Besides, even if that were a human, don't you think nuking twelve planets is a bit of overreaction to one lone pilot incursion?
It wasn't the excursion itself that caused the Cylon attack. Adama had the ship destroyed. The Cylons saw that, and realized what humans could do to each other.
This did not jive with their religious ideas (we are all children of god, etc.), so they decided that human race should be exterminated. Then they would live as god had wanted his children to live.
So from that perspective, nuking the planets was not really overreacting, but a necessary step to realize god's purpose for the universe.
I think (within the storyline), some of the Cylons have started to doubt this doctrine, and that's why they didn't immediately exterminate humans when they found them on New Caprica.
So there really was keyboards without a backspace...And I always thought it was just a bad dream, like the one with the strange man, pickup van, and false promises of candy...
It's a good thing no one patented the backspace, though. Wait a minute, I think I just came up with a business plan!
Baldrick: Permission to ask a question, sir. Blackadder: Permission granted Baldrick, as long as it isn't the one about where babies come from. Baldrick: No. The thing is - the way I see it, these days there's a war on, right? And ages ago, there wasn't a war on, right? So there must have been a moment where there not being a war on went away, right, and there being a war on came along, right? So, what I really want to know is how we went from one case of affairs to the other case of affairs. Blackadder: You mean, how did the war start? Baldrick: Yes, sir. George: The war started because of the vile hun and his villainous empire-building. Blackadder: George, the British Empire at present covers a quarter of the globe while the German Empire consists of a small sausage factory in Tanganyika. I hardly think we can be entirely absolved from blame on the imperialistic front. George: [Loudly] Oh, no sir! Absolutely not! [Quiet, to Baldrick] Mad as a bicycle. Baldrick: I heard that it started when a bloke called Archie Duke shot an ostrich 'cause he was hungry. Blackadder: I think you mean it started when the Archduke of Austro-Hungary got shot. Baldrick: No, there was definitely an ostrich involved, sir. Blackadder: Well possibly. But the real reason for the whole thing is that it would be too much effort not to have a war... you see, Baldrick, in order to prevent a war in Europe, two super blocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast, opposing armies, each acting as the other's deterrent. That way, there could never be a war. Baldrick: Except, well, this is sort of a war, isn't it? Blackadder: That's right, there was one tiny flaw in the plan. George: Oh, what was that? Blackadder: It was bollocks. Baldrick: So the poor old ostrich died for nothing.
Are you insane? How much do you think it costs to replace roads and bridges? I assure you that it is well withing our ability.
Universal healthcare is "within our ability", but I don't see it happening either.
Fixing infrastructure is boring, costly, and without any visible results (apart from lack of accidents), so it's not going to happen until things get seriously out of hands.
It often requires serious loss of lives before action is taken, and I guess what happened in Minnesota (or to some extent in New Orleans, I guess) wasn't enough to arouse people yet.
Unfortunately, it's not just bombs and guns that we should worry about when it comes to classified information (or even sensitive but unclassified, SBU). What about information that would take away a competitive advantage for the company? Disclosing blueprints of bridges could do this. Materials and weights/densities could also prove to lose both monetary and human assets if it gets into the wrong hands.
I work for a civil engineering company, and the only period where we need to keep business secrets is during bidding/financing. After the contracts are signed, though we don't actually go around waving our designs in people's faces, if engineers from another company want to have a peek, we're more than happy to help them.
In civil engineering, sharing information is absolutely vital for making safe and stable designs. We learn from each others' experiences, and especially each others' mistakes. (Often, failed projects are the most interesting ones.)
You have to also remember that most large projects are executed with cooperation from several engineering groups, so you have geotechnical, structural, electrical, and systems engineers are working together. In this environment, trying to keep secrets is going to cause serious problems.
In addition to the actual design and construction, someone will also need to be able to check and maintain these structures in the decades to come, or we will have a lot more collapsing bridges in the future.
I can understand that some people would want to keep, for instance, blueprints and design documents secret for fear of terrorism. The fact is that bad design, and the ensuing failures and accidents, will be far more common, and will cause far more damage, than a few scary arabs trying to blow up bridges in the style of NBC made-for-tv scary flick.
The main jist is that though the network is still mostly acceptable, spending on maintenance and upgrades is not keeping up with what's needed.
Sayeth the Civil Engineer:
Roughly 26 percent of all bridges on urban interstates were rated deficient in 2002, and of that group, most (20 percent of the total number of interstate bridges) were functionally obsolete.
The problem is not the lack of sensors, it's the lack of resources for maintenance and repairs. There's no use knowing a bridge is in poor condition if you don't have the budget to go out and fix it.
Couple that with the deficit spending, and you can bet these accidents will become more common in the near future.
As far as I've seen, most USB enclosures have IDE harddisks inside them. The same is probably true for firewire as well. So there's still a lot of IDE harddisks on the market, and people do want bigger capacities as well.
Of course as a private company, Seagate are welcome to do as they please. There's still a few other manufacturers out there.
For desktop PCs, I think it would be silly to buy IDE-to-SATA converters. At least the ones in Korea cost close to 30 bucks. Most of the IDE harddisks people have are probably around 100-250 GB size, and you can already get that size SATA drives for less than 50 bucks. So the converter is not much of an investment really.
Anyone port VLC to the iPhone ? Its lack of RTP support was my biggest disappointment about it.
I think the problem is that the iPhone probably has a specialized chip for video decoding and playback, and it'll be difficult to take advantage of that without Apple's help.
It's the same problem with running ipodlinux on the iPod, it's difficult to reach realtime playback without proper hardware controls.
This is similar to a whole bunch of websites we have here in Korea that run on a LAMP-stack and do not even work with Firefox on Windows, let alone any free operating system.
For instance, the number one portal/search site in Korea, http://naver.com/ runs PHP on Linux servers, yet the site is still broken for non-IE browsers. It's improved a lot, though.
One benefit of Microsoft breaking their own standards with IE7 and Vista is that the Korean government and companies are finally transitioning to a bit more standards-compliant way of running their websites.
So let's hope Microsoft rolls out a new version of their DRM soon, thereby breaking whatever BBC in their foolishness decided to lock themselves in to.
Still can't do any shopping here without ActiveX, though. It's like they don't trust SSL or something.
Ah, but what sauce will be served with these dogs?
Sheez, the ignorance. You think people eat dog meat like steaks?
Dog meat usually comes in two varieties:
Boshintang is a hot and spicy soup that is served with a bowl of rice and the regular Korean side dishes (kimchi, whatever the restaurant happens to have that day).
Su-yuk is thinly cut meat that is steamed together with assorted herbs and vegetables. It's usually eaten as a side dish with soju (at least that's how I eat it). It's a little on the fatty side, so the taste is kinda soapy, though.
I definitely recommend Bosintang. You can get it even in central Seoul, if you know the spelling in Korean, and you know what kind of a restaurant you're looking for.
If you really want to enjoy it, though, you should ask some locals for a good place. Rural areas (South-Western provinces) and restaurants located close to mountain hiking areas are usually the best.
And if you think eating dog is "wrong", go back to your fried chicken and pretend it's not made by brutally slaughtering innocent animals.
Last year I was in a department store in Seoul. The had a 40+ inch LCD demonstrating the difference between DVD and HD-DVD. The screen was divided in half, both showing the same video clip of tropical fish swimming in an aquarium.
The right half was what you would get if you applied insane blur, and cranked brightness all the way up. It looked awful. That was supposed to be the "old" DVD quality.
The left half showed a regular, clear picture. That was supposedly "HD-DVD" quality.
A cable ran from the TV into a regular DVD player. There was no HD-DVD player. The whole demonstration was running from a regular DVD disc.
The "unlicensed derivative work" angle is interesting; I could see how that argument, if made, could get traction in a court.
How is that different to a TV channel inserting advertisement into a TV show? Or a radio station that fades in a commercial while a song is still playing? Sure you could call it a derivative work, but I really wish you didn't. ^_^
I don't think this "unlicensed derivative work" is going to get much traction.
And on the third hand... isn't this going to break a whole bunch of websites? I'm having a hard time imagining how they could do it without major side effects.
Don't worry, I'm sure it's been thoroughly tested with Internet Explorer.
Also, they tried it with Windows XP and Vista, so they know it's fully cross-platform.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't the excursion itself that caused the Cylon attack. Adama had the ship destroyed. The Cylons saw that, and realized what humans could do to each other.
This did not jive with their religious ideas (we are all children of god, etc.), so they decided that human race should be exterminated. Then they would live as god had wanted his children to live.
So from that perspective, nuking the planets was not really overreacting, but a necessary step to realize god's purpose for the universe.
I think (within the storyline), some of the Cylons have started to doubt this doctrine, and that's why they didn't immediately exterminate humans when they found them on New Caprica.
So there really was keyboards without a backspace...And I always thought it was just a bad dream, like the one with the strange man, pickup van, and false promises of candy...
It's a good thing no one patented the backspace, though. Wait a minute, I think I just came up with a business plan!
Last one is easy.
Democrats are for KDE (bloat), Republicans for Gnome (interface nazis).
Got popcorn?
From Blackadder (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4TKTRV4HM0)
Baldrick: Permission to ask a question, sir.
Blackadder: Permission granted Baldrick, as long as it isn't the one about where babies come from.
Baldrick: No. The thing is - the way I see it, these days there's a war on, right? And ages ago, there wasn't a war on, right? So there must have been a moment where there not being a war on went away, right, and there being a war on came along, right? So, what I really want to know is how we went from one case of affairs to the other case of affairs.
Blackadder: You mean, how did the war start?
Baldrick: Yes, sir.
George: The war started because of the vile hun and his villainous empire-building.
Blackadder: George, the British Empire at present covers a quarter of the globe while the German Empire consists of a small sausage factory in Tanganyika. I hardly think we can be entirely absolved from blame on the imperialistic front.
George: [Loudly] Oh, no sir! Absolutely not! [Quiet, to Baldrick] Mad as a bicycle.
Baldrick: I heard that it started when a bloke called Archie Duke shot an ostrich 'cause he was hungry.
Blackadder: I think you mean it started when the Archduke of Austro-Hungary got shot.
Baldrick: No, there was definitely an ostrich involved, sir.
Blackadder: Well possibly. But the real reason for the whole thing is that it would be too much effort not to have a war... you see, Baldrick, in order to prevent a war in Europe, two super blocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast, opposing armies, each acting as the other's deterrent. That way, there could never be a war.
Baldrick: Except, well, this is sort of a war, isn't it?
Blackadder: That's right, there was one tiny flaw in the plan.
George: Oh, what was that?
Blackadder: It was bollocks.
Baldrick: So the poor old ostrich died for nothing.
In Korea, 11/11 is known as Pepero Day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepero_Day/).
Incindentally, the guy who designs logos for the Google, Dennis Hwang, is Korean (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Hwang).
Oh Dennis, why do you hate Korea?
That's GNU/UbuntuDot/SlashHat to you, mister!
Did you try rebooting it?
Depends on the romanization system you're using, obviously.
Unless you have a home network. With Vista's performance, you might as well be using USB 1.1 for moving data.
Universal healthcare is "within our ability", but I don't see it happening either.
Fixing infrastructure is boring, costly, and without any visible results (apart from lack of accidents), so it's not going to happen until things get seriously out of hands.
It often requires serious loss of lives before action is taken, and I guess what happened in Minnesota (or to some extent in New Orleans, I guess) wasn't enough to arouse people yet.
I work for a civil engineering company, and the only period where we need to keep business secrets is during bidding/financing. After the contracts are signed, though we don't actually go around waving our designs in people's faces, if engineers from another company want to have a peek, we're more than happy to help them.
In civil engineering, sharing information is absolutely vital for making safe and stable designs. We learn from each others' experiences, and especially each others' mistakes. (Often, failed projects are the most interesting ones.)
You have to also remember that most large projects are executed with cooperation from several engineering groups, so you have geotechnical, structural, electrical, and systems engineers are working together. In this environment, trying to keep secrets is going to cause serious problems.
In addition to the actual design and construction, someone will also need to be able to check and maintain these structures in the decades to come, or we will have a lot more collapsing bridges in the future.
I can understand that some people would want to keep, for instance, blueprints and design documents secret for fear of terrorism. The fact is that bad design, and the ensuing failures and accidents, will be far more common, and will cause far more damage, than a few scary arabs trying to blow up bridges in the style of NBC made-for-tv scary flick.
Exactly. While we are at it, why don't we make tags for emails. That way senders can mark their emails by category or importance.
I'm sure spammers will remember to inclue the <spam> tag.
This will work at least as well as the .xxx would for filtering p0rn.
Yessirree, can't go wrong. These guys really know the intarweb.
Good thing the public sector has all that extra money lying around...
There was a good article on the U.S. road and bridge systems in the Civil Engineering Magazine last year (you can get the Google cache version here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=civil+enginee ring+magazine+maintenance+highways).
The main jist is that though the network is still mostly acceptable, spending on maintenance and upgrades is not keeping up with what's needed.
Sayeth the Civil Engineer:
The problem is not the lack of sensors, it's the lack of resources for maintenance and repairs. There's no use knowing a bridge is in poor condition if you don't have the budget to go out and fix it.
Couple that with the deficit spending, and you can bet these accidents will become more common in the near future.
As far as I've seen, most USB enclosures have IDE harddisks inside them. The same is probably true for firewire as well. So there's still a lot of IDE harddisks on the market, and people do want bigger capacities as well.
Of course as a private company, Seagate are welcome to do as they please. There's still a few other manufacturers out there.
For desktop PCs, I think it would be silly to buy IDE-to-SATA converters. At least the ones in Korea cost close to 30 bucks. Most of the IDE harddisks people have are probably around 100-250 GB size, and you can already get that size SATA drives for less than 50 bucks. So the converter is not much of an investment really.
A lot of phones in Korea have cameras that can be turned 180 degrees, so you can take a picture of yourself while still seeing the screen.
Most common usage of this I've seen is the young girls on the subways checking their makeup and hair with the camera. No need for a mirror.
I think the problem is that the iPhone probably has a specialized chip for video decoding and playback, and it'll be difficult to take advantage of that without Apple's help.
It's the same problem with running ipodlinux on the iPod, it's difficult to reach realtime playback without proper hardware controls.
This is similar to a whole bunch of websites we have here in Korea that run on a LAMP-stack and do not even work with Firefox on Windows, let alone any free operating system.
For instance, the number one portal/search site in Korea, http://naver.com/ runs PHP on Linux servers, yet the site is still broken for non-IE browsers. It's improved a lot, though.
One benefit of Microsoft breaking their own standards with IE7 and Vista is that the Korean government and companies are finally transitioning to a bit more standards-compliant way of running their websites.
So let's hope Microsoft rolls out a new version of their DRM soon, thereby breaking whatever BBC in their foolishness decided to lock themselves in to.
Still can't do any shopping here without ActiveX, though. It's like they don't trust SSL or something.
...And the panda eats shoots and leaves...
(Boy, I never thought I'd get to use the panda joke on /.)
Sheez, the ignorance. You think people eat dog meat like steaks?
Dog meat usually comes in two varieties:
Boshintang is a hot and spicy soup that is served with a bowl of rice and the regular Korean side dishes (kimchi, whatever the restaurant happens to have that day).
Su-yuk is thinly cut meat that is steamed together with assorted herbs and vegetables. It's usually eaten as a side dish with soju (at least that's how I eat it). It's a little on the fatty side, so the taste is kinda soapy, though.
I definitely recommend Bosintang. You can get it even in central Seoul, if you know the spelling in Korean, and you know what kind of a restaurant you're looking for.
If you really want to enjoy it, though, you should ask some locals for a good place. Rural areas (South-Western provinces) and restaurants located close to mountain hiking areas are usually the best.
And if you think eating dog is "wrong", go back to your fried chicken and pretend it's not made by brutally slaughtering innocent animals.
I've seen worse:
Last year I was in a department store in Seoul. The had a 40+ inch LCD demonstrating the difference between DVD and HD-DVD. The screen was divided in half, both showing the same video clip of tropical fish swimming in an aquarium.
The right half was what you would get if you applied insane blur, and cranked brightness all the way up. It looked awful. That was supposed to be the "old" DVD quality.
The left half showed a regular, clear picture. That was supposedly "HD-DVD" quality.
A cable ran from the TV into a regular DVD player. There was no HD-DVD player. The whole demonstration was running from a regular DVD disc.
Talk about deceiving your customers.
How is that different to a TV channel inserting advertisement into a TV show? Or a radio station that fades in a commercial while a song is still playing? Sure you could call it a derivative work, but I really wish you didn't. ^_^
I don't think this "unlicensed derivative work" is going to get much traction.
And on the third hand... isn't this going to break a whole bunch of websites? I'm having a hard time imagining how they could do it without major side effects.
Don't worry, I'm sure it's been thoroughly tested with Internet Explorer.
Also, they tried it with Windows XP and Vista, so they know it's fully cross-platform.I've got a ticket for a user-friendly FREE wife. Problems is, they haven't started production yet. I hear the prototype vanished in a puff of logic.
That's good, cause I don't think they sell refill kits for these yet.
Hey wait, I've got a killer business idea...
Ok, now please explain that again as to a non-technical person.
I think you were talking about cars, but as soon as you got technical, my mind froze.