You just don't "get" Jar Jar. The Force channels power through his clumsiness. His "accidents" are guided and/or re-shaped by The Force. It's not like Scooby Doo's F-ups where shear luck catches the bad guy; Jar Jar is divinely-guided chaos.
I can't really argue with that. This makes me sort of sad.
As long as the plot's NOT in Lucas's hands, I'm happy.
Actually, I thought the plots were fine for the prequels. The scripts needed a rewrite to clean up a few details, rework a character or two, and fix dialogue, but the general idea was ok.
Jobs had to literally die before Apple made a large-screen iPhone, and I don't think we'll ever see new physical buttons on an Apple product again thanks to his minimalist design manifesto.
In a world where several BILLION up-and-coming wage earners are ripe to purchase their products, which, incidentally, wouldn't exist if not for the cheap labor still extant in that very same country.
Maybe their regional ads will say 'Designed in California. Made in China'
Probably should actually say 'Designed in California. Made in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. Assembled in China.'
This is why the US system sucks - in the UK I get 4 weeks fully paid sick leave from my employer, and after that a further year of statutory sick pay from the Government. I also get 5 weeks paid holiday against which my sick leave does not count. In addition, I get reasonable accommodation to go see the doctor, dentist, optician, hospital etc etc.
Why is the "land of the free" not similar?
Because, due to history, mainly WW2, vacation as well as sick days and health care have mostly been relegated to the employers rather than by the government. Easy explanation is that it happened because during WW2, there was a pay freeze mandated due to the war effort, so employers started offering healthcare,sickdays, and vacation, above and beyond any required by law, as part of the job offer because that's what they could offer to get new employees in a time of a labor shortage. This continued after the war as it was now a standard part of employment. Thus, the middle class was largely taken care of and there was no large push to get the government involved. The cultural expectation is that if you want better of any of these things, you should get a better job which should just require work on your part. Also coming from that, is the cultural expectation that if you don't have better that what the law demands employers give you, that you are a slacker.
I have it pretty good in the US and get two and half weeks a year of sick time (which carries over from year to year, so at this time, I actually have about five months of sick time since I hardly ever use it) and after ten years, five weeks of vacation time a year (which also carried over). I'm happy where I'm at because while I could probably find a job that pays more, I probably couldn't find one that gave me as much vacation time which is now in higher demand to me than more money.
Many of us are - we take in new information and change our opinions. I used to be a Libertarian...
I still am. While I like Sections 1 & 3 of the Libertarian party platform and don't think any other party has anything like them, I've gotten too old for Section 2 but see it as a pipe dream that would never get implemented even if the Libertarians did get into office.
the American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act permits H-1B portability, provided another employer is willing to sponsor the H-1B worker. claims that H-1Bs are indentured servitude are entirely baseless.
Statements by friends of mine here on H-1B visas would say otherwise. The time it takes to switch over sponsors is usually more than the time given before having to leave the country. They typically lived in fear of getting laid off before they were able to get their green cards or become citizens which was taking years to do.
Common sense is supposed to mean being able to learn from your mistakes. What it usually means is 'why no, I don't have any data to support my statement.
They expect technology to make oil obsolete in 100 years or so.
Which makes you wonder why they're doing fuck all to develop a non-oil-based economy. Eventually they're not going to be able to buy off their unemployed young men or divert them all to a lifetime of study in madrassas.
Because it's still 100 years away. Let others be the pioneers, spend the research money, and then come in and deploy the same tech for cheap.
Yeah, no, not really, though. Most consumers are a lot less idealistic than you seem to think. Even most of the guys who scream "this time they've gone too far! fuck 'em" eventually find a rationalization to stay with Windows.
Consumers yes, Enterprise, perhaps not so much. Enterprise doesn't like to upgrade and stuck with XP till they pretty much had to move to Win7 (although many including my company are still paying for XP patches for current deployments). Enterprise will stick with Win7 as long as they can again. Moving to Win8 looks like a user training issue that would be a nightmare in the Enterprise setting. Of course, few enterprise would consider upgrading anyway while the current standard is still being supported, so Microsoft probably had one or two upgrades to do what they wanted and it wouldn't upset their Enterprise licensed users for Windows and Office that account for a lot of their income. Win10 will probably be the next Enterprise standard and if they do mess it up, it might allow for somebody else to eat some of their market. I've already seen vendors switching to Linux servers for the back end on Enterprise systems. If MS messes things up and it would mean user retraining and software rewriting anyway, vendors and enterprise might look at other options.
Since I'm engaged in humorous speculation, I posit that stable vacuum events are either limited in size and scope or that they travel at less than C, or both.
Great! As a physicist, I eagerly look forward to your supporting math to back up those posits which contradict the math I have already seen.
That's because Microsoft has permitted it to happen. If say there were a 2 year mandatory migration schedule would be working around or removing those roadblocks aggressively. In terms of the roadmap, Microsoft does a great job on the roadmap. The customers though because they wait make things unpredictable for IT.
Sorry. I just don't think you really have worked for large enterprise IT before. The roadmap for a vendor like GE to get customer feedback on Enterprise applications, make those changes, do internal testing, get the FDA to do their testing and certify it, deploy to a test site and work out bugs, then get other enterprises who don't want to be a test site to deploy let alone have the capital budget to do it, is often longer than two years. That's not even counting dependencies on other applications from other vendors whose implementation has to be staggered because it can be the same people doing both projects.
Stick a fork in it, Win3.1 is dead - it should be upgraded to Win98 ASAP.
Requirements - 486/66 8MB ram (16MB recommended, some 386s have this much!), 500MB disk.
Except when it runs some specialized piece of equipment which still works and is needed and the drivers only exist for Win3.1, or the specialized card can't be moved to a newer machine, or everything still works with some special networking app built into the software. Finding people who can still work on Win98 or even finding hardware that will run it can be more difficult than letting sleeping dogs lay. I didn't have a Win3.1 machine at my work, but I was supporting Win95 on Novell networking because of one system that used three barcode scanners that fell into such criteria. they eventually upgraded the system a few years ago and we could get rid of those Win95 machines and the Novell networking servers.
I've run large company IT organizations. If you are managing hundreds of applications (at 10,000 it ain't gonna be dozens) and migrating every 2 years that means you need a large number of full time employees testing new images regularly and migrating applications because you are probably doing more than one application per workday every workday.
Ya, but if most places are like mine, the "good news" is that after one or two such migrations, everything will come to depend on one or two major road blocks and everything will be slowed to their upgrade schedule which will provide more than enough time for everything else and a fairly known roadmap for the future.
I think the Saudis and other OPEC leaders have made it pretty clear that they are targeting low oil prices to kill the new production in North America from shale oil and tar sands.
While shale and tar oils are the main reason that prices have dropped, most of what I have read says that OPEC wants to lower production to increase prices but the Saudis won't go along with it. They are wanting to hurt Iran who is their main opponent in the power plays of the Middle East and that it also hurts Russia which is friends to Iran and makes the US happy, is just a bonus. The Saudis have plenty of cash reserves and some of the lowest to produce cost per barrel for oil. It may hurt their profits a bit, but low period in pricing won't hurt them as much as the various people they don't like.
But memory is better. The sounds are sweeter and the pictures are all photoshopped.
Yes, but it will die with you. We still have my grandparent's, great grandparents photos. However, nobody sat down with them to tell us and write down who or what they were of, so now, nobody knows.
An actual fetish? Certainly. Having associated something external with sex to the point that sexual feelings are impossible without that item is pretty much a disorder and is what a fetish is. Being turned on by something, using something to increase sexual feelings, and liking to dress in leather or participate in games, is not really a fetish if you can sexual gratification without them.
Not everyone needs to go to college, If they can't afford it, there are very good living levels to be made by learning a trade. Hell, plumbers around here make more than some GP physicians at the lower levels.
Yes, but these days in the US, a ditch digger is expected to operate a $100k machine and work without constant supervision to the spec of some detailed plan. Event the trades are going to take extensive training or an apprenticeship. You don't have to go to college, but you'd better get some sort of an education, or you'll be fighting Mexicans for dish washing jobs at a restaurant the rest of your life.
Before we can "invest in technology" we need to have some theoretical basis for said technology to work. Our current understanding of physics provides no plausible mechanism for a living human to travel to these planets. Unless there is a fatal flaw in relativity, it is possible (if not probable) that practical interstellar travel is essentially impossible.
Well, there is plenty of technology to invest in that would head us down that road that would be useful to our current endeavors. We still need the technology and engineering to build a long term space habitat for things like a manned mission to Mars. Given Apollo level funding, drive, and political will, we are still probably 30 years out from having such. Then there's mining and manufacturing in space to worry about. That will continue past the probably 50 years in getting things up and running in a useful manner. There's easily a century of full time work before we even need to worry about things like not having a warp drive.
1) Nah, started to, but it came up as a vice.com webpage, and decided it was better to close the page without reading as that is usually a net win.
2) Well, later, I clicked the later link and at least it was some wordpress page and it said "Civilization" but I an already intrigues with the idea of a life form that eats stars. It would start as any other life, just in a dust cloud around a star rather than in a sludge pit in a planet. All the elements that are found on a planet should also be there, and there in constant input of energy from the star. It forms something like the nano tech grey goo that some think is so much a threat. Evolution is done by some internal mechanism where more efficient mutations in individual parts eventually take over the entire body rather than through fission. Or it could replicate and be more like a dust cloud and probably considered a colony being. It needs to neither form it's own gravity well, nor be blown away by the solar winds that feed it in a time span that would allow it to grow and form. Perhaps in a galaxy where there is little if any heavy elements to nucleate planets. So we end up with a nebula that could be considered a life form. Now the real fun begins, how to make it eat a star? just harvesting energy isn't fun. We'd want it to actually affect the star somehow to get more energy. Perhaps iron bombing it to make it go super nova? Magnetic fields to induce solar flares? Eventually, it would split to leave the dying star for another star, pieces get torn away by passing asteroids, or it ejects smaller parts of itself to maneuver in the system and eventually parts end up in another solar system. Anyway, I'd love to think up some ways to crunch some numbers, but it's now time to go home.
1. It wouldn't single out our star. That's the entire point. Such life would be devouring all stars in the galaxy.
2. This isn't about a single star-eating being/lifeform/civilization. If you read the article, the premise is that there are millions of these things. Which there must be, if they are to exist at all. The only thing stupider than a galaxy full of star eaters is a galaxy with only one star eater.
1) Well, only certain types of stars might be 'digestible'. Some might be too small, too large, not the right type, etc for the type of feeding the creature wants. So, such life might not be in the market for all stars in the galaxy.
2) Considering that it is a hypothetical type of life that we know nothing about and is by definition much different from ourselves, I'd say it's about equal to say there might be one as opposed to a galaxy full. Not to say it might not reproduce, but depending on their food source, the type of star, and the availability of them, there will still be a certain population that a galaxy can support, which might not be one, but a very few.
Yahweh in the old testament is pretty much a real son of a bitch, no different than the angry father next door beating his kid for their lack of compliance. Though, somehow, you call the cop on latter, and prey the former.
My history is a little rusty, but isn't yahweh of the old testament and allah the same god?
Pretty much. A large part of the Koran is just a retelling of the old testament. While the Koran says that Christians are the most like the Moslems, both Christianity and Judaism are "People of the Book". It's just that the teachings of earlier prophets who taught those two religions were corrupted.
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You just don't "get" Jar Jar. The Force channels power through his clumsiness. His "accidents" are guided and/or re-shaped by The Force. It's not like Scooby Doo's F-ups where shear luck catches the bad guy; Jar Jar is divinely-guided chaos.
I can't really argue with that. This makes me sort of sad.
As long as the plot's NOT in Lucas's hands, I'm happy.
Actually, I thought the plots were fine for the prequels. The scripts needed a rewrite to clean up a few details, rework a character or two, and fix dialogue, but the general idea was ok.
Jobs had to literally die before Apple made a large-screen iPhone, and I don't think we'll ever see new physical buttons on an Apple product again thanks to his minimalist design manifesto.
Thank god.
In a world where several BILLION up-and-coming wage earners are ripe to purchase their products, which, incidentally, wouldn't exist if not for the cheap labor still extant in that very same country.
Maybe their regional ads will say 'Designed in California. Made in China'
Probably should actually say 'Designed in California. Made in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. Assembled in China.'
This is why the US system sucks - in the UK I get 4 weeks fully paid sick leave from my employer, and after that a further year of statutory sick pay from the Government. I also get 5 weeks paid holiday against which my sick leave does not count. In addition, I get reasonable accommodation to go see the doctor, dentist, optician, hospital etc etc.
Why is the "land of the free" not similar?
Because, due to history, mainly WW2, vacation as well as sick days and health care have mostly been relegated to the employers rather than by the government. Easy explanation is that it happened because during WW2, there was a pay freeze mandated due to the war effort, so employers started offering healthcare,sickdays, and vacation, above and beyond any required by law, as part of the job offer because that's what they could offer to get new employees in a time of a labor shortage. This continued after the war as it was now a standard part of employment. Thus, the middle class was largely taken care of and there was no large push to get the government involved. The cultural expectation is that if you want better of any of these things, you should get a better job which should just require work on your part. Also coming from that, is the cultural expectation that if you don't have better that what the law demands employers give you, that you are a slacker.
I have it pretty good in the US and get two and half weeks a year of sick time (which carries over from year to year, so at this time, I actually have about five months of sick time since I hardly ever use it) and after ten years, five weeks of vacation time a year (which also carried over). I'm happy where I'm at because while I could probably find a job that pays more, I probably couldn't find one that gave me as much vacation time which is now in higher demand to me than more money.
Many of us are - we take in new information and change our opinions. I used to be a Libertarian...
I still am. While I like Sections 1 & 3 of the Libertarian party platform and don't think any other party has anything like them, I've gotten too old for Section 2 but see it as a pipe dream that would never get implemented even if the Libertarians did get into office.
the American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act permits H-1B portability, provided another employer is willing to sponsor the H-1B worker. claims that H-1Bs are indentured servitude are entirely baseless.
Statements by friends of mine here on H-1B visas would say otherwise. The time it takes to switch over sponsors is usually more than the time given before having to leave the country. They typically lived in fear of getting laid off before they were able to get their green cards or become citizens which was taking years to do.
That's common sense.
Common sense is supposed to mean being able to learn from your mistakes. What it usually means is 'why no, I don't have any data to support my statement.
Why was this posted? It's not good art and has no real life applications.
If it pissed you off enough to post about it, it probably was good art.
They expect technology to make oil obsolete in 100 years or so.
Which makes you wonder why they're doing fuck all to develop a non-oil-based economy. Eventually they're not going to be able to buy off their unemployed young men or divert them all to a lifetime of study in madrassas.
Because it's still 100 years away. Let others be the pioneers, spend the research money, and then come in and deploy the same tech for cheap.
Yeah, no, not really, though. Most consumers are a lot less idealistic than you seem to think. Even most of the guys who scream "this time they've gone too far! fuck 'em" eventually find a rationalization to stay with Windows.
Consumers yes, Enterprise, perhaps not so much. Enterprise doesn't like to upgrade and stuck with XP till they pretty much had to move to Win7 (although many including my company are still paying for XP patches for current deployments). Enterprise will stick with Win7 as long as they can again. Moving to Win8 looks like a user training issue that would be a nightmare in the Enterprise setting. Of course, few enterprise would consider upgrading anyway while the current standard is still being supported, so Microsoft probably had one or two upgrades to do what they wanted and it wouldn't upset their Enterprise licensed users for Windows and Office that account for a lot of their income. Win10 will probably be the next Enterprise standard and if they do mess it up, it might allow for somebody else to eat some of their market. I've already seen vendors switching to Linux servers for the back end on Enterprise systems. If MS messes things up and it would mean user retraining and software rewriting anyway, vendors and enterprise might look at other options.
Since I'm engaged in humorous speculation, I posit that stable vacuum events are either limited in size and scope or that they travel at less than C, or both.
Great! As a physicist, I eagerly look forward to your supporting math to back up those posits which contradict the math I have already seen.
That's because Microsoft has permitted it to happen. If say there were a 2 year mandatory migration schedule would be working around or removing those roadblocks aggressively. In terms of the roadmap, Microsoft does a great job on the roadmap. The customers though because they wait make things unpredictable for IT.
Sorry. I just don't think you really have worked for large enterprise IT before. The roadmap for a vendor like GE to get customer feedback on Enterprise applications, make those changes, do internal testing, get the FDA to do their testing and certify it, deploy to a test site and work out bugs, then get other enterprises who don't want to be a test site to deploy let alone have the capital budget to do it, is often longer than two years. That's not even counting dependencies on other applications from other vendors whose implementation has to be staggered because it can be the same people doing both projects.
Stick a fork in it, Win3.1 is dead - it should be upgraded to Win98 ASAP. Requirements - 486/66 8MB ram (16MB recommended, some 386s have this much!), 500MB disk.
Except when it runs some specialized piece of equipment which still works and is needed and the drivers only exist for Win3.1, or the specialized card can't be moved to a newer machine, or everything still works with some special networking app built into the software. Finding people who can still work on Win98 or even finding hardware that will run it can be more difficult than letting sleeping dogs lay. I didn't have a Win3.1 machine at my work, but I was supporting Win95 on Novell networking because of one system that used three barcode scanners that fell into such criteria. they eventually upgraded the system a few years ago and we could get rid of those Win95 machines and the Novell networking servers.
I've run large company IT organizations. If you are managing hundreds of applications (at 10,000 it ain't gonna be dozens) and migrating every 2 years that means you need a large number of full time employees testing new images regularly and migrating applications because you are probably doing more than one application per workday every workday.
Ya, but if most places are like mine, the "good news" is that after one or two such migrations, everything will come to depend on one or two major road blocks and everything will be slowed to their upgrade schedule which will provide more than enough time for everything else and a fairly known roadmap for the future.
Republicrats and Demicans are just about the same. Pretending otherwise is childish. Both create laws to protect their buddies.
Not quite. They have firmly divided up polarizing wedge issues between the two parties to capture as many single issue voters as possible.
I think the Saudis and other OPEC leaders have made it pretty clear that they are targeting low oil prices to kill the new production in North America from shale oil and tar sands.
While shale and tar oils are the main reason that prices have dropped, most of what I have read says that OPEC wants to lower production to increase prices but the Saudis won't go along with it. They are wanting to hurt Iran who is their main opponent in the power plays of the Middle East and that it also hurts Russia which is friends to Iran and makes the US happy, is just a bonus. The Saudis have plenty of cash reserves and some of the lowest to produce cost per barrel for oil. It may hurt their profits a bit, but low period in pricing won't hurt them as much as the various people they don't like.
But memory is better. The sounds are sweeter and the pictures are all photoshopped.
Yes, but it will die with you. We still have my grandparent's, great grandparents photos. However, nobody sat down with them to tell us and write down who or what they were of, so now, nobody knows.
Faxes still used VERY extensively in healthcare! They like that hard copy...
They like a system that gives confirmation that the message has been received.
Having a fetish is a disorder?
An actual fetish? Certainly. Having associated something external with sex to the point that sexual feelings are impossible without that item is pretty much a disorder and is what a fetish is. Being turned on by something, using something to increase sexual feelings, and liking to dress in leather or participate in games, is not really a fetish if you can sexual gratification without them.
The world needs ditch diggers too.
Not everyone needs to go to college, If they can't afford it, there are very good living levels to be made by learning a trade. Hell, plumbers around here make more than some GP physicians at the lower levels.
Yes, but these days in the US, a ditch digger is expected to operate a $100k machine and work without constant supervision to the spec of some detailed plan. Event the trades are going to take extensive training or an apprenticeship. You don't have to go to college, but you'd better get some sort of an education, or you'll be fighting Mexicans for dish washing jobs at a restaurant the rest of your life.
Before we can "invest in technology" we need to have some theoretical basis for said technology to work. Our current understanding of physics provides no plausible mechanism for a living human to travel to these planets. Unless there is a fatal flaw in relativity, it is possible (if not probable) that practical interstellar travel is essentially impossible.
Well, there is plenty of technology to invest in that would head us down that road that would be useful to our current endeavors. We still need the technology and engineering to build a long term space habitat for things like a manned mission to Mars. Given Apollo level funding, drive, and political will, we are still probably 30 years out from having such. Then there's mining and manufacturing in space to worry about. That will continue past the probably 50 years in getting things up and running in a useful manner. There's easily a century of full time work before we even need to worry about things like not having a warp drive.
1) Nah, started to, but it came up as a vice.com webpage, and decided it was better to close the page without reading as that is usually a net win.
2) Well, later, I clicked the later link and at least it was some wordpress page and it said "Civilization" but I an already intrigues with the idea of a life form that eats stars. It would start as any other life, just in a dust cloud around a star rather than in a sludge pit in a planet. All the elements that are found on a planet should also be there, and there in constant input of energy from the star. It forms something like the nano tech grey goo that some think is so much a threat. Evolution is done by some internal mechanism where more efficient mutations in individual parts eventually take over the entire body rather than through fission. Or it could replicate and be more like a dust cloud and probably considered a colony being. It needs to neither form it's own gravity well, nor be blown away by the solar winds that feed it in a time span that would allow it to grow and form. Perhaps in a galaxy where there is little if any heavy elements to nucleate planets. So we end up with a nebula that could be considered a life form. Now the real fun begins, how to make it eat a star? just harvesting energy isn't fun. We'd want it to actually affect the star somehow to get more energy. Perhaps iron bombing it to make it go super nova? Magnetic fields to induce solar flares? Eventually, it would split to leave the dying star for another star, pieces get torn away by passing asteroids, or it ejects smaller parts of itself to maneuver in the system and eventually parts end up in another solar system. Anyway, I'd love to think up some ways to crunch some numbers, but it's now time to go home.
Wrong, and wrong.
1. It wouldn't single out our star. That's the entire point. Such life would be devouring all stars in the galaxy. 2. This isn't about a single star-eating being/lifeform/civilization. If you read the article, the premise is that there are millions of these things. Which there must be, if they are to exist at all. The only thing stupider than a galaxy full of star eaters is a galaxy with only one star eater.
1) Well, only certain types of stars might be 'digestible'. Some might be too small, too large, not the right type, etc for the type of feeding the creature wants. So, such life might not be in the market for all stars in the galaxy.
2) Considering that it is a hypothetical type of life that we know nothing about and is by definition much different from ourselves, I'd say it's about equal to say there might be one as opposed to a galaxy full. Not to say it might not reproduce, but depending on their food source, the type of star, and the availability of them, there will still be a certain population that a galaxy can support, which might not be one, but a very few.
Yahweh in the old testament is pretty much a real son of a bitch, no different than the angry father next door beating his kid for their lack of compliance. Though, somehow, you call the cop on latter, and prey the former.
My history is a little rusty, but isn't yahweh of the old testament and allah the same god?
Pretty much. A large part of the Koran is just a retelling of the old testament. While the Koran says that Christians are the most like the Moslems, both Christianity and Judaism are "People of the Book". It's just that the teachings of earlier prophets who taught those two religions were corrupted.