Too Inbred to branch the storyline
on
Should Star Trek Die?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
One problem I think Star Trek has is that they really overused most of the interesting facets of the show. Things like Q, the Borg, destroying the ship, time travel, Klingons, etc. all got way over exposed/repeated to death. At the same time, they didn't spend enough time developing a well-populated, consistent universe with lots of hinted-at but unexplored branches. The result is the whole thing is kind of boring and too familiar without any prospects new directions to take the franchise.
Compare to Babylon 5 for instance; admittedly ran for a lot less time, but there were tons of options for offshoots there that were never tapped. (And yeah, the ones JMS did choose to branch on may not have been as interesting as they could of, but that's another story...)
Even if you leave the really cool stuff like shadows, vorlons, etc. alone, there are tons of things that could be developed, such as the Psicorps stuff, all those minor races you saw but never heard a lot of detail on, and even the major races such as Narn or Centauri could have been the subject of a spinoff w/o (IMO) overexposing them.
Given that the list of filtered words is available, couldn't someone design a mini-web server that processes pages and converts offending words into readable but unfilterable variants? eg:
human rights -> h.u.m.a.n. r1ghts etc.
I'm sure a single site offering this would be blocked, but if it were some distributed thing like SETI that a bunch of people could run around the world, it would be very difficult to block or filter.
I agree. There is something indescribable about Totoro. It shouldn't be that captivating; the story is simple, really not a lot of drama, animation is OK but not spectacular.
But for some reason, our family ends up watching this one again and again. There is a special quality to this one that defies simple categorization.
I and many others have no choice. I live about an hour west of Boston, rural, but it's not like we're talking middle of Alaska or something.
We have no cable service in town, and many like me are outside of the 15000 foot DSL limit to the central office. I tried satellite but cannot get a good signal due to trees/mountain in the way as well.
I tend to think of employment as being part of a process. Each employee whether they build bridges for a living or think up new search algorithms or whatever, has a work product. This is the output of their time on the job, and is what the company is paying for.
I have no problem with the idea that your employer owns all your work products. If you were foolish enough to write a killer game or something on company time, they own it, too bad.
What goes on in the brain however is not, at least by my definition, a work product. It is part of the process but it is not yet produced, so the company can't own it.
So if you have a killer idea and you think about it on company time, it's your idea. (although the company may not be happy you aren't doing what you are supposed to do, and could of course fire/sue/etc you for that)
If you write that idea down or convey it to others, it becomes something you produced, and if you did that on company time, I think you can successfully argue it belongs to the company.
Now if you are a fan of Reeely Bad movies, and also like time travel, you may want to also check out
Time Travelers (The Four DVD set). This is a collection of four very bad time travel movies that I found entertaining for their badness. The movies included are:
In the year 2889 - This is actually a post-apocolypse kind of deal, don't know why it's time travel related but is kind of amusing. Rich dude builds a bomb shelter house in a lead lined canyon and various people show up after the blast, while others turn into meat-eating mutants. Hillarity ensues.
Idaho Transfer - College coeds working on a secret project involving time travel in this indecipherable story that really doesn't go anywhere. Oh did I mention all the women have to take off their pants for some reason before activating the time travel device? It was the 70s.. enough said.
Journey to the center of Time. This is one of those early 60's bad scifi deals with people setting big dials and stuff.
The Day Time Ended - Well it has "time" in the title, but really this is invasion of the hippie pyramid ranch in the desert by aliens. I thought it was the least entertaing of the bunch, but hey four movies for like 7 bucks, you can't complain really.
Liberal use of Fast-Forward is recommended, but otherwise fun.
Man.. That closeup of the LEM is kinda scary. Slightly warped metal, bolted down here and there... Aluminum beach chair tubing.. Looks like something I might have built in the back yard as a kid.
You kind of wonder if doubt crosses your mind when you are sitting there looking back at the earth and part of your ride home is comprised of (what appears to be) Aluminum foil.
the sync.c,v line is, if i'm not mistaken, a CVS version header. Very likely a linux author.
Now all we need to do is round up all the CVS using Linux hackers named "Andy"...
I am not convinced that this is the only method the thing travels by. My laptop at work got infected with this, as did my office mate. We both saw mail going out as us to others in our group, etc. Neither of us double-clicked the attachment or ran it.
Being curious though, we did (apparently both of us did this) right click the attachment, save it to a dir on a linux box for inspection in emacs hexl-mode, etc.
So unless this thing launches via a right-click and save operation (off of the windows box entirely), there must be some other transmission mechanism.
Theres a catch here too. In my town, the CO doesnt have ISDN, so they can offer it to me via a neighboring exchange... at the cost of an *additional* $85/month for connecting to an exchange other than my native one! This doesnt even count the ISDN monthly charge itself.
I'm in the same boat, no DSL or Cable. I tried DirecWay dial return service. The latency is pretty horrible (500ms and up) making things like ssh excruciatingly painful. The 2 way DirecWay sat is supposedly even slower in temrs of latency, since you pay the 22,000 mile up-and-down penalty twice.
Web browsing as well can be slow due to this latency, since multiple requests get made per page load. You can fiddle with the settings on your browser and packet sizes etc to help this, but to me browsing felt slower than on a reliable 56k line. Things that require bigger downloads like flash animations are faster, though.
If it's bandwidth you are after, then you have to worry about FAP - the Fair Access Policy. This limits your BW usage by throttling you down once you exceed some magic threshold for some period of time. If you web browse only, you may not see it but if you download stuff, you'll probably hit it.
I also had problems due to trees. DirecTV is an order of magnitude less finicky than DirecWay in terms of positioning, and I struggled to get a good signal when my DirecTV was just fine. Could have been by location though. If you get the Dual dish, you will have to play fancy games with dish rotation to pull in both internet and TV. I'd recommend pro installation unless you really enjoy mucking with setting up dishes, etc.
According to this, NASA is now saying the problem was apparently some sort of crash caused by a recent command sequence they sent.
http://news4colorado.com/nationworld/topstories_st ory_023135646.html
Sounds like they are in debug mode now. And you thought VNC from home was slow.;-)
I suspect it is more politically dangerous than technically dangerous. If the rover gets stuck 3 months from now in some crater a couple of km out, JPL/NASA can declare success, say the mission exceeded expectations, etc.
If the rover gets stuck rolling off the ramp, that's another matter. However small the chance is, it looks reeely, reeely bad.. almost better to do the beagle-fiery-crunchy landing with no embarrasing pics than that.
Nasa has taken down the 8MB hires image off it's site due to bandwidth problems (/.ing aint helping im sure.
I managed to get it earlier today and put a copy of it on my otherwise useless earthlink web area - Im sure that one will get hammered in short order too, so if anyone with a robust web server can get it and provide a better mirror, be my guest.
One interesting mystery is the presence of dark patches that look like mud near the rover - they are clearly visible at the bottom the larger 8MB version of the photo on the nasa site.
They are most likely formed by the airbags, but have an unusual dark appearance that really looks like wet ground.. nobody seems to know why they'd look that way from what I've read so far.
OK, granted tech jobs are going offshore. But I've been in this long enough to know that the reality will not be as horrible/scary as all the predictions.
Anyone remember the "Japanese will take over the entire electronics industry" panic of the 80's? Everyone predicted that there would be no more chip design anywhere but in Japan. That didn't happen. They certainly are a still a big competitor to the US electronics/semi industry, and things did indeed change here, but new things came out of it and I don't think the fact that the US doesn't make memories or TVs anymore devastated the tech industry here -- quite the opposite.
How about the NAFTA "Giant Sucking Sound" of jobs going to Mexico? Unemployment didn't skyrocket due to this as some predicted.
The US economy adapts and changes based on the external environment.. it will continue to do so IMO.
Looked at that too. Verizon says our CO doesn't offer ISDN. They said I'd have to switch to a neighboring exchange. Use of a foreign exhange imposes a fee of $85/month on top of ISDN service. I'm willing to pay a premium, but over $100/month for 128K service is out of the question..
(Thanks for the suggestion tho.)
Slashdot Mirror
Compare to Babylon 5 for instance; admittedly ran for a lot less time, but there were tons of options for offshoots there that were never tapped. (And yeah, the ones JMS did choose to branch on may not have been as interesting as they could of, but that's another story...)
Even if you leave the really cool stuff like shadows, vorlons, etc. alone, there are tons of things that could be developed, such as the Psicorps stuff, all those minor races you saw but never heard a lot of detail on, and even the major races such as Narn or Centauri could have been the subject of a spinoff w/o (IMO) overexposing them.
I called it first! nyah nyah. see you in Borg-space, mortals!
Given that the list of filtered words is available, couldn't someone design a mini-web server that processes pages and converts offending words into readable but unfilterable variants? eg: human rights -> h.u.m.a.n. r1ghts etc. I'm sure a single site offering this would be blocked, but if it were some distributed thing like SETI that a bunch of people could run around the world, it would be very difficult to block or filter.
I agree. There is something indescribable about Totoro. It shouldn't be that captivating; the story is simple, really not a lot of drama, animation is OK but not spectacular. But for some reason, our family ends up watching this one again and again. There is a special quality to this one that defies simple categorization.
We have no cable service in town, and many like me are outside of the 15000 foot DSL limit to the central office. I tried satellite but cannot get a good signal due to trees/mountain in the way as well.
If it's AM-radio-specific, I can't help but think that the Starland Vocal Band must somehow be to blame..
For their next research project, they are looking at turning Windows into an operating system!
Never realized how much our founding fathers were into Pr0n..
I have no problem with the idea that your employer owns all your work products. If you were foolish enough to write a killer game or something on company time, they own it, too bad.
What goes on in the brain however is not, at least by my definition, a work product. It is part of the process but it is not yet produced, so the company can't own it.
So if you have a killer idea and you think about it on company time, it's your idea. (although the company may not be happy you aren't doing what you are supposed to do, and could of course fire/sue/etc you for that)
If you write that idea down or convey it to others, it becomes something you produced, and if you did that on company time, I think you can successfully argue it belongs to the company.
In the year 2889 - This is actually a post-apocolypse kind of deal, don't know why it's time travel related but is kind of amusing. Rich dude builds a bomb shelter house in a lead lined canyon and various people show up after the blast, while others turn into meat-eating mutants. Hillarity ensues.
Idaho Transfer - College coeds working on a secret project involving time travel in this indecipherable story that really doesn't go anywhere. Oh did I mention all the women have to take off their pants for some reason before activating the time travel device? It was the 70s.. enough said.
Journey to the center of Time. This is one of those early 60's bad scifi deals with people setting big dials and stuff.
The Day Time Ended - Well it has "time" in the title, but really this is invasion of the hippie pyramid ranch in the desert by aliens. I thought it was the least entertaing of the bunch, but hey four movies for like 7 bucks, you can't complain really.
Liberal use of Fast-Forward is recommended, but otherwise fun.
Yep it's down. Never seen that.. Ya see, given em a few billion and they slack right off. ;-)
Man.. That closeup of the LEM is kinda scary. Slightly warped metal, bolted down here and there... Aluminum beach chair tubing.. Looks like something I might have built in the back yard as a kid. You kind of wonder if doubt crosses your mind when you are sitting there looking back at the earth and part of your ride home is comprised of (what appears to be) Aluminum foil.
the sync.c,v line is, if i'm not mistaken, a CVS version header. Very likely a linux author. Now all we need to do is round up all the CVS using Linux hackers named "Andy"...
I am not convinced that this is the only method the thing travels by. My laptop at work got infected with this, as did my office mate. We both saw mail going out as us to others in our group, etc. Neither of us double-clicked the attachment or ran it. Being curious though, we did (apparently both of us did this) right click the attachment, save it to a dir on a linux box for inspection in emacs hexl-mode, etc. So unless this thing launches via a right-click and save operation (off of the windows box entirely), there must be some other transmission mechanism.
Theres a catch here too. In my town, the CO doesnt have ISDN, so they can offer it to me via a neighboring exchange... at the cost of an *additional* $85/month for connecting to an exchange other than my native one! This doesnt even count the ISDN monthly charge itself.
I'm in the same boat, no DSL or Cable. I tried DirecWay dial return service. The latency is pretty horrible (500ms and up) making things like ssh excruciatingly painful. The 2 way DirecWay sat is supposedly even slower in temrs of latency, since you pay the 22,000 mile up-and-down penalty twice. Web browsing as well can be slow due to this latency, since multiple requests get made per page load. You can fiddle with the settings on your browser and packet sizes etc to help this, but to me browsing felt slower than on a reliable 56k line. Things that require bigger downloads like flash animations are faster, though. If it's bandwidth you are after, then you have to worry about FAP - the Fair Access Policy. This limits your BW usage by throttling you down once you exceed some magic threshold for some period of time. If you web browse only, you may not see it but if you download stuff, you'll probably hit it. I also had problems due to trees. DirecTV is an order of magnitude less finicky than DirecWay in terms of positioning, and I struggled to get a good signal when my DirecTV was just fine. Could have been by location though. If you get the Dual dish, you will have to play fancy games with dish rotation to pull in both internet and TV. I'd recommend pro installation unless you really enjoy mucking with setting up dishes, etc.
According to this, NASA is now saying the problem was apparently some sort of crash caused by a recent command sequence they sent. http://news4colorado.com/nationworld/topstories_st ory_023135646.html
Sounds like they are in debug mode now. And you thought VNC from home was slow. ;-)
I suspect it is more politically dangerous than technically dangerous. If the rover gets stuck 3 months from now in some crater a couple of km out, JPL/NASA can declare success, say the mission exceeded expectations, etc. If the rover gets stuck rolling off the ramp, that's another matter. However small the chance is, it looks reeely, reeely bad.. almost better to do the beagle-fiery-crunchy landing with no embarrasing pics than that.
Nasa has taken down the 8MB hires image off it's site due to bandwidth problems (/.ing aint helping im sure. I managed to get it earlier today and put a copy of it on my otherwise useless earthlink web area - Im sure that one will get hammered in short order too, so if anyone with a robust web server can get it and provide a better mirror, be my guest.
One interesting mystery is the presence of dark patches that look like mud near the rover - they are clearly visible at the bottom the larger 8MB version of the photo on the nasa site. They are most likely formed by the airbags, but have an unusual dark appearance that really looks like wet ground.. nobody seems to know why they'd look that way from what I've read so far.
__
/ \
|O O|
|\_/| "Looks like you are trying to Break
| | The sound barrier!"
| | |
| | |
| \_/
So BSOD == Blue Sky Of Death ?
But the good news is that it will separate. My friend was forever picking up parts that dropped off his MGB on the highway..
OK, granted tech jobs are going offshore. But I've been in this long enough to know that the reality will not be as horrible/scary as all the predictions. Anyone remember the "Japanese will take over the entire electronics industry" panic of the 80's? Everyone predicted that there would be no more chip design anywhere but in Japan. That didn't happen. They certainly are a still a big competitor to the US electronics/semi industry, and things did indeed change here, but new things came out of it and I don't think the fact that the US doesn't make memories or TVs anymore devastated the tech industry here -- quite the opposite. How about the NAFTA "Giant Sucking Sound" of jobs going to Mexico? Unemployment didn't skyrocket due to this as some predicted. The US economy adapts and changes based on the external environment.. it will continue to do so IMO.
Looked at that too. Verizon says our CO doesn't offer ISDN. They said I'd have to switch to a neighboring exchange. Use of a foreign exhange imposes a fee of $85/month on top of ISDN service. I'm willing to pay a premium, but over $100/month for 128K service is out of the question.. (Thanks for the suggestion tho.)