picture floating around out there somewhere where I'm shaking Robonaut's hand. My eyes are closed and I have a really goofy look on my face. Robonaut is bigger than a person, though not by a lot, and has extra degrees of freedom. It can do things like swivel its wrists in a full circle.
While Robonaut is Really Cool, it's not quite as cool as the article implies. It has extremely limited autonomy...they're still teaching it to do things like tell the difference between a wrench and a screwdriver, since machine vision is not a trivial problem, though when I was there they had gotten it to the stage where it was capable of following commands like "Robonaut, get wrench."
It does much better when piloted by a human. The operator puts on a helmet and Power Glove-looking ensemble, and Robonaut will mimic the operator's actions. The operator has to move slowly, however, because Robonaut can't move all that quickly, and if there are too many intervening actions, the program will miss them and it will take the shortest distance between the start condition and end condition, even if there were intervening movements.
I saw it tie a knot in a rope, under operator guidance, and it was able to take a pen from a programmer's hand, hold it correctly (not clenched in a fist, but held between thumb and forefinger) and write with it.
It doesn't have legs. And the head looks like Boba Fett's helmet. When I asked, the explanation I got was that it's designed to look like a Roman Centurion's helmet, but when the designer told me that, he got a really shifty look on his face, so I know the truth.
Anyway...Robonaut linkage.
-Carolyn
Even when it's bad, Stargate SG-1 is still pretty good, which I credit mostly to Richard Dean Anderson's snarky Colonel O'Neill. The writers doomed themselves by getting into a feedback loop of ever-more-powerful technology and bad guys, I think. The last season is going to be a lead-in to the spinoff Stargate Atlantis, which I think (don't quote me) is going to be a miniseries that will turn into the pilot of a series if it's any good. (Which I'm not expecting...anyone remember Legend of the Rangers?) Good on the SG-1 guys for ending the series before it started to suck. Andromeda and Mutant X, on the other hand, started out sucking.
-Carolyn
Friends whom I would have sworn were going to get married in full SCA attire or dressed like Imperial Stormtroopers have gone meekly to the altar in white dresses and tuxes because of pressure from family and the spouse-to-be. The wedding is traditionally the province of the bride, and paid for by the bride's family, and many a foot has been put down about wedding details. I imagine conversations something like this:
"Honey, I want to dress like Darth Vader for our wedding." "No, you don't, dear." "But I really--" "No. You. Don't. Dear." "...So, tuxedo with tails, then?"
"And then the minstrels are going to go down the aisle--" "Wouldn't you rather have a nice, traditional wedding?" "Well, SCA is really important to us--" "I'm not paying for my daughter to be married in some medieval Halloween costume."
I suspect many, uh, "creative" wedding plans have been scrapped in favor of domestic tranquility and financing. So when you do get a true geek wedding, it's because both partners are hardcore geeks (or one is very tolerant), and they are secure enough financially and in their relationships with their families to do things their way.
That said...if I ever do lose my mind and get married: Vegas. Elvis impersonator. Biker boots and a leather miniskirt. Then a wild night of drunkenness in which my groom and I frighten old ladies and wake up the next evening with no memory of what transpired. Ah, I have such a soft spot for fantasy weddings.
-Carolyn
Seriously. Even if LucasArts does manage to keep it under wraps until the release, if it's not available by about 2:00 am on Sept. 21, I'm going to be very disappointed in all those slavering fanboys out there.
-Carolyn
But that doesn't make it any less a losing battle. Arguing on the Internet, Special Olympics, driving a point through the thick layer of bone shielding the miniscule forebrain, etc.
But your boots are unspeakably awesome.
-Carolyn
This is great, but your team is the exception. Most of the winning robots are built by the engineers who work for the sponsors, not by the students. And if you don't have a filthy rich sponsor, you're at a disadvantage right out of the gate. My high school team was sponsored by a local machine shop. We were competing against teams sponsored by Raytheon and GE. Even if the students on the other teams had done most of the work on the robots by themselves (which it was glaringly obvious they hadn't), they would still have had access to better equipment, and just plain more cash.
Still, free trip to Florida, and cool button-trading. And if you get eliminated early, more time for Disney World.
-Carolyn
I tend to generate playlists based on theme and mood. Sure, there are times when I'll dump my entire music collection into the playlist, but there are other times when I really don't want, say, Sisters of Mercy to be followed directly by Tom Lehrer. Random jumps have a way of killing any mood that may have been building.
And there are some albums that just should not be broken up, as other posters have been saying. Tool's Lateralus comes to mind as one I've been listening to rather often recently.
-Carolyn
Nonsense. My anecodotal evidence disproves your anecdotal evidence:
;)
Once, at a convention, we had a room party and got blitzed on various forms of booze, from absinthe to...hmm, can't think of something that begins with z...uh, vodka. That's close. Anyway, it eventually wrapped up and our guests stumbled off to their rooms. My much more sober roommate went to the bathroom to brush his teeth, and I managed to crawl into bed, drunk-dial my boyfriend and leave a rambling message on his voicemail, and fall asleep, all in the five minutes before my roommate came back out.
I don't remember this and only believe it because my boyfriend saved the message and played it back for me when I returned from the con. Sure enough, there I was, telling him that it's 3 in the morning and I miss him and why isn't he picking up the phone? (Not my finest hour, I must say.)
So I was able to unlock the keypad, search the phonebook for a number, and tell time, all while blacked out. Clearly, I am either the next step in evolution, or you're a much sloppier drunk than I am.
-Carolyn
I bow to your superior knowledge of musical forms. :D
-Carolyn
Ah, yes. 4'33". Similar to my opus "Dead Air," which I play all the time on my cell phone. Mine is a fugue, though, because it keeps happening. ;)
-Carolyn
Okay, just checking. Otherwise, I was going to have to cry.
That said, I think most people would recognize Moonlight Sonata (and several dozen other classical pieces), but not be able to put a name to 'em. Which is what this service is supposed to do...but it will take away one of my sources of trivia cred if it works. "What's that beef music?" "Rodeo, you philistine."
-Carolyn
Moonlight Sonata? "Obscure?" That was a joke, yes?
-Carolyn
is that US law regards corporations as persons, with rights. While I'm not clear whether or not they are considered "artificial" persons (as distinguished from "natural" persons) and thus their rights would in theory be held subordinate to those of natural persons, corporations can afford better lawyers. In a court system where the smoothest-talking legal team often prevails, you can see the problem.
In this case, a corporation is claiming free speech protections under the First Amendment...which is a load of purest bullshit given the nature of their business, but courts have bought into dumber arguments.
A quick Google for "corporate personhood" will give you a pretty good picture of how Americans who are familiar with the issue feel about it.
-Carolyn
Forget datajacks; I want cybereyes, a smartlink, bone lacing, and wired reflexes. I'll be the baddest street sam in Seattle. No, really. CP 2020 and Shadowrun are starting to look less and less like games.
If the US Department of Defense incorporates and starts handing out business cards, or kids start getting born with pointy ears, I'm moving to New Zealand.
-Carolyn
It's certainly not a great film, but I found it to be a stylishly-executed if not very deep dystopia. Great set design and cinematography, and well-cast, but the script is mediocre.
I had nothing against this movie until I made the mistake of buying it for my boyfriend and was subjected to it three times in a weekend. For the next month: "I wanna learn gun-kata!"
-Carolyn
I have *so much* reading to do before September.
And the Retros are going to be almost impossible, especially Best Novel. I had no idea 1953 was such a good year for SF novels.
-Carolyn
What confused me is that "nominal" in space systems engineering means "operating normally," which I really don't think is what you meant to say at all.
Though nukes are much more likely to kill me than asteroids, death by nuclear first strike lacks the frisson of being wiped out by giant space rocks. Oh, and you must read Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" if you haven't already.
-Carolyn
See my response to another poster, below.
It was not meant to be about race. I had intended the comment to be a mildly humorous one about not putting up with offensively antisocial behavior, and chose an ethnicity that takes a lot of crap and a response that would rapidly put an end to any of the aforementioned behavior...and any "joke" that requires this much explanation can't be anything close to funny.
But I don't think that any of this makes my point less true. I should have substituted either a different minority about whom bigoted jokes are socially unacceptable, or changed the behavior from "punch in the face" to "stern talking to," but the latter lacks rhetorical, uh, punch.
-Carolyn
because that's the reaction that most black men have when they sense racism in you. bam! right in the face.
Yeah, I realized that could come off as racist after I posted. Which leaves me wide open to cries of "hypocrite!" based on the content of my post. I should have chosen a different ethnicity, but I would probably still be getting yelled at.
And this post has garnered the most responses of any I have made to Slashdot, even the "+5, Insightful" ones. *sigh* O tempora, o mores!
those sexist jokes are funny because they are so stupid.
That smacks of "the gentleman doth protest too much" to me.
-Carolyn
Naw. I'm implying that black men are more upright and forward than anyone else in fulfilling their societal obligation to beat the daylights out of the obnoxious. ;)
-Carolyn
I'm not clear on your usage of "nominal." I think you mean "minimal."
;)
Anyway, I'm much more scared of the planet's nuclear arsenal, both because of fallout, and because I think it's way more likely someone in a position of power is going to push the big red button than that the orbit of the Earth will intersect with that of a NEA at exactly the right time. Of course, if big scary aliens are mass-driving us for no apparent reason, I guess all bets are off.
-Carolyn