So we film the Wheel of Time series. If you substract all the costume descriptions and the skirt smoothing/braid pulling (just instruct the actors to do them every time they appear in a scene) you can get the material down to a manageable size.
Oh, and don't use anything past the first three books. That's where it went from "decent LoTR clone" to "let's see how many sideplots I can cram in here". Not that I mind but few people are going to sit through a 1200 minute movie featuring half a dozen main plot arcs at the same time (cleverly hidden among a dozen sideplots).
As Neuromancer is hard to play straight, why not Snow Crash? The Metaverse is much more sensible than old-school cyberspace (hey, it's essentially the blueprint for Second Life), even non-geeks would love CosaNostra Pizza and I'll be damned if any shot of Reason in action won't look awesome.
Granted, nobody would understand what it's all about because the compressed version of the whole Sumeran/Enki/Asherah thing will probably end up incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read the book. Thus the "unfilmable" problem comes full circle...
You are right. Slashdot's gross and criminally negligient failure to add an Ubuntu icon to a story has made me lose all faith in Open Source, Free Software and IT in general. I will now relocate to a lonely pasture in the mountains of Albania where I will stand watch over a gerd of goats until I die of starvation, resting well in the knowledge that never again will someone submit my fragile psyche to the horror of not seeing the Ubuntu logo when reading a story about Ubuntu.
The non-descriptive ones have the advantage of being non-descriptive. We're talking about unambiguous ways of referring to the sun Earth orbits and Earth's moon. "The sun" and "the moon" can be applied to just about any planet and will refer to that planet's sun or moon. We could use "Earth's sun/moon" but that's unwieldy, which provides a disincentive to using it.
We could start capitalizing the words when they refer to the Earthen ones (I'd say "Terran" but that's just another silly foreign word) but then again - would anyone actually use them in that way? Well, anyone outside the German-speaking countries? (And on that note, this convention horribly fails in German where the terms are already capitalized.)
Remember, we're talking about globally unambiguous identifiers. "Sun" and "moon" do not fit, being descriptive terms.
That's the problem: Plural zone. Earth is not one crummy little G2 star, it's a whole lot of crummy little G2 stars. Given that nobody can prove that the total number of Earth's inhabitants isn't several times that of the rest of the known universe, the bureaucrats of the MWTA decided that they had to mention it.
Still better than our local village school. There, you may get suspended if you get into a fight... with a teacher, provided you don't beat up the teacher enough to make him fear you too much to do anything against you. Getting into a fight with a student may only lead to consequences if it happens during class at the teachers don't enter the schoolyard during recess. Oh, and if you injure your opponent hard enough for the police to be called. Yes, we did have cases where ambulances were neccessary.
I wish I was kidding but that school is a goddamn warzone. It's where deadbeat teachers are sent to watch their careers die.
I was thinking about the entire S/N, which should be 20-40 alphanumeric characters (and, of course, nonsequential; maybe an MD5 hash of the order the device was built in prefixed by model information). Provides a nice incentive for the user to change the password, as well. 36^20 is a nice, big search space and 36^40 should be enough to keep any naive attacker at bay until the device has been replaced.
Maybe, if you want to be particularly user-friendly, you could use shorter S/Ns but I wouldn't go below 10 characters, which offers a mere three quadrillion possible passwords.
You can go one step further and just use the S/N. Not quite as secure but the attacker still needs to have at least brief physical access to the device.
Yeah, it is fairly obvious but hey, I would have assumed that automatic drivers also know how to quickly decouple the motor from the wheels. But yeah, it's more natural for manual drivers.
I'm sorry, I forgot step 1.5: "Get backwards". My bad.
(As for the flashers: I'd first reestablish control over the vehicle before turning them on. It might be a good idea to turn them on before pulling over, though; I'll grant you that.)
...good catch. Well, if you're in one of these driving school cars with a second set of pedals on the right side you could reach over and hit the right clutch - but I can see how that might be considered unergonomical. And completely insane.
Alternatively, I might have used the wrong words but since being unreasonable on the internet is much more acceptable than being wrong on the internet I clearly thought of the driving school car thing the whole time.
For sake of completeness, the appropriate equivalent for manual-transmission cars (slightly extended):
1. Take right foot off gas pedal
2. Slam right foot on clutch
3. Slam left foot on brake (can be performed simultaneously with step 2)
4. Steer off the road once it's reasonably safe to do so
5. Turn off engine
6. Engage hand brake
7. Engage emegency lights and follow standard car breakdown procedures
I take "without warning" to refer to the individual shutdowns. Compare this to the scenario of an automatic restart due to an important system service having failed: Windows shows you a dialog explaining it's going to shut down and counts down one minute to let you save any unsaved data you have. A shutdown without warning sounds to me as if Windows just immediately force-quits all applications and then shuts down, which is a bit rude.
I know, Windows 7 RC isn't intended for production environments but still eating the user's data is not something I think Microsoft wants to be associated with again. Even for an EOL'd beta product.
You also need a certificate to practice medicine and drive a car. The law is simply of the opinion that education is too important a thing to let any random hick ruin his children's chance at a decent job by failing to properly prepare them for the school certificate tests. Remember, without a proper school certificate you're not even going to get a job as a burger flipper over here.
Mail is a public service; a utility of sorts. Sure, private entities are theoretically capable, but they continually fail. That is, their raison d'être is to provide the most efficient service to the widest audience possible. However, being profit-oriented business, they without fail place profits above their service requirements.
That would provide a compelling argument to ask for other state-provided services such as transportation or internet access - I think we can all agree that ISPs do an appalling job at providing anyone outside the bigger cities with a decent connection and today internet access is becoming just as important as getting your mail on time. Still, I think that most people would object if you tried to turn communication into a public business again.
The problem is that the braking needs to propagate through the car train before the first car can safely brake, especially if you can't guarantee that the first car will be able to avoid a crash.
The worst-case scenario is if a deer runs onto the street only a few meters in front of the first car while the other lane is inaccessible (for example due to traffic). The first car will not be able to stop in time and neither will the ones behind it - you end up with a mass crash involving every single car in the train.
The failure being solely mechanical still likely points to either a drastic re-engineering to account for the electronics, or an electronics-induced mechanical failure.
Or a case of bad design. Just because we've been building properly working pedals for decades doesn't mean that someone can't come up with one that can get stuck.
A throttle really needs to be designed with safety in mind: IE, under-working not over-working. In other words, the car doesn't "go", never mind not accelerating.
While I never encountered stuck accelerators, my father (who used to manage the truck fleet of a transport company) has seen a few vehicles with that problem. It occurred because the cable could go in one direction (opening the throttle) but got stuck when trying to go in the other (thus it stayed open). This could come from a frayed cable getting snagged on something, from something getting into the engine compartment and getting lodged in a bad place or simply from dirt build-up. His opinion on the old-fashioned steel cable throttles isn't very high.
If all you want is a Linux ultraportable, there are devices besides the N900 you could look into. There are a few Beagleboard-based ones as well as the very similar Pandora, which gives you a keyboard, a touchscreen, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB and two SD slots in a form factor similar to the original NDS. If you want a Pandora, though, you'll have to order from the second batch; the first batch is expected to ship somewhere within the next two or three months, with the second one close behind. The price was 330 USD for the first batch; this should not change for the second one.
Also, you could always look into importing an N900; it ought to be sold without a plan at least somewhere in Europe.
Unless something unexpected happens like, say, a deer (or some other animal) running onto the street. Couple that with bad conditions (like the deer entering the road close to the car) and some sudden braking and swerving is the only thing between the car and a dead deer lodged in the windshield. Without safety margins, in this case your car automatically turns into a crumple zone for everyone else.
Even if we have automatic cars with perfect AI we still have to prepare for unexpected disturbances. Certain optimizations simply don't mesh well with that.
I think we can agree that a precedent for a fine of a few cents per song (remember, that would include punitive and statutory fines) would be an outcome we can live with. It would have a similar effect as the complete rejection of fines: Suing someone for copyright infringement would be hugely unprofitable.
Note that duty-to-rescue laws (which this is, despite what TFS says) usually come coupled with actual Good Samaritan laws, which excuse you form liability if you tried to help and did so in a reasonable way.
Let's say you see a man in a crashed car. You get him out and notice he doesn't appear to have a pulse so after calling 112 (or the local emergency number in your country) you proceed to administer CPR, during which you accidentally crack one of their ribs.
If that person sues you, the court is extremely likely to rule in your favor - you tried to help and administering CPR until the ambulance arrives was the sensible thing to do. As you don't have any medical training past, say, a first aid course years ago you can't be expected to administer CPR in exactly the right way in an emergency situation.
I was under the assumption that the Constitution trumps the law. Otherwise a state could just make a law that abolishes free speech. Therefore you can't be expected to report a crime that you committed.
How many people know CPR? Or will they just try and emulate what they saw Doctor House doing?
In Germany, where we do have a duty to rescue, you need to have a certificate that proves you took a special first-aid course in order to get a driver's license. Therefore, even if their memory is probably more than a bit hazy after a few years, every motorist here can be assumed to have been trained in CPR and knowing how to put someone into a recovery position.
Also, duty to rescue laws are usually accompanied by Good Samaritan laws which clear you if you attempt to help but fail; everything else would be unreasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
So we film the Wheel of Time series. If you substract all the costume descriptions and the skirt smoothing/braid pulling (just instruct the actors to do them every time they appear in a scene) you can get the material down to a manageable size.
Oh, and don't use anything past the first three books. That's where it went from "decent LoTR clone" to "let's see how many sideplots I can cram in here". Not that I mind but few people are going to sit through a 1200 minute movie featuring half a dozen main plot arcs at the same time (cleverly hidden among a dozen sideplots).
As Neuromancer is hard to play straight, why not Snow Crash? The Metaverse is much more sensible than old-school cyberspace (hey, it's essentially the blueprint for Second Life), even non-geeks would love CosaNostra Pizza and I'll be damned if any shot of Reason in action won't look awesome.
Granted, nobody would understand what it's all about because the compressed version of the whole Sumeran/Enki/Asherah thing will probably end up incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read the book. Thus the "unfilmable" problem comes full circle...
You are right. Slashdot's gross and criminally negligient failure to add an Ubuntu icon to a story has made me lose all faith in Open Source, Free Software and IT in general. I will now relocate to a lonely pasture in the mountains of Albania where I will stand watch over a gerd of goats until I die of starvation, resting well in the knowledge that never again will someone submit my fragile psyche to the horror of not seeing the Ubuntu logo when reading a story about Ubuntu.
The non-descriptive ones have the advantage of being non-descriptive. We're talking about unambiguous ways of referring to the sun Earth orbits and Earth's moon. "The sun" and "the moon" can be applied to just about any planet and will refer to that planet's sun or moon. We could use "Earth's sun/moon" but that's unwieldy, which provides a disincentive to using it.
We could start capitalizing the words when they refer to the Earthen ones (I'd say "Terran" but that's just another silly foreign word) but then again - would anyone actually use them in that way? Well, anyone outside the German-speaking countries? (And on that note, this convention horribly fails in German where the terms are already capitalized.)
Remember, we're talking about globally unambiguous identifiers. "Sun" and "moon" do not fit, being descriptive terms.
That's the problem: Plural zone. Earth is not one crummy little G2 star, it's a whole lot of crummy little G2 stars. Given that nobody can prove that the total number of Earth's inhabitants isn't several times that of the rest of the known universe, the bureaucrats of the MWTA decided that they had to mention it.
Still better than our local village school. There, you may get suspended if you get into a fight... with a teacher, provided you don't beat up the teacher enough to make him fear you too much to do anything against you. Getting into a fight with a student may only lead to consequences if it happens during class at the teachers don't enter the schoolyard during recess. Oh, and if you injure your opponent hard enough for the police to be called. Yes, we did have cases where ambulances were neccessary.
I wish I was kidding but that school is a goddamn warzone. It's where deadbeat teachers are sent to watch their careers die.
I was thinking about the entire S/N, which should be 20-40 alphanumeric characters (and, of course, nonsequential; maybe an MD5 hash of the order the device was built in prefixed by model information). Provides a nice incentive for the user to change the password, as well. 36^20 is a nice, big search space and 36^40 should be enough to keep any naive attacker at bay until the device has been replaced.
Maybe, if you want to be particularly user-friendly, you could use shorter S/Ns but I wouldn't go below 10 characters, which offers a mere three quadrillion possible passwords.
Rocket science experts have greater expertise on rocket science than a random person from the internet? Preposterous, I say!
You can go one step further and just use the S/N. Not quite as secure but the attacker still needs to have at least brief physical access to the device.
Yeah, it is fairly obvious but hey, I would have assumed that automatic drivers also know how to quickly decouple the motor from the wheels. But yeah, it's more natural for manual drivers.
I'm sorry, I forgot step 1.5: "Get backwards". My bad.
(As for the flashers: I'd first reestablish control over the vehicle before turning them on. It might be a good idea to turn them on before pulling over, though; I'll grant you that.)
...good catch. Well, if you're in one of these driving school cars with a second set of pedals on the right side you could reach over and hit the right clutch - but I can see how that might be considered unergonomical. And completely insane.
Alternatively, I might have used the wrong words but since being unreasonable on the internet is much more acceptable than being wrong on the internet I clearly thought of the driving school car thing the whole time.
For sake of completeness, the appropriate equivalent for manual-transmission cars (slightly extended):
1. Take right foot off gas pedal
2. Slam right foot on clutch
3. Slam left foot on brake (can be performed simultaneously with step 2)
4. Steer off the road once it's reasonably safe to do so
5. Turn off engine
6. Engage hand brake
7. Engage emegency lights and follow standard car breakdown procedures
Which only serves to reinforce the notion that it is, in fact, the same problem.
I take "without warning" to refer to the individual shutdowns. Compare this to the scenario of an automatic restart due to an important system service having failed: Windows shows you a dialog explaining it's going to shut down and counts down one minute to let you save any unsaved data you have. A shutdown without warning sounds to me as if Windows just immediately force-quits all applications and then shuts down, which is a bit rude.
I know, Windows 7 RC isn't intended for production environments but still eating the user's data is not something I think Microsoft wants to be associated with again. Even for an EOL'd beta product.
You also need a certificate to practice medicine and drive a car. The law is simply of the opinion that education is too important a thing to let any random hick ruin his children's chance at a decent job by failing to properly prepare them for the school certificate tests. Remember, without a proper school certificate you're not even going to get a job as a burger flipper over here.
That would provide a compelling argument to ask for other state-provided services such as transportation or internet access - I think we can all agree that ISPs do an appalling job at providing anyone outside the bigger cities with a decent connection and today internet access is becoming just as important as getting your mail on time. Still, I think that most people would object if you tried to turn communication into a public business again.
The problem is that the braking needs to propagate through the car train before the first car can safely brake, especially if you can't guarantee that the first car will be able to avoid a crash.
The worst-case scenario is if a deer runs onto the street only a few meters in front of the first car while the other lane is inaccessible (for example due to traffic). The first car will not be able to stop in time and neither will the ones behind it - you end up with a mass crash involving every single car in the train.
Or a case of bad design. Just because we've been building properly working pedals for decades doesn't mean that someone can't come up with one that can get stuck.
While I never encountered stuck accelerators, my father (who used to manage the truck fleet of a transport company) has seen a few vehicles with that problem. It occurred because the cable could go in one direction (opening the throttle) but got stuck when trying to go in the other (thus it stayed open). This could come from a frayed cable getting snagged on something, from something getting into the engine compartment and getting lodged in a bad place or simply from dirt build-up. His opinion on the old-fashioned steel cable throttles isn't very high.
If all you want is a Linux ultraportable, there are devices besides the N900 you could look into. There are a few Beagleboard-based ones as well as the very similar Pandora, which gives you a keyboard, a touchscreen, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB and two SD slots in a form factor similar to the original NDS. If you want a Pandora, though, you'll have to order from the second batch; the first batch is expected to ship somewhere within the next two or three months, with the second one close behind. The price was 330 USD for the first batch; this should not change for the second one.
Also, you could always look into importing an N900; it ought to be sold without a plan at least somewhere in Europe.
Unless something unexpected happens like, say, a deer (or some other animal) running onto the street. Couple that with bad conditions (like the deer entering the road close to the car) and some sudden braking and swerving is the only thing between the car and a dead deer lodged in the windshield. Without safety margins, in this case your car automatically turns into a crumple zone for everyone else.
Even if we have automatic cars with perfect AI we still have to prepare for unexpected disturbances. Certain optimizations simply don't mesh well with that.
I think we can agree that a precedent for a fine of a few cents per song (remember, that would include punitive and statutory fines) would be an outcome we can live with. It would have a similar effect as the complete rejection of fines: Suing someone for copyright infringement would be hugely unprofitable.
Note that duty-to-rescue laws (which this is, despite what TFS says) usually come coupled with actual Good Samaritan laws, which excuse you form liability if you tried to help and did so in a reasonable way.
Let's say you see a man in a crashed car. You get him out and notice he doesn't appear to have a pulse so after calling 112 (or the local emergency number in your country) you proceed to administer CPR, during which you accidentally crack one of their ribs.
If that person sues you, the court is extremely likely to rule in your favor - you tried to help and administering CPR until the ambulance arrives was the sensible thing to do. As you don't have any medical training past, say, a first aid course years ago you can't be expected to administer CPR in exactly the right way in an emergency situation.
I was under the assumption that the Constitution trumps the law. Otherwise a state could just make a law that abolishes free speech. Therefore you can't be expected to report a crime that you committed.
In Germany, where we do have a duty to rescue, you need to have a certificate that proves you took a special first-aid course in order to get a driver's license. Therefore, even if their memory is probably more than a bit hazy after a few years, every motorist here can be assumed to have been trained in CPR and knowing how to put someone into a recovery position.
Also, duty to rescue laws are usually accompanied by Good Samaritan laws which clear you if you attempt to help but fail; everything else would be unreasonable.