Oh, come on. What's wrong with the opening theme. It's a break from the traditional themes, shows what the show is about, and goes well with the intro.
The old version of the Enterprise theme did all that. Took me a bit to get used to, but otherwise it was fine. The redone version (IIRC starting with season 3) however is IMHO just plain horrible. They tried to make it more upbeat, but in the process they destroyed all the character that was in the song.
Now, this is all a matter of personal taste of course. I'm sure some people do love the theme. What I just can't understand is why Paramount chose a theme that annoys so many people. If they'd tested it on a random audience sampling they'd known that.
Very true. That was indeed a horrible low point of the movie. However, I really, really dislike TPM, so I still consider AotC a significant improvement as a whole.
As an aside: I don't really blame Hayden and Natalie for the acting. With those lines there's really very little they could have done to make those scenes bearable. Even the best actors (which, admittedly, they're not) need something to work with.
I'm hopeful. If this one is as much better than Attack of the Clones as that one was better than The Phantom Menace, then it should be on par with Return of the Jedi. (AotC + (AotC-TPM) == RotJ) If George manages to pull that off, then I'll be content.
Funny, I alwasy thought that DC was part of America and if I remember correctly something happend around 1812 that makes your statement false and shows you lack ok knowledge of history.
You mean the 1814 burning of Washington DC's public buildings. That's not exactly a direct attack on a major population center like the massive bombings of entire cities in WWII were. But very well, for the sake of argument, I'm willing to cede that one and say the USA hasn't seen an attack on a major population center in nearly 200 years. That doesn't really change my point, which you seem to be ignoring.
The attack on Pearl Harbor, terrible as it was, was hardly a direct assault on a major population center.
I did not count the first independence war since the USA was not internationally recognized until after it was over. And as far as I know the war of 1812 did not involve any direct attacks on major population centers. Washington DC did have its public buildings burned in 1814, but AFAIK there were no organized attacks on civilian targets, unlike the massive bombings of entire cities in WWII. But okay, I'm willing to cede that one and say the USA hasn't seen an attack on a major population center in nearly 200 years.
Yes, French - the only language with 1000 words for surrender and don't bomb Paris.:)
Hardeharhar. Seriously folks, I like to make fun of the French as much as anyone, but this is getting really old.
This joke seems to come mostly from people from the USA, a country that is blessed in that it has never suffered a direct attack by a foreign nation on their major population centers. The closest thing is perhaps what happened on 9/11. Now imagine that some nation broke through your defenses and did that to your entire east coast and there was very little you could do to stop them from doing it again. You don't think that could possibly move Bush to sign an armistice?
Seriously folks. I know it's a joke and I do heartily laugh at it when it's brought well, but jeez, you hear this one so often that one gets the impression that some people believe it could never ever happen to their country. Please, let's all just make fun of some other aspect of the French for a while. It's not like there's not plenty of choice there.
GM crops have tremendous potential in regions such as Africa, where also, unfortunately, the governments are too afraid to use GM strains because they risk their agricultural exports with the hysterically-anti-GM nations (because of the fear of cross-polination).
These developing countries can't even compete fairly with unmodified crops because of the unfair subsidies Western governments give their own farmers. Imagine that--taxing your highly advanced industrial complex and then using the money to artificially lower the prices of your products in one of the only markets that people of impoverished nations can compete in!
How long is the developing world going to suffer because technological nations remain sentimental over their own agriculture?
Right now a lot of slashdotters hope their government will do something similar for IT workers to stop outsourcing. Other industries already have such measures to protect them. IIRC the American steel industries are a fine example.
That's just the way the world works. If you have something, you protect it, ethics be damned. Is it fair? Probably not. However, if you don't do it then people will lose jobs and that's not good for the elections.
Who's to blame? The politicians who are really just listening to their voters or the people who fear for their jobs? Things aren't always right or wrong.
Making Firefox the default browser is always worth it, but I wouldn't be so eager to throw away MS Office. If all it's used for is typing letters then it could well be a good idea (but then why aren't you using Works instead of Office in the first place?), but if people are using Excel, Access and PowerPoint then you're getting yourself in more trouble than you might think.
I work (part-time) at a human resources department and Excel is used all over the place. If it were replaced with Calc, then we'd have a serious problem. Lots of things that are easy in Excel are pretty hard to do in Calc, at least until you've had time to really familiarize yourself with it. Even worse is that it's a lot of work to convert Excel macros to Calc macros. Those things save a ton of work, but they're sadly not very portable. Maybe in time we'd be able to be just as productive with Calc, but the transition period would not be pretty. Like you said: time is money.
Another problem is with Impress. It's a fine program, but presentations need to look perfect and sadly the conversion from and to PowerPoint files is not yet perfect. Not a problem if all you have to deal with is other people using Impress, but you don't always have that luxury.
And finally, I wouldn't even know what to replace Access with. Granted, no hacker would touch the thing, but office workers generally aren't hackers. Access is about as complex a piece of software as you can put in front of office workers. Anything more complex and they just won't be able to use it at all.
So they say they've found the missing matter...
on
Dark Matter Discovered
·
· Score: 3, Funny
So they say they've found the missing matter, but nowhere in the article do they actually tell us where all the missingsocks went. Sure sounds like a scam to me!
Not an astronomer or space engineer, but does this one month timeframe take the required slowing down into account? You can't just point a spaceship at something, shoot it away at 60 km/s and expect it to both stop at its destination and survive arrival.
And while we're at it: how does one slow down a craft like this? Without destroying it or tugging along a rediculous amount of fuel, that is.
How about Carmageddon. A game that's all about hitting pedestrians with your car. Great fun, but after playing it for a about a week in my highschool vacation, I was really glad that I didn't have a driver's license. Every time I got into a car I would instinctively want to drive toward a pedestrian.
Now I don't think the urge was big enough to have actually caused problems had I been behind the wheel, but it sure as hell would have made driving uncomfortable.
And, by god, learn when to use jpeg, png and gif. I am continually amazed at the number of high profile websites that use jpegs when they should be using png or even gif. (The reverse doesn't happen quite as often.)
In case anybody around here doesn't know the difference: Use jpeg for photos and photo-like images. Basically anything with lots of gradual color changes. Never use it for anything with large equi-colored areas or line-art. If you do, then the lossy compression scheme will introduce visible artifacts that look really unprofessional. Instead use png or even gif (if you don't need more than 256 colors).
Take a look at VBA. You can script just about anything in in Office with it. Or any other application that exposes a COM interface for that matter. It's Turing complete and you can call the scripts using hotkeys.
It's pretty neat if you can get past the fact that it's based on VB6 (could be the newer Office versions have finally switched to VB.NET though). Not that bash has a much nicer syntax though. Ugh.
I actually did quite well with my 5 correct answers, considering the average score of only 2. I must admit though, that this is largely due to the fact that section 7 is thematically tied to my country of birth. Had I been smart enough to figure out that some sections have a theme to the answers as well as to the questions, then I probably could have doubled my score.
Even suckier is that there's a blatant internal discrepancy. According to the popular tech stuff table, "wallpaper" and "kazaa" are more popular than "mp3". However, according to the table with most popular queries "mp3" beats both of them!
I know it's a joke, but there's a reason why they won't go back to numbers (with or without biblical connotations). IIRC Intel tried to sue AMD for producing a chip they called a 486, but they were told by the judge that they couldn't trademark a number. That's why they called their next chip a Pentium instead of a 80586.
You might want to give ImageMagick a go; I'm not sure if it supports SVG.
It does, but rather poorly. It seems to convert any vector images to bitmaps, even if you just want to convert one vector format to another (say svg to eps).
The USPTO is little more than the IP law police department. They take the legislated law and the case law and attempt to make those who apply for patents abide by those legal concepts. [...] and if the applicant argues incessantly, there isn't much the USPTO can do other than reject the patent and let it go to court, or issue the patent and let the issue get sorted out in court when the patent owner tries to enforce it.
Perhaps I overestimated the authority of the USPTO then. But still, by not taking the hard route through the courts, the USPTO allows greedy corporations with enough money to pay for a small army of lawyers to terrorize smaller corporations and individuals through the use of bogus patents.
Now, I imagine that the USPTO does not feel it has the resources to take this hard route and that is probably true. However, it certainly can ask congress for more funds for this express purpose. I'm not naive enough to believe that congress will immediately comply, but it would certainly raise the public's awareness of the issue and could well be the first step towards resolving the problem.
I'm not sure what the story is behind this patent, but it's a far more complex issue than the USPTO employs idiots.
I actually never claimed that this is the case, though I can understand why I might have given that impression, given the posts that preceded my own. My apologies for not being clearer.
While you might hold this opinion about police who enforce bad laws, many people do not. Why do you think that the public realizes that police officers are "just doing their jobs" while they expect examiners at the USPTO to risk their careers to fix a system they had no part in creating?
People can and do understand that police officers are just doing their jobs, while still criticizing the police department as a whole. Likewise for the USPTO.
Only if I remove any knowledge of the legal system. The "criticism" of the USPTO around here is only valid if you don't have a clue how a legal system works. There is no concept of "common sense" in the law. There is no legal basis for issuing or not issuing a patent based on "common sense". If you think that's a problem, then you have a problem with the law, not the USPTO, and anyone with a basic knowledge of how the legal system works would know that.
Actually, it is my understanding that most countries require the law to be interpreted within the confines of reason, at least in theory. Specifically, it certainly seems to me that the nonobviousness requirement of US patent law requires the application of common sense, but I will gladly admit that I am not a lawyer, so I will not get into that any further.
Regardless, while I do have an issue with the law (I do not doubt that it needs a revision), I see no reason why that precludes me from having an issue with the institution that applies this law. If the spirit of a law is obviously violated, then I expect those who are to apply this law to protest and most definitely not to blindly keep applying it. If they do not protest, then I will rightfully have a problem with them as well.
There is, of course, no tool that meets the needs of every possible scenario. Instead, there are tools that meet the needs of common scenarios. Most of what MySQL is being (improperly) used for could be easily replaced with PostgreSQL. Postgres offer similar performance, but takes a minor hit for data integrity. As a bonus, you gain sub-selects, stored procedures, SQL-92 compliance, and other features of a "real" SQL database.
Actually, MySQL has been moving in that direction for quite some time now. MySQL 4.1 has subqueries and MySQL 5.0 has stored procedures.
Of course, MySQL still doesn't quite have the functionality of Postgress, especially in the data integrity department, so there's certainly truth to your claims. However, my point is that it's not standing still. It's certainly improving, so we can't just keep pointing out its past mistakes.
The only likely explanation for why those governments would be interested that has surfaced so far is that Indymedia posted some photographs that were taken of undercover police officers who were photographing demonstrators (the demonstrators photographed their photographers, as it were). Apparently this is illegal in Europe?
Compromising the identity of undercover police officers is something that is frowned on by governments worldwide. Don't know if it's actually illegal in Italy or Switzerland though.
In any case, it's a bit weird to generalise Italy and Switzerland to all of Europe. European countries all have their own laws, though members of the EU (which Switzerland isn't) share a lot of common laws. Not that I blame you for doing so - it's a common mistake for foreigners - but I felt I should set that straight.
Slashdot Mirror
The old version of the Enterprise theme did all that. Took me a bit to get used to, but otherwise it was fine. The redone version (IIRC starting with season 3) however is IMHO just plain horrible. They tried to make it more upbeat, but in the process they destroyed all the character that was in the song.
Now, this is all a matter of personal taste of course. I'm sure some people do love the theme. What I just can't understand is why Paramount chose a theme that annoys so many people. If they'd tested it on a random audience sampling they'd known that.
That's odd. Adaware occasionally does find tracker cookies on my machine and I only use IE for banking sites.
Do you have the most recent version of Adaware (not just the data files)?
Very true. That was indeed a horrible low point of the movie. However, I really, really dislike TPM, so I still consider AotC a significant improvement as a whole.
As an aside: I don't really blame Hayden and Natalie for the acting. With those lines there's really very little they could have done to make those scenes bearable. Even the best actors (which, admittedly, they're not) need something to work with.
I'm hopeful. If this one is as much better than Attack of the Clones as that one was better than The Phantom Menace, then it should be on par with Return of the Jedi. (AotC + (AotC-TPM) == RotJ) If George manages to pull that off, then I'll be content.
You mean the 1814 burning of Washington DC's public buildings. That's not exactly a direct attack on a major population center like the massive bombings of entire cities in WWII were. But very well, for the sake of argument, I'm willing to cede that one and say the USA hasn't seen an attack on a major population center in nearly 200 years. That doesn't really change my point, which you seem to be ignoring.
Hardeharhar. Seriously folks, I like to make fun of the French as much as anyone, but this is getting really old.
This joke seems to come mostly from people from the USA, a country that is blessed in that it has never suffered a direct attack by a foreign nation on their major population centers. The closest thing is perhaps what happened on 9/11. Now imagine that some nation broke through your defenses and did that to your entire east coast and there was very little you could do to stop them from doing it again. You don't think that could possibly move Bush to sign an armistice?
Seriously folks. I know it's a joke and I do heartily laugh at it when it's brought well, but jeez, you hear this one so often that one gets the impression that some people believe it could never ever happen to their country. Please, let's all just make fun of some other aspect of the French for a while. It's not like there's not plenty of choice there.
Right now a lot of slashdotters hope their government will do something similar for IT workers to stop outsourcing. Other industries already have such measures to protect them. IIRC the American steel industries are a fine example.
That's just the way the world works. If you have something, you protect it, ethics be damned. Is it fair? Probably not. However, if you don't do it then people will lose jobs and that's not good for the elections.
Who's to blame? The politicians who are really just listening to their voters or the people who fear for their jobs? Things aren't always right or wrong.
Making Firefox the default browser is always worth it, but I wouldn't be so eager to throw away MS Office. If all it's used for is typing letters then it could well be a good idea (but then why aren't you using Works instead of Office in the first place?), but if people are using Excel, Access and PowerPoint then you're getting yourself in more trouble than you might think.
I work (part-time) at a human resources department and Excel is used all over the place. If it were replaced with Calc, then we'd have a serious problem. Lots of things that are easy in Excel are pretty hard to do in Calc, at least until you've had time to really familiarize yourself with it. Even worse is that it's a lot of work to convert Excel macros to Calc macros. Those things save a ton of work, but they're sadly not very portable. Maybe in time we'd be able to be just as productive with Calc, but the transition period would not be pretty. Like you said: time is money.
Another problem is with Impress. It's a fine program, but presentations need to look perfect and sadly the conversion from and to PowerPoint files is not yet perfect. Not a problem if all you have to deal with is other people using Impress, but you don't always have that luxury.
And finally, I wouldn't even know what to replace Access with. Granted, no hacker would touch the thing, but office workers generally aren't hackers. Access is about as complex a piece of software as you can put in front of office workers. Anything more complex and they just won't be able to use it at all.
So they say they've found the missing matter, but nowhere in the article do they actually tell us where all the missing socks went. Sure sounds like a scam to me!
Not an astronomer or space engineer, but does this one month timeframe take the required slowing down into account? You can't just point a spaceship at something, shoot it away at 60 km/s and expect it to both stop at its destination and survive arrival.
And while we're at it: how does one slow down a craft like this? Without destroying it or tugging along a rediculous amount of fuel, that is.
How about Carmageddon. A game that's all about hitting pedestrians with your car. Great fun, but after playing it for a about a week in my highschool vacation, I was really glad that I didn't have a driver's license. Every time I got into a car I would instinctively want to drive toward a pedestrian.
Now I don't think the urge was big enough to have actually caused problems had I been behind the wheel, but it sure as hell would have made driving uncomfortable.
And, by god, learn when to use jpeg, png and gif. I am continually amazed at the number of high profile websites that use jpegs when they should be using png or even gif. (The reverse doesn't happen quite as often.)
In case anybody around here doesn't know the difference: Use jpeg for photos and photo-like images. Basically anything with lots of gradual color changes. Never use it for anything with large equi-colored areas or line-art. If you do, then the lossy compression scheme will introduce visible artifacts that look really unprofessional. Instead use png or even gif (if you don't need more than 256 colors).
Take a look at VBA. You can script just about anything in in Office with it. Or any other application that exposes a COM interface for that matter. It's Turing complete and you can call the scripts using hotkeys.
It's pretty neat if you can get past the fact that it's based on VB6 (could be the newer Office versions have finally switched to VB.NET though). Not that bash has a much nicer syntax though. Ugh.
I actually did quite well with my 5 correct answers, considering the average score of only 2. I must admit though, that this is largely due to the fact that section 7 is thematically tied to my country of birth. Had I been smart enough to figure out that some sections have a theme to the answers as well as to the questions, then I probably could have doubled my score.
Even suckier is that there's a blatant internal discrepancy. According to the popular tech stuff table, "wallpaper" and "kazaa" are more popular than "mp3". However, according to the table with most popular queries "mp3" beats both of them!
I know it's a joke, but there's a reason why they won't go back to numbers (with or without biblical connotations). IIRC Intel tried to sue AMD for producing a chip they called a 486, but they were told by the judge that they couldn't trademark a number. That's why they called their next chip a Pentium instead of a 80586.
It does, but rather poorly. It seems to convert any vector images to bitmaps, even if you just want to convert one vector format to another (say svg to eps).
Perhaps I overestimated the authority of the USPTO then. But still, by not taking the hard route through the courts, the USPTO allows greedy corporations with enough money to pay for a small army of lawyers to terrorize smaller corporations and individuals through the use of bogus patents.
Now, I imagine that the USPTO does not feel it has the resources to take this hard route and that is probably true. However, it certainly can ask congress for more funds for this express purpose. I'm not naive enough to believe that congress will immediately comply, but it would certainly raise the public's awareness of the issue and could well be the first step towards resolving the problem.
I actually never claimed that this is the case, though I can understand why I might have given that impression, given the posts that preceded my own. My apologies for not being clearer.
People can and do understand that police officers are just doing their jobs, while still criticizing the police department as a whole. Likewise for the USPTO.
Actually, it is my understanding that most countries require the law to be interpreted within the confines of reason, at least in theory. Specifically, it certainly seems to me that the nonobviousness requirement of US patent law requires the application of common sense, but I will gladly admit that I am not a lawyer, so I will not get into that any further.
Regardless, while I do have an issue with the law (I do not doubt that it needs a revision), I see no reason why that precludes me from having an issue with the institution that applies this law. If the spirit of a law is obviously violated, then I expect those who are to apply this law to protest and most definitely not to blindly keep applying it. If they do not protest, then I will rightfully have a problem with them as well.
You do not see a relation between that and the critique directed at the reality of the USPTO?
I think you've nailed the crux of the issue down quite well.
Actually, MySQL has been moving in that direction for quite some time now. MySQL 4.1 has subqueries and MySQL 5.0 has stored procedures.
Of course, MySQL still doesn't quite have the functionality of Postgress, especially in the data integrity department, so there's certainly truth to your claims. However, my point is that it's not standing still. It's certainly improving, so we can't just keep pointing out its past mistakes.
Compromising the identity of undercover police officers is something that is frowned on by governments worldwide. Don't know if it's actually illegal in Italy or Switzerland though.
In any case, it's a bit weird to generalise Italy and Switzerland to all of Europe. European countries all have their own laws, though members of the EU (which Switzerland isn't) share a lot of common laws. Not that I blame you for doing so - it's a common mistake for foreigners - but I felt I should set that straight.