The flip side of your argument is that the writers have to be able to maintain a complicated universe and keep it reasonably consistent. Look at everyone's favorite Trek movie, The Wrath of Khan: In it the writers introduced an unstoppable weapon, the Genesis torpedo. This was a weapon which, much like the Death Star, would make war obsolete. Despite all the subsequent wars with the Borg, Klingons, Cardassians, etc. we never saw the Genesis torpedo again.
And that's not all.
Whatever happened to TNG's metaphasic shielding, which swould let you safely fly right into the sun? What happened to the finding that warp drive destroyed the fabric of space and would make subsequent space travel hazardous? What happened to that soliton wave technology that was supposed to replace warp drive but would have made a dandy weapon? On two or three occasions we've seen technology that could destabilize stars! I've lost count of the number of near omnipotent races the Federation has run into--- lessee, the Metroids, the Organians, Trellane's parents, Charlie X's guardians, the spinning ball of that loved anguish, V'ger, Q's people, the Doud, the Traveler, the Cythereans... what about them?
Who could write sensible stories with all these technologies and gods and societies interacting? It's a mess and it all just needs to be put to rest.
Re:I'm not a Californian
on
Tinfoil Hat House
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· Score: 5, Informative
Not health code, fascist community code, as in "no trucks up on blocks in your front yard", "no neon Looney Tunes paint job for your house", "no satellite dish antennas", "no running a bordello in a residential neighborhood", that sort of thing.
All but #4 was fixed in the next generation model. Roomba is quite nice for carpets, probably not worthwhile for wood floors since they are swept so easily.
Current problems are that the Roomba is poor at cleaning carpets at the baseboard and corners, and that it just can't figure out how to escape from under some office chairs. To me these problems are offset by its ability to vacuum under the bed and the fact that I can be doing something else while it works.
The Roomba moves too slowly to threaten a cat. Cats don't care much for the noise, but one of our cats just sits and watches the Roomba go, and moves aside when it approaches.
The larger R/C cars are another matter. They move quickly and generally scare the crap out of any cat that encounters them.
In one of the most convincing technology demonstrations this reporter has witnessed, I was handed a CD, a wire-wool pan scourer and some permanent marker pens, and invited to scratch or mark the discs. Hard as I tried, I could not make a single mark on the disc with the scourer. And the ink simply wiped off.
Wow. Forget DVD's--- when can I get eyeglasses made with this goop?
The problem with turning off "open safe files" is that Apple's definition of safe files is too broad. It lumps executable code in with things like movies and sound files. The result is that with the option disabled you have to manually open music samples at online music stores, the same for clips downloaded from NPR. You have to manually open PDF files and downloaded images. It really makes web browsing a lot more inconvenient.
The right thing to do is to not consider widgets to be "safe", and it looks like that's what Apple is going to do.
Better yet read Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time which makes the obvious point that time travelers ain't gonna congregate at some party at MIT, they're going to meet at some BIG historical event like the Crucifixion.
I want devices grouped by how I use and abuse them.
Sure you do, until the price/performance/convenience reality hits you. Would you pay $100 for a phone, plus $300 for an iPod, plus $200 for a still cam, plus $400 for a camcoder, plus $300 for a PDA, plus $20 for a USB keychain disk, etc etc, or $300 for one device that fits in your pocket and does all of this?
You mean "and does all this poorly." It's not like a Swiss army knife; these combo phones are like a cheap, flimsy, tradeshow swag knockoff.
Bloggers have been calling themselves journalists for a while now. We'll see how seriously these guys take the responsibity, that is, we'll see if any of them be willing to go to jail to protect their sources.
I don't think anyone has launched anything into a retrograde orbit. Everything is launched into the east because the vehicle benefits from the several hundred miles per hour imparted by Earth's rotation. Launch in the opposite direction and that rotation works against you. So there shouldn't be any junk in true retrograde orbits. Polar orbits, on the other hand...
Who the fuck cares about how much the jetstream helped or didn't help? That's not the point of the flight. The point of the flight was to break the boundries of human imagination.
Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager's feat nearly twenty years ago was astonishing. Fossett's feat by comparison just added in sleep deprivation. Sorry, but staying up for days on end is something most people here on slashdot are very familiar with. So Fossett's feat is not so impressive, particularly if there were drugs involved.
What do you say to film producer who produced a world wide smash hit but is only able to recover $20 of a $1,000,000 production cost?
Sounds vaguely familiar.
"Won't programmers starve?"
I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get any money for standing on the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making faces, and starving. We do something else.
But that is the wrong answer because it accepts the questioner's implicit assumption: that without ownership of software, programmers cannot possibly be paid a cent. Supposedly it is all or nothing.
The real reason programmers will not starve is that it will still be possible for them to get paid for programming; just not paid as much as now.
Though I have my own ideas on how the movie studios could save money. STOP PAYING THEM SO MUCH. I mean how many studios are there? A dozen at most? If they all colluded and salary capped the stars to say 50,000$ per movie [give or take] we wouldn't have "multi-million dollar movies" where most of the money goes to the actors and not the actual crew behind the scenes WHO ACTUALLY MAKE IT HAPPEN.
(n mod 10) = (n^k mod 10) iff (k mod 4) = 1. (n > 0, k > 0)
Since we use base 10 arithmetic (n mod 10) means we just look at the last digit. Digits repeat every fourth iteration when computing the powers of a natural number.
Winamp is a nice piece of software indeed, but I take it you have never tried this.
Much, much better. Uses less memory, plays anything you throw at it, great community, it's free - anything else I'm missing?
*kroop* Windows only *kaff*
Re:not "oh jesus" - just 10 300gb disk..
on
The Music Man
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· Score: 1
Mac OS X has software RAID. It didn't sound like the dude was using it though...:-/
Because nanotech and fusion power combined will make production of anything dirtcheap. You'll license designs covered by IP rights for your nanofactory, which will build the thing out of basic atoms. There will be free designs, government-made and/or open source. The poor will have access to nearly free production of low-quality goods, and the rich will be able to afford the luxuries of IP-protected designs.
Who always takes direct advantage of new technology first? The military. They will find a way to kill us all with nanotech long before any factories are built to feed the poor. And our leaders will find it impossible to resist using these weapons.
The eventually of AI I'll accept but roving nanobots still seems like fantasy to me. The only thing we're successfully miniaturizing fast enough to save Kurzweil from involuntary discorporation is computing power. Kurzweil better hope we develop fast enough machines, good enough software and neuroscience to be able to download his mind into a machine before his body rots away. I still think it's a long shot given his age.
Come on guys, piracy isnt a fact of doing business, any more than physical theft from Walmart, or defrauding your favourite bank.
Bad analogy. Shoplifting and bank robbery are definitely facts of doing business. As long as we live in a society where some people are living outdoors and some aren't getting enough to eat, stealing is going to be fact of life in our society. The laws of nature trump the laws of man every time.
Domain names aren't as important as they were in the 1990's. If you want to find something on the web, you go to a search engine now. I think that typing fooblab.com in the address bar and hoping for the best went out of style when porn sites starting parking redirect pages everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's not all. Whatever happened to TNG's metaphasic shielding, which swould let you safely fly right into the sun? What happened to the finding that warp drive destroyed the fabric of space and would make subsequent space travel hazardous? What happened to that soliton wave technology that was supposed to replace warp drive but would have made a dandy weapon? On two or three occasions we've seen technology that could destabilize stars! I've lost count of the number of near omnipotent races the Federation has run into--- lessee, the Metroids, the Organians, Trellane's parents, Charlie X's guardians, the spinning ball of that loved anguish, V'ger, Q's people, the Doud, the Traveler, the Cythereans... what about them?
Who could write sensible stories with all these technologies and gods and societies interacting? It's a mess and it all just needs to be put to rest.
Not health code, fascist community code, as in "no trucks up on blocks in your front yard", "no neon Looney Tunes paint job for your house", "no satellite dish antennas", "no running a bordello in a residential neighborhood", that sort of thing.
Current problems are that the Roomba is poor at cleaning carpets at the baseboard and corners, and that it just can't figure out how to escape from under some office chairs. To me these problems are offset by its ability to vacuum under the bed and the fact that I can be doing something else while it works.
The larger R/C cars are another matter. They move quickly and generally scare the crap out of any cat that encounters them.
Wow. Forget DVD's--- when can I get eyeglasses made with this goop?
The right thing to do is to not consider widgets to be "safe", and it looks like that's what Apple is going to do.
Indeed. You're better off trusting Wired than trusting the so-called editors here, who can't even be troubled to RTFA.
Better yet read Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time which makes the obvious point that time travelers ain't gonna congregate at some party at MIT, they're going to meet at some BIG historical event like the Crucifixion.
Sure you do, until the price/performance/convenience reality hits you. Would you pay $100 for a phone, plus $300 for an iPod, plus $200 for a still cam, plus $400 for a camcoder, plus $300 for a PDA, plus $20 for a USB keychain disk, etc etc, or $300 for one device that fits in your pocket and does all of this?
You mean "and does all this poorly." It's not like a Swiss army knife; these combo phones are like a cheap, flimsy, tradeshow swag knockoff.
Bloggers have been calling themselves journalists for a while now. We'll see how seriously these guys take the responsibity, that is, we'll see if any of them be willing to go to jail to protect their sources.
I don't think anyone has launched anything into a retrograde orbit. Everything is launched into the east because the vehicle benefits from the several hundred miles per hour imparted by Earth's rotation. Launch in the opposite direction and that rotation works against you. So there shouldn't be any junk in true retrograde orbits. Polar orbits, on the other hand...
Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager's feat nearly twenty years ago was astonishing. Fossett's feat by comparison just added in sleep deprivation. Sorry, but staying up for days on end is something most people here on slashdot are very familiar with. So Fossett's feat is not so impressive, particularly if there were drugs involved.
"Won't programmers starve?"
I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get any money for standing on the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making faces, and starving. We do something else.
But that is the wrong answer because it accepts the questioner's implicit assumption: that without ownership of software, programmers cannot possibly be paid a cent. Supposedly it is all or nothing.
The real reason programmers will not starve is that it will still be possible for them to get paid for programming; just not paid as much as now.
The above is excerpted from the GNU Manifesto.
In the U.S. doing so would be a felony.
This fails if A or B is zero because A * B will lose information.
At those temperatures could anyone tell the difference?
With thirty billion in the bank I think they can just have him killed.
(n mod 10) = (n^k mod 10) iff (k mod 4) = 1. (n > 0, k > 0)
Since we use base 10 arithmetic (n mod 10) means we just look at the last digit. Digits repeat every fourth iteration when computing the powers of a natural number.
Numbers ending with:
1 -> 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,...
2 -> 2,4,8,6,2,4,8,6,2,...
3 -> 3,9,7,1,3,9,7,1,3,...
5 -> 5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,...
You can see the period 4 cycles for 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9 as well. Since the digits repeat, the value of (n^k mod 10) must also repeat as k increases.
Wot?! We were actually mourning about the death of a Windows-only app on Slashdot. Get the smelling salts, I ... *klunk*
*kroop* Windows only *kaff*
Mac OS X has software RAID. It didn't sound like the dude was using it though... :-/
Who always takes direct advantage of new technology first? The military. They will find a way to kill us all with nanotech long before any factories are built to feed the poor. And our leaders will find it impossible to resist using these weapons.
The eventually of AI I'll accept but roving nanobots still seems like fantasy to me. The only thing we're successfully miniaturizing fast enough to save Kurzweil from involuntary discorporation is computing power. Kurzweil better hope we develop fast enough machines, good enough software and neuroscience to be able to download his mind into a machine before his body rots away. I still think it's a long shot given his age.
Bad analogy. Shoplifting and bank robbery are definitely facts of doing business. As long as we live in a society where some people are living outdoors and some aren't getting enough to eat, stealing is going to be fact of life in our society. The laws of nature trump the laws of man every time.
And as for the leak of Halo 2, cry me a river.
Domain names aren't as important as they were in the 1990's. If you want to find something on the web, you go to a search engine now. I think that typing fooblab.com in the address bar and hoping for the best went out of style when porn sites starting parking redirect pages everywhere.