Well, let's move to the obvious conclusion then: the project that isn't getting enough attention is LibreSSL.
Those guys have been running on a shoestring and disgust with OpenSSL from day 1 and not getting much support. They could both turn in a new, improved solution pretty soon with just a little more.
I believe the point is that every member would be thinner. It might have a faster or same or even slower corrosion rate, but still have a shorter lifespan.
Ductile iron water pipes appear to corrode about 30% slower in mils/yr than the earlier cast iron; but the cast iron pipes, less strong, were twice as thick, so they're still in service as ductile iron pipes 20 years younger are failing. You can cathodically protect the earlier metals too...and all other things (like that) being equal, the thicker piece of metal is around longer.
Since your loss of value is many years away in most environments, it may be economically minor in cars, which are expected to depreciate to zero in under 20 years anyway.
...about soundproofing, not poisoning dogs, I believe it was.
Nobody's mentioned that soundproofing and heatproofing are largely the same thing. If your walls are well-insulated, your primary entrance for sound is through the windows. The questioner didn't mention his climate, but if he doesn't have double-pane glass, that's your major problem there. And you're probably cheaper to go to triple-pane or just two sets of double-pane before you start coating all the rest of the walls with another layer of acoustic panels or some such. Then there's doors. Make sure you have heavy doors, well-insulated.
Or as Dr. Gwynne Dyer put it over 40 years ago, "The next war is a come-as-you-are war". It isn't just that nobody would be able to invent a new type of weapon during the course of it; they couldn't manufacture a single copy of any weapon. In WW2, it was a battle of factories: could we build tanks and planes faster than they could? Faster than they could shoot ours down? Dr. Dyer pointed out that the next war is very unlikely to exceed 30 days duration, much less the 30 months needed to put out a single tank or plane these days.
"Ya gotta" ABSOLUTELY HATE ANY AIRCRAFT "whose sole mission is ground support " if you are an Air Marshal who has no job unless they're doing strategic bombing. Fixed that for you.
Close-air support hands over an AF asset to some Army(!!) lieutenant to boss around with a walkie-talkie. That's why the AF has been trying to kill it for decades.
There is no way in hell you'd assume a vitally important feedback mechanism like pain was absent from any living organism that could benefit from it, unless you were trying to convince yourself you weren't being cruel. Furcrissake bash their brains the instant you can.
The technologies of the 20th century, much less the 21st (we're already 1/7th of the way through that century), are enough to settle Antarctica. And there are some seriously, seriously overpopulated places on Earth now, and the land values in Manhattan and London are preposterous. But nobody is even talking about colonizing Antarctica for lebensraum. Not even doing that some decade in the future, ever. Nobody in India is saying "man, when India hits 1.4 billion, we'll just have to move some folks to Antarctica".
Or the Gobi Desert. Or the central plains of the whole of Russia, where some millions of square miles are barely used for anything, not being quite productive enough for grain growing. Only a *little* technology, compared to Mars, would be needed to colonize land areas the size of all of Mars...and are right here at the bottom of a gravity well, with free air(!!).
As Charles Stross says, call me about space colonies when Antarctica is full.
The professor's point is not that humans lack adventurousness or industry; but they don't go doing much more than the one trip and plant-the-flag unless there's profit in it. There's no profit in Antarctica, the Gobi, or the Russian Steppes...and way, way less in Mars, still less beyond it.
It's not even about transportation costs; you could lower those until you could get a tonne to Mars as cheaply as to Antarctica and there would STILL be no space colony unless Mars had something to offer than the Gobi did not.
Just a few months back, lwn.net had a longish story on PostgreSQL. They were scoring a victory with the "UPSERT" command addition in 9.5, which with speed updates old records, OR inserts a new one, if none. A big feature on your commercial databases. Apparently, PostgreSQL's biggest worry lately is that it has so many developers adding cool new features that there's some resource lacks maintaining and cleaning the base code. (Possibly unfair oversimplification of lwn.net story.)
I discovered PostgreSQL to get a free geodatabase for mapping, with the PostGIS plug-in...the open plug-in architecture being one of the greatest things about a FLOSS database. After nearly 25 years with Oracle and thinking everything else was a toy by comparison, PG blew me away. Amazing features, high performance, reliable. It's an amazing project, and this news is both impressive and unsurprising.
I was shopping for VCRs about 20 years back and asked the Future Shop guy how much better it was for having (quoting from the card beside the VCR) a "19 micron tape head". Turns out they ALL had 19 micron tape-heads (whatever the hell that *meant*) as it was the spec for a VCR tape head, at the time, at least. It was just another bit of science-y sounding technobabble to put on the card. Buying based on core count is like buying for the 19-micron thing; it's either a fast machine for your purposes or not. Absolutely the only way to tell that for sure is a test. The only thing that was ever useful with, say, "megahertz" was that it had for a decade or so there a correlation with the performance you'd get in real use. I've never found "cores" to have anything of the sort.
I read my way about half-way, started, skimming, and finally hit the TL;DR wall. It all seems to be criticism of picky aspects of previous series. So very little of it - except right at the top, before the arguments - was about what might be good ideas for a new show. None of these went over a sentence, whereas the criticism always goes on for paragraphs.
You critics should try writing sometime; it certainly seems to be hard for you to be new and creative here.
While the vitriol washes across the page and the duelling citations go to great indent levels, I'd just like to say, I don't care.
Nobody cares about the 24,000 people dying of coal-related causes in the US every year (over 100,000 world wide), they're just dismissed (emotionally speaking, which translates to newspaper column-inches and TV minutes) as "background", life is tough, has some risks, cars hit people, crazy people shoot innocent people...etc.
So you guys go ahead and argue whether the worldwide cancer death rate would be microscopically higher if all the coal plants were replaced with nukes. I'm sure it's a very interesting argument to doctors and biologists and nuclear engineers and stuff, but the rest of us have lives to get on with and we can't go worrying over problems that are undetectable without a well-run society doing careful statistics on very large numbers.
The cost of coal in lives is so much larger it doesn't require all that careful a record-keeping. I just read that 70% of the 29 coal miners killed in that explosion a few years back had black lung, when the industry average is 3% - caused by cheaping out on the coal-dust suppression, presumably, since that's also what blew up. The uranium-mining industry can't remotely compare. And their industry deliberately pumps all their combustion products straight into the atmosphere, mercury and all; they've harshly resisted any filtration.
Compared to coal, nuclear risks just disappear in perspective.
>Somebody has to be in charge. >Somebody has to be the final authority when tough decisions need to be made. >Otherwise, you've just got chaos.
A perfect statement of the authoritarian belief system. I say "belief system" not to be insulting but to point out that such statements are often phrased, as here, to have no exceptions, there's no "usually" qualifiers anywhere. So a single counter-example proves them to be incorrect statements. As there are many counterexamples, its a belief system, not a fact.
Decisions can be made by voting, or consensus, for instance. The workability is highly dependent on the group size, the problem, and particularly on whether the group contains a lot of people with authoritarian belief systems. Such people rarely want to contribute unselfishly to a group dynamic, they're constantly looking for "angles" to improve their own personal situation at group expense and the group dynamic quickly breaks down.
But if you can pull a group together where such people are absent or muzzled, they are frequently far more productive that groups lashed to a boss under an authoritarian system. They often have "leaders" - sometimes a number of them, each a Leader at a different type of problem - that other people follow happily because you get results if you follow them - but not bosses that compel obedience.
...but the coal industry in the States kills about 24,000 people per year - and that's just the respiratory stuff, it doesn't even attempt to find out what all the mercury that winds up in the fish is doing to people.
So sorry if it sounds callous to say, "actually, it doesn't matter whether you're arguing over zero deaths, one, ten or a hundred"...but as long as every single article about nuclear issues doesn't start and end with that 24,000 deaths per year (hundreds of thousands worldwide, though China is the really staggering toll), then all of those articles are callous.
Honestly, if 65 people per day were dying of a disease, would it be callous to say "look, the cure only kills about a hundred people in a whole year, fuck those people, deploy the cure". Maybe it would, but with a good:bad ratio of 240:1, it's the kind of callousness we all sign off on when it comes to anything else.
It's actually funny (black humour) to read those super-long posts attempting to prove this or that about the ultimate death toll...but the numbers don't even rise to the 1600 at issue for the evacuation, much less the respiratory deaths from fossil alternatives, much less the whole atmospheric chemistry issue. It's like the bar being set for nuclear is that it must be perfect..."way, way better" is not good enough...
I'm trying to remember what Iraq did to provoke the bombing of Osirak... I think they built something that might eventually have allowed the development of nuclear parity.
This may (also) have been stolen from some other OS, but Win95 was this Great Leap Forward in usability for one innovation alone, the right-click menu. I think it was the first time that "object-oriented" really showed up at the user level. Whatever object you clicked on - file, device, folder, data-object inside an application - you got the list of methods associated with the object, what you could do with the thing. Instead of applications having menus for their various functions, *data* objects had a menu appropriate to that data-item. If Microsoft invented that, they have to be given some props. Certainly all the larger Linux distros paid them the homage of stealing the idea.
Oh, and minor point by comparison, but still, props: I remember everybody giving rave reviews to their workaround for storing long filenames while remaining backwards compatible with 8.3 names. Not exactly a leap forward, but it countered the Great Leap Backward that 8.3 was and made the transition away from them almost painless.
You're far too tolerant. These "proportionalists" are the enemy of our freedoms and must all be hunted down and lynched. Even vi and emacs combatants must declare a truce and form a united front. Only monospacers are the True Faith.
Sorry, just left me at the bakery. The only thing I know about this squabble is what I just read, (and I have no intention of reading megabytes of angry argument-posts from dozens or hundreds of people I don't know) and it seems everybody agrees (1) the 2015 nominees were basically picked by these "puppy" groups; and (2) that in a wide-open election, their preferences were rejected.
The latter doesn't prove a "clique" because it was the wide-open election, and the former doesn't prove a clique, it proves a group banded together under the belief that there was a clique. To prove that point, they would have to show somehow that the nominees for previous awards were not representative or fair, that an attempt to nominate their preferences was gamed into failure.
Just re-reading your note to be sure this critique is fair. Your "and thus" seems to be saying that a current effort to change voting procedures is what proves the existence of this clique. I can't see what's wrong (or tendentious) about the prevention of small numbers of voters from effectively controlling the nominations - surely it could also be used by another fan-group to nominate only 5-nominee blocks of gay liberals or whatever - and that too should be prevented.
And I saw "Blade Runner". You ever see a great sportsman play a bad game? Movies are complicated things where a whole lot of people have to all get it right; it's not a precise science.
Thanks for the link. I've been telling people that was my favourite scene in Apollo 13 this whole time.
Frankly, the people posting hate on this book (I'm on the last chapter and have been reading it almost bouncing in my chair the whole time, all week) fill me with laughter and pity.
Guys, you are very, very literally-minded people with dull imaginations and badly need to get laid or otherwise loosen up. Novels are not instruction manuals on how to set up your BBQ. Novels are mostly metaphors. Not just the "moon was a ghostly galleon" kind of direct metaphors you find in a sentence, the whole problem and setting and plot are a larger metaphor. It's like you're critiquing a "Tale of Two Cities" as unbelievable because no two unrelated guys were ever that much of a pair of twins that close associates would be fooled.
The author has created a pulse-pounding drama by having it be One Man Against Nature, a really classic trope, read your Jack London. Yes, he cut a bunch of corners to make it possible for one guy to do just way, way more than the equipment and energy and available potatoes could really do, so that the story could be one man, forseeable tech, near future. The reality is that we'll have all those kinds of difficulties, need all that ingenuity, have all those close shaves, exploring space and Mars...but it'll be spread over many people and many missions and the specific problems will be different (and they'll totally obey every law of nature). The novel distills all that future adventure into one guy in one year, like distilling beer down into Scotch.
No one real-life action hero has 22 life-threatening adventures in one year; no one detective catches dozens of wily, smart, prepared serial killers in one career, (hell, no one town has that many). But by concentrating the adventures of a zillion cops and lawyers into one cast, stories are created that *people will watch* whereas real-life stories may be found on obscure cable channels Sunday afternoons.
The best story about making of Interstellar was the director telling Kip Thorne he needed the black hole to warp time by many years to the hour...long walk on the beach or whatever, and Thorne comes back with "well, barely possible, if it was spinning at an insane rate", and, well, that became the kind of black hole it had to be. [ And of course, that's after the magic FTL wormhole was already sucked up by the scientists. ]
The point of Interstellar was not to compete with Cosmos, it was to wake up the audience to just how amazing and complex space-time really can be in extreme locations; people got to marvel at the human meaning that time-rate-compression would have, what a black hole would look like, how a wormhole entrance would be a sphere, a 3D portal through 4D. All that was AWESOME and if you let your literal-mindedness close these stories off from your enjoyment of it, your other hobbies must include throwing cold water on your pants while clicking through Chive hotbodies, because "in reality" you are never going to meet those hot people.
Since I was just posting about how Libre's higher-end stuff is poor compared to Excel, I should be joining you on this. But "PowerPivot" is high-end even for me. Only introduced for Excel2010 (my office doesn't have it yet), and restricted to certain versions of 2013, I have to wonder how big the user base is.
I wrote my own VBA utility that lets me type an SQL statement and that sucks the results straight out of Oracle into a pivot table, plus has a bunch of buttons for doing stuff to the pivot table that take multiple menu moves without my add-in. (You can do this with menus, my addin just saves several steps - steps that most engineers around me would never learn in the first place).
Fooling around on menus, I couldn't find any way in LibreOffice to bring the result of an SQL query directly into a pivot table; that's pretty bad right there. Once you're spending time on workarounds, you quickly overcome any cost advantage of the free software. For me. Now if only 1% of users need these differences between Excel and Calc to save dozens of hours per year, we could easily be outvoted by the folks who just need to manage a few tables of numbers and formulas.
On the one hand, I have to agree: I use Libre at home and love my Excel VBA at work, and when it comes to interaction with databases, charting, the programming environment, I'd have to pick Excel for my job if they gave me the option, so I'd have to pick it for the corporation (8000 seats) too.
On the other: this wasn't the complaint. They were complaining about simple document tweaks like pagination. That makes it a bullshit complaint they just made up. My "corp" is a large city, but a city with 500 employees grand total isn't doing a lot of its engineering like we do, they're just cutting contracts to hire it out...and repaginating Word documents the contractors send them.
It's exactly with the "small office environments" that aren't slinging 30,000 rows of database into an excel spreadsheet with a touch of a button calling VBA that can do fine with Libre. It's the big places that are bound to be doing a number of complicated things that are out on the edge of what Office apps can do at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, let's move to the obvious conclusion then: the project that isn't getting enough attention is LibreSSL.
Those guys have been running on a shoestring and disgust with OpenSSL from day 1 and not getting much support. They could both turn in a new, improved solution pretty soon with just a little more.
I believe the point is that every member would be thinner. It might have a faster or same or even slower corrosion rate, but still have a shorter lifespan.
Ductile iron water pipes appear to corrode about 30% slower in mils/yr than the earlier cast iron; but the cast iron pipes, less strong, were twice as thick, so they're still in service as ductile iron pipes 20 years younger are failing. You can cathodically protect the earlier metals too...and all other things (like that) being equal, the thicker piece of metal is around longer.
Since your loss of value is many years away in most environments, it may be economically minor in cars, which are expected to depreciate to zero in under 20 years anyway.
...about soundproofing, not poisoning dogs, I believe it was.
Nobody's mentioned that soundproofing and heatproofing are largely the same thing. If your walls are well-insulated, your primary entrance for sound is through the windows. The questioner didn't mention his climate, but if he doesn't have double-pane glass, that's your major problem there. And you're probably cheaper to go to triple-pane or just two sets of double-pane before you start coating all the rest of the walls with another layer of acoustic panels or some such.
Then there's doors. Make sure you have heavy doors, well-insulated.
Or as Dr. Gwynne Dyer put it over 40 years ago, "The next war is a come-as-you-are war". It isn't just that nobody would be able to invent a new type of weapon during the course of it; they couldn't manufacture a single copy of any weapon. In WW2, it was a battle of factories: could we build tanks and planes faster than they could? Faster than they could shoot ours down?
Dr. Dyer pointed out that the next war is very unlikely to exceed 30 days duration, much less the 30 months needed to put out a single tank or plane these days.
"Ya gotta" ABSOLUTELY HATE ANY AIRCRAFT "whose sole mission is ground support " if you are an Air Marshal who has no job unless they're doing strategic bombing. Fixed that for you.
Close-air support hands over an AF asset to some Army(!!) lieutenant to boss around with a walkie-talkie. That's why the AF has been trying to kill it for decades.
There is no way in hell you'd assume a vitally important feedback mechanism like pain was absent from any living organism that could benefit from it, unless you were trying to convince yourself you weren't being cruel. Furcrissake bash their brains the instant you can.
The technologies of the 20th century, much less the 21st (we're already 1/7th of the way through that century), are enough to settle Antarctica. And there are some seriously, seriously overpopulated places on Earth now, and the land values in Manhattan and London are preposterous.
But nobody is even talking about colonizing Antarctica for lebensraum. Not even doing that some decade in the future, ever. Nobody in India is saying "man, when India hits 1.4 billion, we'll just have to move some folks to Antarctica".
Or the Gobi Desert. Or the central plains of the whole of Russia, where some millions of square miles are barely used for anything, not being quite productive enough for grain growing. Only a *little* technology, compared to Mars, would be needed to colonize land areas the size of all of Mars...and are right here at the bottom of a gravity well, with free air(!!).
As Charles Stross says, call me about space colonies when Antarctica is full.
The professor's point is not that humans lack adventurousness or industry; but they don't go doing much more than the one trip and plant-the-flag unless there's profit in it. There's no profit in Antarctica, the Gobi, or the Russian Steppes...and way, way less in Mars, still less beyond it.
It's not even about transportation costs; you could lower those until you could get a tonne to Mars as cheaply as to Antarctica and there would STILL be no space colony unless Mars had something to offer than the Gobi did not.
>You either win it or lose it, and you win it by breaking your enemy's will to fight. You have to kill the civilians to do that.
Very popular sentiments about Vietnam. Won yet?
Just a few months back, lwn.net had a longish story on PostgreSQL. They were scoring a victory with the "UPSERT" command addition in 9.5, which with speed updates old records, OR inserts a new one, if none. A big feature on your commercial databases. Apparently, PostgreSQL's biggest worry lately is that it has so many developers adding cool new features that there's some resource lacks maintaining and cleaning the base code. (Possibly unfair oversimplification of lwn.net story.)
I discovered PostgreSQL to get a free geodatabase for mapping, with the PostGIS plug-in...the open plug-in architecture being one of the greatest things about a FLOSS database. After nearly 25 years with Oracle and thinking everything else was a toy by comparison, PG blew me away. Amazing features, high performance, reliable. It's an amazing project, and this news is both impressive and unsurprising.
I was shopping for VCRs about 20 years back and asked the Future Shop guy how much better it was for having (quoting from the card beside the VCR) a "19 micron tape head". Turns out they ALL had 19 micron tape-heads (whatever the hell that *meant*) as it was the spec for a VCR tape head, at the time, at least. It was just another bit of science-y sounding technobabble to put on the card.
Buying based on core count is like buying for the 19-micron thing; it's either a fast machine for your purposes or not. Absolutely the only way to tell that for sure is a test. The only thing that was ever useful with, say, "megahertz" was that it had for a decade or so there a correlation with the performance you'd get in real use. I've never found "cores" to have anything of the sort.
I read my way about half-way, started, skimming, and finally hit the TL;DR wall. It all seems to be criticism of picky aspects of previous series. So very little of it - except right at the top, before the arguments - was about what might be good ideas for a new show. None of these went over a sentence, whereas the criticism always goes on for paragraphs.
You critics should try writing sometime; it certainly seems to be hard for you to be new and creative here.
While the vitriol washes across the page and the duelling citations go to great indent levels, I'd just like to say, I don't care.
Nobody cares about the 24,000 people dying of coal-related causes in the US every year (over 100,000 world wide), they're just dismissed (emotionally speaking, which translates to newspaper column-inches and TV minutes) as "background", life is tough, has some risks, cars hit people, crazy people shoot innocent people...etc.
So you guys go ahead and argue whether the worldwide cancer death rate would be microscopically higher if all the coal plants were replaced with nukes. I'm sure it's a very interesting argument to doctors and biologists and nuclear engineers and stuff, but the rest of us have lives to get on with and we can't go worrying over problems that are undetectable without a well-run society doing careful statistics on very large numbers.
The cost of coal in lives is so much larger it doesn't require all that careful a record-keeping. I just read that 70% of the 29 coal miners killed in that explosion a few years back had black lung, when the industry average is 3% - caused by cheaping out on the coal-dust suppression, presumably, since that's also what blew up. The uranium-mining industry can't remotely compare. And their industry deliberately pumps all their combustion products straight into the atmosphere, mercury and all; they've harshly resisted any filtration.
Compared to coal, nuclear risks just disappear in perspective.
Could go both ways. Some of us evolve in to the Arisians and others into the Eddoreans.
>Somebody has to be in charge.
>Somebody has to be the final authority when tough decisions need to be made.
>Otherwise, you've just got chaos.
A perfect statement of the authoritarian belief system. I say "belief system" not to be insulting but to point out that such statements are often phrased, as here, to have no exceptions, there's no "usually" qualifiers anywhere. So a single counter-example proves them to be incorrect statements. As there are many counterexamples, its a belief system, not a fact.
Decisions can be made by voting, or consensus, for instance. The workability is highly dependent on the group size, the problem, and particularly on whether the group contains a lot of people with authoritarian belief systems. Such people rarely want to contribute unselfishly to a group dynamic, they're constantly looking for "angles" to improve their own personal situation at group expense and the group dynamic quickly breaks down.
But if you can pull a group together where such people are absent or muzzled, they are frequently far more productive that groups lashed to a boss under an authoritarian system. They often have "leaders" - sometimes a number of them, each a Leader at a different type of problem - that other people follow happily because you get results if you follow them - but not bosses that compel obedience.
...but the coal industry in the States kills about 24,000 people per year - and that's just the respiratory stuff, it doesn't even attempt to find out what all the mercury that winds up in the fish is doing to people.
So sorry if it sounds callous to say, "actually, it doesn't matter whether you're arguing over zero deaths, one, ten or a hundred"...but as long as every single article about nuclear issues doesn't start and end with that 24,000 deaths per year (hundreds of thousands worldwide, though China is the really staggering toll), then all of those articles are callous.
Honestly, if 65 people per day were dying of a disease, would it be callous to say "look, the cure only kills about a hundred people in a whole year, fuck those people, deploy the cure". Maybe it would, but with a good:bad ratio of 240:1, it's the kind of callousness we all sign off on when it comes to anything else.
It's actually funny (black humour) to read those super-long posts attempting to prove this or that about the ultimate death toll...but the numbers don't even rise to the 1600 at issue for the evacuation, much less the respiratory deaths from fossil alternatives, much less the whole atmospheric chemistry issue. It's like the bar being set for nuclear is that it must be perfect..."way, way better" is not good enough...
Ahem. The GP was actually being, and I'm using the word correctly, literal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Tera is derived from Greek word teras, meaning “monster”. ...So TB is in fact monstrous...though PB and up are not.
I'm trying to remember what Iraq did to provoke the bombing of Osirak ... I think they built something that might eventually have allowed the development of nuclear parity.
Whenever somebody asks a question starting "Why don't they...." - the answer is always "money". (R. Heinlein)
We call Ozone the nuclear option of water treatment. Chlorine can generally do the job and it isn't just cheaper but more reliable.
This may (also) have been stolen from some other OS, but Win95 was this Great Leap Forward in usability for one innovation alone, the right-click menu. I think it was the first time that "object-oriented" really showed up at the user level. Whatever object you clicked on - file, device, folder, data-object inside an application - you got the list of methods associated with the object, what you could do with the thing. Instead of applications having menus for their various functions, *data* objects had a menu appropriate to that data-item.
If Microsoft invented that, they have to be given some props. Certainly all the larger Linux distros paid them the homage of stealing the idea.
Oh, and minor point by comparison, but still, props: I remember everybody giving rave reviews to their workaround for storing long filenames while remaining backwards compatible with 8.3 names. Not exactly a leap forward, but it countered the Great Leap Backward that 8.3 was and made the transition away from them almost painless.
You're far too tolerant. These "proportionalists" are the enemy of our freedoms and must all be hunted down and lynched. Even vi and emacs combatants must declare a truce and form a united front. Only monospacers are the True Faith.
Sorry, just left me at the bakery. The only thing I know about this squabble is what I just read, (and I have no intention of reading megabytes of angry argument-posts from dozens or hundreds of people I don't know) and it seems everybody agrees (1) the 2015 nominees were basically picked by these "puppy" groups; and
(2) that in a wide-open election, their preferences were rejected.
The latter doesn't prove a "clique" because it was the wide-open election, and the former doesn't prove a clique, it proves a group banded together under the belief that there was a clique. To prove that point, they would have to show somehow that the nominees for previous awards were not representative or fair, that an attempt to nominate their preferences was gamed into failure.
Just re-reading your note to be sure this critique is fair. Your "and thus" seems to be saying that a current effort to change voting procedures is what proves the existence of this clique. I can't see what's wrong (or tendentious) about the prevention of small numbers of voters from effectively controlling the nominations - surely it could also be used by another fan-group to nominate only 5-nominee blocks of gay liberals or whatever - and that too should be prevented.
And I saw "Blade Runner". You ever see a great sportsman play a bad game? Movies are complicated things where a whole lot of people have to all get it right; it's not a precise science.
Thanks for the link. I've been telling people that was my favourite scene in Apollo 13 this whole time.
Frankly, the people posting hate on this book (I'm on the last chapter and have been reading it almost bouncing in my chair the whole time, all week) fill me with laughter and pity.
Guys, you are very, very literally-minded people with dull imaginations and badly need to get laid or otherwise loosen up. Novels are not instruction manuals on how to set up your BBQ. Novels are mostly metaphors. Not just the "moon was a ghostly galleon" kind of direct metaphors you find in a sentence, the whole problem and setting and plot are a larger metaphor. It's like you're critiquing a "Tale of Two Cities" as unbelievable because no two unrelated guys were ever that much of a pair of twins that close associates would be fooled.
The author has created a pulse-pounding drama by having it be One Man Against Nature, a really classic trope, read your Jack London. Yes, he cut a bunch of corners to make it possible for one guy to do just way, way more than the equipment and energy and available potatoes could really do, so that the story could be one man, forseeable tech, near future. The reality is that we'll have all those kinds of difficulties, need all that ingenuity, have all those close shaves, exploring space and Mars...but it'll be spread over many people and many missions and the specific problems will be different (and they'll totally obey every law of nature). The novel distills all that future adventure into one guy in one year, like distilling beer down into Scotch.
No one real-life action hero has 22 life-threatening adventures in one year; no one detective catches dozens of wily, smart, prepared serial killers in one career, (hell, no one town has that many). But by concentrating the adventures of a zillion cops and lawyers into one cast, stories are created that *people will watch* whereas real-life stories may be found on obscure cable channels Sunday afternoons.
The best story about making of Interstellar was the director telling Kip Thorne he needed the black hole to warp time by many years to the hour...long walk on the beach or whatever, and Thorne comes back with "well, barely possible, if it was spinning at an insane rate", and, well, that became the kind of black hole it had to be. [ And of course, that's after the magic FTL wormhole was already sucked up by the scientists. ]
The point of Interstellar was not to compete with Cosmos, it was to wake up the audience to just how amazing and complex space-time really can be in extreme locations; people got to marvel at the human meaning that time-rate-compression would have, what a black hole would look like, how a wormhole entrance would be a sphere, a 3D portal through 4D. All that was AWESOME and if you let your literal-mindedness close these stories off from your enjoyment of it, your other hobbies must include throwing cold water on your pants while clicking through Chive hotbodies, because "in reality" you are never going to meet those hot people.
Since I was just posting about how Libre's higher-end stuff is poor compared to Excel, I should be joining you on this. But "PowerPivot" is high-end even for me. Only introduced for Excel2010 (my office doesn't have it yet), and restricted to certain versions of 2013, I have to wonder how big the user base is.
I wrote my own VBA utility that lets me type an SQL statement and that sucks the results straight out of Oracle into a pivot table, plus has a bunch of buttons for doing stuff to the pivot table that take multiple menu moves without my add-in. (You can do this with menus, my addin just saves several steps - steps that most engineers around me would never learn in the first place).
Fooling around on menus, I couldn't find any way in LibreOffice to bring the result of an SQL query directly into a pivot table; that's pretty bad right there. Once you're spending time on workarounds, you quickly overcome any cost advantage of the free software. For me. Now if only 1% of users need these differences between Excel and Calc to save dozens of hours per year, we could easily be outvoted by the folks who just need to manage a few tables of numbers and formulas.
On the one hand, I have to agree: I use Libre at home and love my Excel VBA at work, and when it comes to interaction with databases, charting, the programming environment, I'd have to pick Excel for my job if they gave me the option, so I'd have to pick it for the corporation (8000 seats) too.
On the other: this wasn't the complaint. They were complaining about simple document tweaks like pagination. That makes it a bullshit complaint they just made up. My "corp" is a large city, but a city with 500 employees grand total isn't doing a lot of its engineering like we do, they're just cutting contracts to hire it out...and repaginating Word documents the contractors send them.
It's exactly with the "small office environments" that aren't slinging 30,000 rows of database into an excel spreadsheet with a touch of a button calling VBA that can do fine with Libre. It's the big places that are bound to be doing a number of complicated things that are out on the edge of what Office apps can do at all.