All in favor of a missile strike against the MPAA, raise your right hands.
OK, now all those in favor of leaving in place a price-fixing organization of questionable political practices and shoddy professional demeanor, raise your right hands.
I'm sorry, you must have thought I was talking about the Bush administration. Let's try again.
All those in favor of defending organizations whose acronyms consist of four letters ending in "-AA", raise your right hands.
Right up there with the comment about souls, is this doozie:
Jenet and Scott Ransom of McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, have developed a theoretical model to explain the behavior of this one-of-a-kind set of pulsars.
"One of a kind"? Just because we haven't seen any others, means there are no others?
For shame. Feynman would totally kick these people's asses.
The comic doesn't really do much good to people, other than make them laugh. Child's Play does a lot more good. So they want to off-load comic bandwidth, in order to get their whole site, including Child's Play, to run a bit faster.
Actually, I did open the original image in the Gimp to find the hex triplet I needed.
I chose OOo because I'm already familiar with it. There are tools out there for vectorizing bitmaps, but I needed something that day. I didn't have time to learn a new program.
Boss wanted me to create a PostScript version of our corporate logo, so it could be scaled as needed.
Source: a poorly rendered GIF.
Equipment: one Linux machine, with OpenOffice.org installed.
I found the matching font, got the dots lined up, converted it to a traced object, found the right "burnt sienna" color... but that pukey-green was nowhere in any color selector I could find.
After hunting for nearly a half hour, for an edit box that would let me enter an arbitrary hex triplet, I just saved the file and quit OOo. Then I unzipped the document, opened the style sheet in NEdit, and changed the hex triplets by hand. Save, exit, re-zip, and open it in OOo to see if the changes were correct. Voila!
I never, never ever would have been able to do that in a Microsoft product. I will grant that Microsoft may have made the hex triplet entry somewhat more obvious, but that doesn't mean I would have been able to find it any more easily. They absolutely control how the user accesses the document. OOo lets you access it any way you want.
When customer requests are involved, you can tell him (in so many words), "Failure to write clearly will result in an incomplete product specification. Therefore: You will use entire words and sentences. You will break your text into reasonable paragraphs. You will explain in clear words what the customer wants. If you do not, I will send it back to you for a re-write, no matter how small the infraction. Any delay resulting from this will not be my responsibility. This is not negotiable."
Yeah, yeah, Obligatory Microsoft Slam. But I don't see any great stampede to isolate and neutralize the threat that this Typhoid Mary of OS's presents to communication stability. Why are we preparing for a threat that barely exists, when we refuse to deal with the present, much greater threat?
With that kind of resume, it seems obvious to me that you take a grand vision of things. Beyond the obvious (learning to tolerate differences, being polyglot), what would you recommend to us lesser beings for furthering the cause of, if not peace, at least a better world for our children?
Not more bands. The rainbow having six bands is a by-product of having three color filters in our eyes. In our case, they are Red, Green, and Blue.
If you want more bands, add to the RGB triplet in our eyes (IRGB? RGBU?). And then re-design the CRT and color TV systems to accomodate, since the monitors will appear to be "burned out", the way they look when green goes out and all you have is red, blue, and intermediate shades of violet.
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How long will it be until our cars are catching viruses, worms, and trojans?
And what guarantee do we have that said network will be isolated from the engine systems?
Perhaps I'm being paranoid. But they laughed at me when I said Microsoft's invisible hand was writing SCO's lawsuits. Who's laughing now?
All in favor of a missile strike against the MPAA, raise your right hands.
OK, now all those in favor of leaving in place a price-fixing organization of questionable political practices and shoddy professional demeanor, raise your right hands.
I'm sorry, you must have thought I was talking about the Bush administration. Let's try again.
All those in favor of defending organizations whose acronyms consist of four letters ending in "-AA", raise your right hands.
Your children will not be joining Wolverine and Rogue anytime soon.
And how many other of those so-called "dirty hippies" in the store would be happy to kick your ass up and down every aisle in the store?
If you want to be lazy, and give up your rights under the law, that's your right. Don't demand that the rest of us do the same.
Google will stop my cell phone from working? Noooooo!
By that "logic," this binary pulsar didn't exist until we discovered it. Did the act of our discovery cause its existence?
Right up there with the comment about souls, is this doozie:
Jenet and Scott Ransom of McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, have developed a theoretical model to explain the behavior of this one-of-a-kind set of pulsars.
"One of a kind"? Just because we haven't seen any others, means there are no others?
For shame. Feynman would totally kick these people's asses.
The comic doesn't really do much good to people, other than make them laugh. Child's Play does a lot more good. So they want to off-load comic bandwidth, in order to get their whole site, including Child's Play, to run a bit faster.
How long until the AWK (Advanced Watchable and Karryable) and GREP (Graphics-Rendering Efficient Power) technologies come out?
Actually, I did open the original image in the Gimp to find the hex triplet I needed.
I chose OOo because I'm already familiar with it. There are tools out there for vectorizing bitmaps, but I needed something that day. I didn't have time to learn a new program.
Boss wanted me to create a PostScript version of our corporate logo, so it could be scaled as needed.
Source: a poorly rendered GIF.
Equipment: one Linux machine, with OpenOffice.org installed.
I found the matching font, got the dots lined up, converted it to a traced object, found the right "burnt sienna" color... but that pukey-green was nowhere in any color selector I could find.
After hunting for nearly a half hour, for an edit box that would let me enter an arbitrary hex triplet, I just saved the file and quit OOo. Then I unzipped the document, opened the style sheet in NEdit, and changed the hex triplets by hand. Save, exit, re-zip, and open it in OOo to see if the changes were correct. Voila!
I never, never ever would have been able to do that in a Microsoft product. I will grant that Microsoft may have made the hex triplet entry somewhat more obvious, but that doesn't mean I would have been able to find it any more easily. They absolutely control how the user accesses the document. OOo lets you access it any way you want.
Nobody's going to stop you from laughing. After all, he did. And it wouldn't make you a fanboy.
However, you would be a fanboy if GWB ran for the Gnome Foundation Board, and won, and you were still pleased with the results.
When customer requests are involved, you can tell him (in so many words), "Failure to write clearly will result in an incomplete product specification. Therefore: You will use entire words and sentences. You will break your text into reasonable paragraphs. You will explain in clear words what the customer wants. If you do not, I will send it back to you for a re-write, no matter how small the infraction. Any delay resulting from this will not be my responsibility. This is not negotiable."
Like, say, Windows?
Yeah, yeah, Obligatory Microsoft Slam. But I don't see any great stampede to isolate and neutralize the threat that this Typhoid Mary of OS's presents to communication stability. Why are we preparing for a threat that barely exists, when we refuse to deal with the present, much greater threat?
Since I don't have a TV, and don't want one. Anything interesting on the tube can also be found on the Internet, anyway.
Oh really? I'd like to see you get a Harvard MBA.
I guess that's why he's the President, and you're an AC.
After all, aren't they the ones indoctrinating our future leaders with all this nanny-state nonsense?
How long until they claim that overhead projectors violate their patent on "arbitrary static image projection"?
Could it also be that your professor is discounting any information that doesn't jibe with his (or her) viewpoints?
Now it looks like Wikipedia needs something similar. Nice going, assholes.
After all, it would make AOL's idiotic discs very welcome in third-world countries.
I really wanna see how well Laurence Fishburn can do as The Oracle.
38,675,976 GB?!? As in, 38 petabytes?
I'd make a "welcome our new overlords" crack, but somehow the thought seems more scary than funny.
With that kind of resume, it seems obvious to me that you take a grand vision of things. Beyond the obvious (learning to tolerate differences, being polyglot), what would you recommend to us lesser beings for furthering the cause of, if not peace, at least a better world for our children?
Not more bands. The rainbow having six bands is a by-product of having three color filters in our eyes. In our case, they are Red, Green, and Blue.
If you want more bands, add to the RGB triplet in our eyes (IRGB? RGBU?). And then re-design the CRT and color TV systems to accomodate, since the monitors will appear to be "burned out", the way they look when green goes out and all you have is red, blue, and intermediate shades of violet.