The amazing thing, to me, is that the Moon's diameter as viewed from the Earth is almost exactly the same as that of the Sun. I've heard that, of the moons in the Solar System, only a handful subtend the same arc as the Sun when viewed from their primary's surface (though of course "surface" is a tricky concept when we're talking about the gas giants), and of those, I don't think many of them are spherical. The kind of diamond rings we get during eclipses are probably quite rare.
Do you really think that China invaded Tibet out of pure malevolence?
Of course not. I'm actually something of an apologist when it comes to the Chinese occupation of Tibet. What I'm saying is this: The US has done lots of bad things in the past, and has continued to do lots of bad things right up into the present. China has done lots of bad things in the past, and has equally continued into the present. Neither country can blame the empires that preceded them for their wrongdoings; they both need to admit their mistakes and work to make up for them.
It sounds like you're saying the US hasn't done anything wrong recently, and that it's effectively innocent now: "just like the US did" (emphasis mine), or your references to things that happened more than a hundred years ago in US history, without reference to oppression that continues to happen. Both China and the US continue to oppress minorities in the present, right now. Neither one can blame those problems on empires that preceded them. We need to be conscious of the historical context, yes, but just because someone 50 or 150 years ago oppressed my people, that doesn't mean it's okay for them to continue to do so in the present. That simply isn't an excuse in either case, and it sounds a bit like you're implying that it is.
You make it sound like the US government was trying to do the right thing from the start, but just having to deal with the problems left over from the French and British empires. That argument is wrong in at least two ways:
1. The US government has done terrible things to Native Americans right up to the present. The US has only recently started to act as if Native American and African American rights are important (and of course it's still a long way from correcting the problems that still exist). That is to say, the US has created plenty of its own problems; not everything can be blamed on the empires that preceded it.
2. Even if we accept "we're dealing with problems left over from dead empires" as an excuse, then China can use it, too: "We're not racists, we're just trying to correct inequities left over from the Qing Dynasty."
I started Linux with Mandriva 9.1, then later used 10.1 and 2007. They slowly got things working better in some ways, but every major release meant tons of important broken packages. In 2007, Firestarter, XEphem and Gweled were quite completely broken, as I remember it. Setting up my Wacom tablet meant huge headaches every major release. They never got a decent package management system (rpmdrake is a huge pain to use; dependency hell was all over the place, the GUI quite often didn't actually select the packages I clicked on and many more problems). Et cetera.
Around that time, Ubuntu was getting a lot more press. I tried it and have never gone back. Ubuntu has its problems -- there was some package missing from Gnome that required quite a bit of hunting down to get my themes working, for example, which wasn't a problem in Mandriva -- but overall, it's vastly superior. Package management, Wacom setup, a million little interface choices -- Ubuntu steals headlines from Mandriva for good reason.
Mandriva was a good distro to start with. It gave me a lot of explanation and hand-holding where I needed it. But given a choice, I would've used Ubuntu right from the start and never tried Mandriva.
I would really like to learn Blender. I own a full seat of Lightwave 7.5, but using it means booting into Windows, and Blender certainly seems like it should be able to do what I want. But actually using it is a pain (as so many others have said, the UI leaves a lot to be desired), and learning it is just as much of a pain. I bought the Blender 2.3 Guide -- yes, I really want to support the project -- but it's so poorly written, or so poorly translated, that it's effectively impossible to use.
Have they come out with a manual written in good, clear English? And who will give me a free copy in exchange for the useless manual I currently have?
Are there seriously no women in their LUG? Why not? Reaching out to sororities makes a good joke, but it does almost nothing to address the real issues. Maybe they should actually reach out to, and acknowledge, the geek women who already exist.
But then, this is Slashdot, where it usually seems that every poster is assumed to be male, and where every Linux user is assumed to be male, and every geek and nerd is assumed to be male, so I'm probably just asking for a headache.
OO.o Writer has the "Default Formatting" option at the top of the right-click menu. Click that and whatever style a block of text is in, it goes immediately to the default I've defined for that style. In Word, trying to do the same thing simply doesn't work. Word will ask me if I want to update the style to match the text block, or in 2007, make it impossible to apply default formatting to text. I'm probably missing something, but it seems like there is just no way to make a block of text conform to its base style with a click or two in Word 2007. Selecting text and clicking or double-clicking on the style -- which would seem the most natural way to do it -- does nothing. The fact that Writer has this feature and Word doesn't means that Writer wins, hands down, for me.
Writer also handles Asian fonts better -- with separate font settings for each style, one for Asian languages and one for Western. So if I want, say, Palatino Linotype for the English and AR PL Kaiti M for the Chinese, it's easy. Doing the same thing in Word has (so far) been impossible. It's either a nice font for Chinese or a nice font for English, but not both in the same style.
Now if I could just get Writer to display the fonts list in Styles more quickly...
One of the reasons I decided to leave Taiwan was that it got too depressing when I'd occasionally hear little kids say, "Look, mommy, a star!" A star, because usually they saw none at all.
In Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, intelligences vastly superior to humanity ("Minds") are the ones in power. The humans still have lots of fun and don't want for material or intellectual freedom, however, because the Minds aren't interested in oppressing anyone. They like being nice.
I disagree with some of his premises, though. He assumes that there will be an economic singularity, where anyone will be able to have anything they could want and people will therefore settle for "enough". We've already pretty much had that -- the industrial revolution -- and all that shows me is that, when it becomes possible to produce things at a vastly cheaper rate, inequalities in the system still allow some people to get richer and force others to get poorer. We're seeing it right now: continual improvements in efficiency (computers, chemical engineering, new manufacturing processes, etc.) don't result in everyone having more leisure time, unless we count "unemployed and looking for work" as leisure time. Instead, the people at the top benefit far more than everyone else, and those on the bottom have to work longer hours, for lower pay, lower benefits and lower satisfaction. When it becomes possible for one person to do the work of three, the one doesn't usually want to share their money with the two who have nothing to do.
So for us to get where the Culture is, there would have to be a revolution -- if not physically violent, then at least mentally. Perhaps creating Minds who are, by their natures, compassionate and egalitarian, could be that revolution. I'm just not convinced such a thing could ever occur. It makes for great science fiction, though.
Unfortunately, it's not just a 'today' thing for me. No matter what I set my threshold to, I only ever see about 20% of the total posts, unless I actually click on each one to open it. I should figure out why that is someday when I have the time... Maybe in a decade or two.
Ridley Scott's vision of Los Angeles always seemed amazingly futuristic and innovative to me until I went to live in Taiwan. Los Angeles 2019 = Taibei/Taipei 2002 with more white people. The mix of dirty and ultracool newness is very, very close to what things look like in Taiwan. And if you go across the straits to China, things look even more like Blade Runner.
For those who want a replacement for the great Dragon magazines of old, subscribing to Pyramid is a good idea. It fills a very similar niche to those old great Dragons: lots of very interesting articles about many games, not just ones by the magazine's publishers themselves, as well as good reviews, industry analysis, a forum, etc.
But the book and movie were made together, and are supposed to go together, it was an artistic experiment.
Not true. The movie was written first. It was inspired by Clarke's "The Sentinel" and Borges' "The Aleph", but while the actual writing was done by Clarke, Kubrick demanded so many rewrites that Clarke himself admits that he didn't really write 2001 -- Kubrick did. The book was based on Clarke's understanding of what was going on in the movie, but the two stories are not the same, because (among other things) Kubrick is not Clarke. It's like saying that you have to watch Blade Runner to understand Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Yes, both works are strongly related, but they're not designed as a unitary whole, and treating them as such will lead you astray.
Wait, you're not saying that 2001: A Space Odyssey was based on a book, are you?
My #1 wish for Gnome: A decent menu editor
on
Gnome 2.18 Released
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· Score: 1
The current menu editing app in Gnome, Alacarte, is better than previous menu editors but is still quite bad. Creating new sub-menus is pretty much impossible, so if I have (say) a large number of Games, I end up with a huge list that takes forever to scroll through. It'd be nice if I could create (again using the Games example) a sub-menu for Strategy and then drag-and-drop strategy game icons into it. This supposedly works now, but not in actual fact; I can click on the icon and drag it, but it either doesn't drop into the sub-menu, or drops the wrong icon (!). And there's no way to delete a sub-menu once it's created, so trying to use the menu editor actually creates more of a mess than it gets rid of. Alacarte is still better than previous menu editors, but it has a long way to go before it's actually good.
What height exaggeration were the flyovers done with? NASA has a long history of doing planetary animations that make things look way taller than they actually are, apparently in an attempt to make the animations appeal more to the public. Are these flyovers similarly exaggerated? If so, I'm not interested.
Sorry, I think my level of facetiousness was unclear. I'm saying that a large part of the public anthropomorphizes Pluto, and that they view Pluto as "a cute underdog who is fighting for its rights against nasty scientists who want to take away its status as a planet", not that that is my view. The IAU's new definition and Pluto's "demotion" is one of the few astronomy-related stories that has gotten major attention in the media recently; it was, I think, the only astronomy story that made it onto my local NPR station's weekday talkshow. And it's one of the few astronomy issues that has any kind of foothold on the public attention span. Herearea fewexamples of what seems to be the general mindset regarding Pluto. And note how many of those things ascribe feelings or intentions to Pluto -- they're doing the anthropomorphizing, not me.
Of course there's lots of research going on; but the public seems to fixate on things that are of little consequence, when they could be getting interested in things that are hugely important to our understanding of the universe and our place in it. And they vote in politicians who make policy decisions about science funding, and a lot of things end up getting cut because (again, facetiousness:) "those nasty scientists made Pluto sad".
I, on the other hand, see Pluto as a very interesting object that doesn't have any desires at at of its own, and which deserves a lot more study by us humans. I don't particularly care whether it's a planet or not; as long as the scientific community uses a definition that's consistent and useful, that's fine with me. I await the arrival of New Horizons impatiently.
Honoring Tombaugh is fine. He did some great work. But declaring Pluto a planet as it passes overhead is not honoring him; that's just silliness. It'd be better to find a pre-existing science scholarship and rename it for him, or put up a statue, or donate good telescopes to a few high schools in his name, or declare April to be "Clyde Tombaugh Science Month", than to make some kind of silly protest against the scientific community's agreed definitions.
The saddest thing about all this, to me, is that the legislators probably did this because their constituents demanded it. There are way too many people out there who think that Pluto being declared not a planet is the biggest astronomy story in recent memory. Hints as to the source of gamma ray bursts? Flowing water on Mars? The Hubble's main camera having trouble? Landing a probe on the surface of Titan? More beautiful photography of Saturn than you can shake a stick at? None of those seem to get a grip on the popular consciousness. But Pluto, subject to more anthropomorphizing than any planet should be, somehow gets to be the cute underdog, fighting for its rights against nasty scientists. Blech.
Slashdot Mirror
The amazing thing, to me, is that the Moon's diameter as viewed from the Earth is almost exactly the same as that of the Sun. I've heard that, of the moons in the Solar System, only a handful subtend the same arc as the Sun when viewed from their primary's surface (though of course "surface" is a tricky concept when we're talking about the gas giants), and of those, I don't think many of them are spherical. The kind of diamond rings we get during eclipses are probably quite rare.
Of course not. I'm actually something of an apologist when it comes to the Chinese occupation of Tibet. What I'm saying is this: The US has done lots of bad things in the past, and has continued to do lots of bad things right up into the present. China has done lots of bad things in the past, and has equally continued into the present. Neither country can blame the empires that preceded them for their wrongdoings; they both need to admit their mistakes and work to make up for them.
It sounds like you're saying the US hasn't done anything wrong recently, and that it's effectively innocent now: "just like the US did" (emphasis mine), or your references to things that happened more than a hundred years ago in US history, without reference to oppression that continues to happen. Both China and the US continue to oppress minorities in the present, right now. Neither one can blame those problems on empires that preceded them. We need to be conscious of the historical context, yes, but just because someone 50 or 150 years ago oppressed my people, that doesn't mean it's okay for them to continue to do so in the present. That simply isn't an excuse in either case, and it sounds a bit like you're implying that it is.
You make it sound like the US government was trying to do the right thing from the start, but just having to deal with the problems left over from the French and British empires. That argument is wrong in at least two ways:
1. The US government has done terrible things to Native Americans right up to the present. The US has only recently started to act as if Native American and African American rights are important (and of course it's still a long way from correcting the problems that still exist). That is to say, the US has created plenty of its own problems; not everything can be blamed on the empires that preceded it.
2. Even if we accept "we're dealing with problems left over from dead empires" as an excuse, then China can use it, too: "We're not racists, we're just trying to correct inequities left over from the Qing Dynasty."
I started Linux with Mandriva 9.1, then later used 10.1 and 2007. They slowly got things working better in some ways, but every major release meant tons of important broken packages. In 2007, Firestarter, XEphem and Gweled were quite completely broken, as I remember it. Setting up my Wacom tablet meant huge headaches every major release. They never got a decent package management system (rpmdrake is a huge pain to use; dependency hell was all over the place, the GUI quite often didn't actually select the packages I clicked on and many more problems). Et cetera.
Around that time, Ubuntu was getting a lot more press. I tried it and have never gone back. Ubuntu has its problems -- there was some package missing from Gnome that required quite a bit of hunting down to get my themes working, for example, which wasn't a problem in Mandriva -- but overall, it's vastly superior. Package management, Wacom setup, a million little interface choices -- Ubuntu steals headlines from Mandriva for good reason.
Mandriva was a good distro to start with. It gave me a lot of explanation and hand-holding where I needed it. But given a choice, I would've used Ubuntu right from the start and never tried Mandriva.
I would really like to learn Blender. I own a full seat of Lightwave 7.5, but using it means booting into Windows, and Blender certainly seems like it should be able to do what I want. But actually using it is a pain (as so many others have said, the UI leaves a lot to be desired), and learning it is just as much of a pain. I bought the Blender 2.3 Guide -- yes, I really want to support the project -- but it's so poorly written, or so poorly translated, that it's effectively impossible to use.
Have they come out with a manual written in good, clear English? And who will give me a free copy in exchange for the useless manual I currently have?
Mod parent up!
Are there seriously no women in their LUG? Why not? Reaching out to sororities makes a good joke, but it does almost nothing to address the real issues. Maybe they should actually reach out to, and acknowledge, the geek women who already exist.
But then, this is Slashdot, where it usually seems that every poster is assumed to be male, and where every Linux user is assumed to be male, and every geek and nerd is assumed to be male, so I'm probably just asking for a headache.
Impress already does Flash, at least as of version 2.2. In "Export", one of the options is .swf Flash files.
Just in case no one has yet, I propose the acronym GRAIL: Gamma Ray AnnihIlation Laser. Sounds like they've been seeking it for a while, too...
OO.o Writer has the "Default Formatting" option at the top of the right-click menu. Click that and whatever style a block of text is in, it goes immediately to the default I've defined for that style. In Word, trying to do the same thing simply doesn't work. Word will ask me if I want to update the style to match the text block, or in 2007, make it impossible to apply default formatting to text. I'm probably missing something, but it seems like there is just no way to make a block of text conform to its base style with a click or two in Word 2007. Selecting text and clicking or double-clicking on the style -- which would seem the most natural way to do it -- does nothing. The fact that Writer has this feature and Word doesn't means that Writer wins, hands down, for me.
Writer also handles Asian fonts better -- with separate font settings for each style, one for Asian languages and one for Western. So if I want, say, Palatino Linotype for the English and AR PL Kaiti M for the Chinese, it's easy. Doing the same thing in Word has (so far) been impossible. It's either a nice font for Chinese or a nice font for English, but not both in the same style.
Now if I could just get Writer to display the fonts list in Styles more quickly...
One of the reasons I decided to leave Taiwan was that it got too depressing when I'd occasionally hear little kids say, "Look, mommy, a star!" A star, because usually they saw none at all.
In Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, intelligences vastly superior to humanity ("Minds") are the ones in power. The humans still have lots of fun and don't want for material or intellectual freedom, however, because the Minds aren't interested in oppressing anyone. They like being nice.
I disagree with some of his premises, though. He assumes that there will be an economic singularity, where anyone will be able to have anything they could want and people will therefore settle for "enough". We've already pretty much had that -- the industrial revolution -- and all that shows me is that, when it becomes possible to produce things at a vastly cheaper rate, inequalities in the system still allow some people to get richer and force others to get poorer. We're seeing it right now: continual improvements in efficiency (computers, chemical engineering, new manufacturing processes, etc.) don't result in everyone having more leisure time, unless we count "unemployed and looking for work" as leisure time. Instead, the people at the top benefit far more than everyone else, and those on the bottom have to work longer hours, for lower pay, lower benefits and lower satisfaction. When it becomes possible for one person to do the work of three, the one doesn't usually want to share their money with the two who have nothing to do.
So for us to get where the Culture is, there would have to be a revolution -- if not physically violent, then at least mentally. Perhaps creating Minds who are, by their natures, compassionate and egalitarian, could be that revolution. I'm just not convinced such a thing could ever occur. It makes for great science fiction, though.
Unfortunately, it's not just a 'today' thing for me. No matter what I set my threshold to, I only ever see about 20% of the total posts, unless I actually click on each one to open it. I should figure out why that is someday when I have the time... Maybe in a decade or two.
You're welcome!
I wish Slashdot actually showed all the replies above my set threshold. Then I wouldn't have posted the same thing a dozen other people did.
Bob the Angry Flower's Classic Literature Sequels -- Atlas Shrugged 2: One Hour Later.
I'm sure someone in Xinzhu has one. Wang Yongqing probably has several.
Ridley Scott's vision of Los Angeles always seemed amazingly futuristic and innovative to me until I went to live in Taiwan. Los Angeles 2019 = Taibei/Taipei 2002 with more white people. The mix of dirty and ultracool newness is very, very close to what things look like in Taiwan. And if you go across the straits to China, things look even more like Blade Runner.
I don't actually subscribe -- not enough money. But if I had the money, it'd be the first RPG magazine I'd subscribe to.
Not all kind words are shills.
For those who want a replacement for the great Dragon magazines of old, subscribing to Pyramid is a good idea. It fills a very similar niche to those old great Dragons: lots of very interesting articles about many games, not just ones by the magazine's publishers themselves, as well as good reviews, industry analysis, a forum, etc.
He's probably driving a cab in Chicago, FYI.
Not true. The movie was written first. It was inspired by Clarke's "The Sentinel" and Borges' "The Aleph", but while the actual writing was done by Clarke, Kubrick demanded so many rewrites that Clarke himself admits that he didn't really write 2001 -- Kubrick did. The book was based on Clarke's understanding of what was going on in the movie, but the two stories are not the same, because (among other things) Kubrick is not Clarke. It's like saying that you have to watch Blade Runner to understand Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Yes, both works are strongly related, but they're not designed as a unitary whole, and treating them as such will lead you astray.
Wait, you're not saying that 2001: A Space Odyssey was based on a book, are you?
The current menu editing app in Gnome, Alacarte, is better than previous menu editors but is still quite bad. Creating new sub-menus is pretty much impossible, so if I have (say) a large number of Games, I end up with a huge list that takes forever to scroll through. It'd be nice if I could create (again using the Games example) a sub-menu for Strategy and then drag-and-drop strategy game icons into it. This supposedly works now, but not in actual fact; I can click on the icon and drag it, but it either doesn't drop into the sub-menu, or drops the wrong icon (!). And there's no way to delete a sub-menu once it's created, so trying to use the menu editor actually creates more of a mess than it gets rid of. Alacarte is still better than previous menu editors, but it has a long way to go before it's actually good.
What height exaggeration were the flyovers done with? NASA has a long history of doing planetary animations that make things look way taller than they actually are, apparently in an attempt to make the animations appeal more to the public. Are these flyovers similarly exaggerated? If so, I'm not interested.
Sorry, I think my level of facetiousness was unclear. I'm saying that a large part of the public anthropomorphizes Pluto, and that they view Pluto as "a cute underdog who is fighting for its rights against nasty scientists who want to take away its status as a planet", not that that is my view. The IAU's new definition and Pluto's "demotion" is one of the few astronomy-related stories that has gotten major attention in the media recently; it was, I think, the only astronomy story that made it onto my local NPR station's weekday talkshow. And it's one of the few astronomy issues that has any kind of foothold on the public attention span. Here are a few examples of what seems to be the general mindset regarding Pluto. And note how many of those things ascribe feelings or intentions to Pluto -- they're doing the anthropomorphizing, not me.
Of course there's lots of research going on; but the public seems to fixate on things that are of little consequence, when they could be getting interested in things that are hugely important to our understanding of the universe and our place in it. And they vote in politicians who make policy decisions about science funding, and a lot of things end up getting cut because (again, facetiousness:) "those nasty scientists made Pluto sad".
I, on the other hand, see Pluto as a very interesting object that doesn't have any desires at at of its own, and which deserves a lot more study by us humans. I don't particularly care whether it's a planet or not; as long as the scientific community uses a definition that's consistent and useful, that's fine with me. I await the arrival of New Horizons impatiently.
Honoring Tombaugh is fine. He did some great work. But declaring Pluto a planet as it passes overhead is not honoring him; that's just silliness. It'd be better to find a pre-existing science scholarship and rename it for him, or put up a statue, or donate good telescopes to a few high schools in his name, or declare April to be "Clyde Tombaugh Science Month", than to make some kind of silly protest against the scientific community's agreed definitions.
The saddest thing about all this, to me, is that the legislators probably did this because their constituents demanded it. There are way too many people out there who think that Pluto being declared not a planet is the biggest astronomy story in recent memory. Hints as to the source of gamma ray bursts? Flowing water on Mars? The Hubble's main camera having trouble? Landing a probe on the surface of Titan? More beautiful photography of Saturn than you can shake a stick at? None of those seem to get a grip on the popular consciousness. But Pluto, subject to more anthropomorphizing than any planet should be, somehow gets to be the cute underdog, fighting for its rights against nasty scientists. Blech.