Blame Sc[y|i]f[y|i] for that. It seems that their beef is with any show that grows beyond the mediocre. It gets cancelled in favour of shows that don't.
Take Farscape for example. Went boldly where no science fiction show had gone before. Got cancelled prematurely. Still, a good miniseries wrapping it all up got made. Or Caprica. Great show, great potential. Got cancelled after only one season.
We'll have to agree to disagree then. I count it as one of his strongest points that in B5 he always seemed able to put contemporary problems into a format that would work in such a setting. Be it a fight against tyranny, xenophobia or religious ethics, he always found a dilemma, and choose to not always provide an answer. I like that in a series. Not everything needs to be tidied up neatly. There have to be loose ties. Some things have to be let to the viewer's imagination.
Of course I recognized influences from other authors and other shows. I personally liked the link between Delenn (and the rest of the Minbari) and Carl Sagan. The part about star-stuff. It always rang true to me, right from the beginning.
I disagree. I view the Ninth, Tenth and Eleven Doctor as - and in some ways quite liteally - three faces of the same individual: Eccleston's Ninth Doctor is the mysterious happy-go-lucky persona that comes in from the cold and takes you up into an adventure. Tennant's Tenth Doctor is a bit more pragmatic, maybe a bit less mysterious: he knows his time is running out and he will go to great lengths to postpone that, and hints of his true age show up all over. And he falls in love. Smith's Eleventh Doctor is neither. Only the Doctor has remained. In a way, he has been reborn, not just regenerated.
Babylon 5 is by far one of the best science fiction TV series ever written. It was way ahead of its time. There is no denying it. Very few TV series can top it. Firefly certainly, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica maybe, Farscape for sure, Doctor Who is on par with it, but that's about it. What most people misunderstand about B5 is that it's basically a novel in an audiovisual format: the first season is the prologue, the second, third and fourth season is the main story and the fifth season is the epilogue. My personal favorite is season 2, episode 21 "Comes The Inquisitor". I knew it was about a certain figure from British history before the episode was halfway through. Why? Because of the subtle clues that JMS wrote into it. (I also feel it should be required viewing for double-duh-Bush-lovers;-))
If you really want to get into Doctor Who, watch the new series from 2005 on first. Why? Because it will give you a good feel of the show. Then watch some episodes from the Tom Baker era. If you're still intrigued, watch the rest from start. The first serials will definitely feel 'slow' and the special effects are dated (we are talking about a B&W science fiction show from the early 60s after all), but it will definitely be worth the watch.
One final note on my part: I feel that the World Scout movement has a very clear position towards child abuse: do everything we can to prevent it from happening in our organisations, and if it does happen, make sure the perpetrator is punished accordingly and is forever barred from ever working with children again.
Off topic:
By the way, why does the formatting of posts go haywire once we post them? I have to add HTML BR tags to every empty line for it to appear as one. I forgot that with my previous post above.
I am curious as to what this TSA is you are referring to:
* The Scouts Associations
* Theosophical Society in America
* Transport Security Administration
* Technology Student Association
* Tattnall Square Academy
* Texas Soaring Association
* Thai Student Association
* The Sharon Academy
* Tulane School of Architecture
Each of these would (at least in theory) be dealing with minors, or with adults in a student-teacher situation.
Accusing any of these specifically of promoting acts of child abuse is a grave accusation in and of itself. Being vague about some "TSA organisation being a front for child abuse" is actually even worse, because it could refer to any or all of the above.
Personally, I think your pet peeve is with the one top-most on my list (and if so, you are probably referring to the Scout movement itself, not the British association). For some reason the "pedophilia scare" always extends to the world's largest youth organisation. Maybe it has something to do with numbers. Maybe it is because you do not like the idea of children learning in and of the wild outdoors (although to think the activities of the Scout movement are restricted to only that would be grossly underestimating the contemporary activities of the Scout movement).
I have been involved with a local Scout group for a very long time - first as a youth member, then as a troop leader and later on as an volunteer in the foundation. In those 20+ years I was informed of two reported cases of child abuse. While still two too many, it is two in twenty years in a group of over 150 people. The most important thing I learnt from the way those two cases were handled is the proper response to it: keep your cool and make sure both the victim and the perpetrator are in safe hands. Because while most of us will realize the victim is scarred for the rest of his life (for which he (or she) should get all the help and support he (or she) needs), virtually none of us will realize that the perpetrator is as well. What he (or she) did cannot be justified in any way, but there usually comes a time when his (or her) time is served and he (or she) will have to go back to society and start over. Once that moment arrives, he (or she) should not be prevented from starting a new life.
Most cases of child abuse occur in a familial or familiar environment, by people who have a previous relationship with the victim. People who have lives and often also families of their own. Families who are torn apart by what happened, often to no fault of their own. Children being shunned because their daddy or mommy is a perv. Cases where - with proper counseling - chances for repetition of the fact are very small. Those are the cases we hardly read about in the news media, unless there is some sensational value to it. The cases we do read about are the extreme ones: serial rapists and murders, virtual strangers who abuse their position of oppurtunity to do the most horrid things to toddlers, fathers who abuse their daughters and lock them up in cellars, et cetera, et cetera. Because those are the stories with the most sensational value. That skews our view of things a lot. We end up believing that all people behaving inappropiately are automatically (child) rapists or murderers, when in fact that is far from true.
Do not be too sure about that. In some parts of Europe the tendency to label a completely innocent man (women are for some unspoken reason almost never accused) as a child molestor goes on par with cases of actual child abuse. The former may not always end up in criminal court or result in an actual sentencing, but the media coverage is disproportional and there are legions of citizens ready to lynch him if the case is thrown out or he is acquitted, or to cry wolf that the sentence was not high enough.
And the sad part is that if a person is acquitted or the case is thrown out, the damage is already done and he (or she) is almost without exception blacklisted and prevented from working with children again - without valid grounds.
The fear that someone may be a black sheep is often more damaging than this person actually being one.
Our very western society is going down the drain because our law-givers want make rules for everything and every conceivable situation. That is not freedom. Nor does it promote acting responsibly towards one's fellow man, let alone towards children.
The most important factor in dealing with people is using one's common sense. Unfortunately, when emotionally hot topics are concerned - like child abuse, terrorism presently, and the famous non-existing WMDs in Iraq, the Red Scare or the fear of nuclear holocaust in the past - our common sense is the first thing to go. This is because our society is programmed to lash out against anything or anyone that even remotely insinuates those things.
Why? Because of the age old saying: "The great Masses of the People..."
Not every Muslim is a terrorist. Heck, not every terrorist is Muslim. There are terrorists in every flavour and every vocation or religious belief system. Not every man or woman who works with children and enjoys it is a child molestor. In fact, the enjoyment part is often exactly what keeps these people going for twenty years or more. Being an educator or (surrogate) parent is a hard job and usually only pays off on the long term. I know of teachers and foster parents who were burnt out long before that!
And here I am, quoting someone who was arguably one of the most evil people in our history. Not because I agree with his ideas, or with his motives - let alone his actions. No, because unfortunately for us, with regard to this, he was absolutely right.
Any person proud to be of a specific nationality is by definition an idiot. Pride reflects a choice of actions. Pride is often confused with arrogance. Arrogance is the pride exhibited by those who have no cause to feel pride (e.g., someone of noble birth looking down on a commoner). Pride is also seldomly confused with inspiration.
I disagree. There is nothing wrong with being proud of who you are and where you came from. It is the moment that you start believing you or your nation or culture is better than that of others and that therefore everyone else should yield to your superiority that you become the idiot. Our history is full of fools who thought themselves better than others. Fortunately there were also several key moments in our history where very wise men were able to do something about that.
(*: If he's innocent, he can go back and defend himself. If he's innocent, he has little reason not to and a big scary reason to do so... namely, to clear his and wikileaks' names.)
He does not have to prove his innocence. A public attorney has to prove his guilt. There is a world of difference between those two. Be glad of that. Somehow the media always finds ways to pronounce someone guilty before it has actually been proven. And somehow everyone will always automatically believe what the media say.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master." Old quote from an old computer game, but it always rings true with me.
Privacy? What privacy?
As long as Facebook requires your real name and age, I will not create an account on it. Facebook has no right to that information. An email address and nickname should be all they ask for.
In my opinion the rule of thumb still applies. No matter what you are going to do with your system, it never hurts to have (more than) enough swap space. Like several people mentioned earlier: the more free RAM you have, the more RAM is available to the OS for the disk and buffer caches.
There is, however, a potentially severe case if you have two processes accessing the same resource simultanously. Every good informatician and computer programmer knows that such a case is the ultimate no-no in software engineering. Unfortunately, there are scenarios thinkable, in which it will happen nonetheless.
Back when I was still working on my Bachelor's degree I and a couple of friends of mine tried to simulate this theoretical possibility and see what happens. We had two processes, called 'ss1' and 'ss2', accessing the same resource at the same time:
ss1 would create a file sized X and go into an endless loop writing random bytes at random positions in the file. ss2 would open that file and mmap() it. That way it would be in the buffer cache as long as data was written to it (and since data was written to it by the other process, that was actually the case). The result of the mmap() was a character array and ss2 would write random bytes to that character array at random positions.
We tested this on the following OSes: Linux 2.0, Linux 2.2, Solaris x86 (can't remember which version), FreeBSD 3.3, Irix 4.0.5, 5.3 and 6.2 and Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. We ran the application with administrative or superuser privileges.
As long as the size (X) did not approach half the physical amount of RAM present in the machine, there were no problems whatsoever. However, as soon as X passed that threshold, bad things started to happen. The only exception was Windows NT, which simply aborted the process with a page fault and an out-of-memory error.
All the aforementioned machines that were running Linux or a variant of UNIX, suffered the same problem: a non-responsive system. The processes could only be terminated by doing a hardware reset of the machine. A kill -9 of the two processes did not work, because they were in a non-interruptable sleep. And the reason they were was that the OS was trying to fullfill the resource demands of the processes by swapping out other stuff, including, as we theorized, other parts of the file that were not "hot" at that time.
This piece of intentionally bad-written software and intentionally bad system operatorship of course proved that, while it was highly unlikely to happen, it could happen and would have dire consequences for the system.
Ordinarily, one should never run programs as a privileged user unless one absolutely has to and the two competing processes would have been terminated by the OS had they not run as root on the Linux and UNIX machines. But regardless of whether the OS in question uses the optimistic or pessimistic approach when allocating resources for a new process, the net result of having such a (in our case intentionally) badly written piece of software is the same: the system becomes non-responsive.
In this case, it does not matter much how much swap space you have, the only difference is that if you have only a little amount of swap space the "dreaded" OOM killer starts to kill of processes at a very early hour instead of when it is already too late (and virtually incapable of functioning properly and actually do its job).
Personally, I would still recommend using at least the same amount of swap space as you have physical RAM, and preferably at twice the amount. Bad things happen all the time, and it is better to be prepared for it. Therefore, the rule of thumb still applies.
*nods* A buckminster fullerene molecule (which is the actual name for the substance, is a very nice piece of chemical engineering. It shape is much like a football and it is big enough to contain atoms or molecules in its interior.
Slashdot Mirror
Blame Sc[y|i]f[y|i] for that. It seems that their beef is with any show that grows beyond the mediocre. It gets cancelled in favour of shows that don't.
Take Farscape for example. Went boldly where no science fiction show had gone before. Got cancelled prematurely. Still, a good miniseries wrapping it all up got made. Or Caprica. Great show, great potential. Got cancelled after only one season.
We'll have to agree to disagree then. I count it as one of his strongest points that in B5 he always seemed able to put contemporary problems into a format that would work in such a setting. Be it a fight against tyranny, xenophobia or religious ethics, he always found a dilemma, and choose to not always provide an answer. I like that in a series. Not everything needs to be tidied up neatly. There have to be loose ties. Some things have to be let to the viewer's imagination.
Of course I recognized influences from other authors and other shows. I personally liked the link between Delenn (and the rest of the Minbari) and Carl Sagan. The part about star-stuff. It always rang true to me, right from the beginning.
I disagree. I view the Ninth, Tenth and Eleven Doctor as - and in some ways quite liteally - three faces of the same individual: Eccleston's Ninth Doctor is the mysterious happy-go-lucky persona that comes in from the cold and takes you up into an adventure. Tennant's Tenth Doctor is a bit more pragmatic, maybe a bit less mysterious: he knows his time is running out and he will go to great lengths to postpone that, and hints of his true age show up all over. And he falls in love. Smith's Eleventh Doctor is neither. Only the Doctor has remained. In a way, he has been reborn, not just regenerated.
There are only two real Bonds. The rest of 'm are all bad copies. The first is Sean Connery. The second is Roger Moore.
Babylon 5 is by far one of the best science fiction TV series ever written. It was way ahead of its time. There is no denying it. Very few TV series can top it. Firefly certainly, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica maybe, Farscape for sure, Doctor Who is on par with it, but that's about it. What most people misunderstand about B5 is that it's basically a novel in an audiovisual format: the first season is the prologue, the second, third and fourth season is the main story and the fifth season is the epilogue. My personal favorite is season 2, episode 21 "Comes The Inquisitor". I knew it was about a certain figure from British history before the episode was halfway through. Why? Because of the subtle clues that JMS wrote into it. (I also feel it should be required viewing for double-duh-Bush-lovers ;-))
If you really want to get into Doctor Who, watch the new series from 2005 on first. Why? Because it will give you a good feel of the show. Then watch some episodes from the Tom Baker era. If you're still intrigued, watch the rest from start. The first serials will definitely feel 'slow' and the special effects are dated (we are talking about a B&W science fiction show from the early 60s after all), but it will definitely be worth the watch.
One final note on my part: I feel that the World Scout movement has a very clear position towards child abuse: do everything we can to prevent it from happening in our organisations, and if it does happen, make sure the perpetrator is punished accordingly and is forever barred from ever working with children again.
Off topic: By the way, why does the formatting of posts go haywire once we post them? I have to add HTML BR tags to every empty line for it to appear as one. I forgot that with my previous post above.
I am curious as to what this TSA is you are referring to: * The Scouts Associations * Theosophical Society in America * Transport Security Administration * Technology Student Association * Tattnall Square Academy * Texas Soaring Association * Thai Student Association * The Sharon Academy * Tulane School of Architecture Each of these would (at least in theory) be dealing with minors, or with adults in a student-teacher situation. Accusing any of these specifically of promoting acts of child abuse is a grave accusation in and of itself. Being vague about some "TSA organisation being a front for child abuse" is actually even worse, because it could refer to any or all of the above. Personally, I think your pet peeve is with the one top-most on my list (and if so, you are probably referring to the Scout movement itself, not the British association). For some reason the "pedophilia scare" always extends to the world's largest youth organisation. Maybe it has something to do with numbers. Maybe it is because you do not like the idea of children learning in and of the wild outdoors (although to think the activities of the Scout movement are restricted to only that would be grossly underestimating the contemporary activities of the Scout movement). I have been involved with a local Scout group for a very long time - first as a youth member, then as a troop leader and later on as an volunteer in the foundation. In those 20+ years I was informed of two reported cases of child abuse. While still two too many, it is two in twenty years in a group of over 150 people. The most important thing I learnt from the way those two cases were handled is the proper response to it: keep your cool and make sure both the victim and the perpetrator are in safe hands. Because while most of us will realize the victim is scarred for the rest of his life (for which he (or she) should get all the help and support he (or she) needs), virtually none of us will realize that the perpetrator is as well. What he (or she) did cannot be justified in any way, but there usually comes a time when his (or her) time is served and he (or she) will have to go back to society and start over. Once that moment arrives, he (or she) should not be prevented from starting a new life. Most cases of child abuse occur in a familial or familiar environment, by people who have a previous relationship with the victim. People who have lives and often also families of their own. Families who are torn apart by what happened, often to no fault of their own. Children being shunned because their daddy or mommy is a perv. Cases where - with proper counseling - chances for repetition of the fact are very small. Those are the cases we hardly read about in the news media, unless there is some sensational value to it. The cases we do read about are the extreme ones: serial rapists and murders, virtual strangers who abuse their position of oppurtunity to do the most horrid things to toddlers, fathers who abuse their daughters and lock them up in cellars, et cetera, et cetera. Because those are the stories with the most sensational value. That skews our view of things a lot. We end up believing that all people behaving inappropiately are automatically (child) rapists or murderers, when in fact that is far from true.
Do not be too sure about that. In some parts of Europe the tendency to label a completely innocent man (women are for some unspoken reason almost never accused) as a child molestor goes on par with cases of actual child abuse. The former may not always end up in criminal court or result in an actual sentencing, but the media coverage is disproportional and there are legions of citizens ready to lynch him if the case is thrown out or he is acquitted, or to cry wolf that the sentence was not high enough. And the sad part is that if a person is acquitted or the case is thrown out, the damage is already done and he (or she) is almost without exception blacklisted and prevented from working with children again - without valid grounds. The fear that someone may be a black sheep is often more damaging than this person actually being one.
Very wise words.
Our very western society is going down the drain because our law-givers want make rules for everything and every conceivable situation. That is not freedom. Nor does it promote acting responsibly towards one's fellow man, let alone towards children.
The most important factor in dealing with people is using one's common sense. Unfortunately, when emotionally hot topics are concerned - like child abuse, terrorism presently, and the famous non-existing WMDs in Iraq, the Red Scare or the fear of nuclear holocaust in the past - our common sense is the first thing to go. This is because our society is programmed to lash out against anything or anyone that even remotely insinuates those things.
Why? Because of the age old saying: "The great Masses of the People..."
Not every Muslim is a terrorist. Heck, not every terrorist is Muslim. There are terrorists in every flavour and every vocation or religious belief system. Not every man or woman who works with children and enjoys it is a child molestor. In fact, the enjoyment part is often exactly what keeps these people going for twenty years or more. Being an educator or (surrogate) parent is a hard job and usually only pays off on the long term. I know of teachers and foster parents who were burnt out long before that!
And here I am, quoting someone who was arguably one of the most evil people in our history. Not because I agree with his ideas, or with his motives - let alone his actions. No, because unfortunately for us, with regard to this, he was absolutely right.
Any person proud to be of a specific nationality is by definition an idiot. Pride reflects a choice of actions. Pride is often confused with arrogance. Arrogance is the pride exhibited by those who have no cause to feel pride (e.g., someone of noble birth looking down on a commoner). Pride is also seldomly confused with inspiration.
I disagree. There is nothing wrong with being proud of who you are and where you came from. It is the moment that you start believing you or your nation or culture is better than that of others and that therefore everyone else should yield to your superiority that you become the idiot. Our history is full of fools who thought themselves better than others. Fortunately there were also several key moments in our history where very wise men were able to do something about that.
(*: If he's innocent, he can go back and defend himself. If he's innocent, he has little reason not to and a big scary reason to do so... namely, to clear his and wikileaks' names.)
He does not have to prove his innocence. A public attorney has to prove his guilt. There is a world of difference between those two. Be glad of that. Somehow the media always finds ways to pronounce someone guilty before it has actually been proven. And somehow everyone will always automatically believe what the media say.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master." Old quote from an old computer game, but it always rings true with me.
Privacy? What privacy? As long as Facebook requires your real name and age, I will not create an account on it. Facebook has no right to that information. An email address and nickname should be all they ask for.
IMHO, XFS is a far better choice anyway. It's fast and it's stable. I have used it on my systems for years now.
In my opinion the rule of thumb still applies. No matter what you are going to do with your system, it never hurts to have (more than) enough swap space. Like several people mentioned earlier: the more free RAM you have, the more RAM is available to the OS for the disk and buffer caches.
There is, however, a potentially severe case if you have two processes accessing the same resource simultanously. Every good informatician and computer programmer knows that such a case is the ultimate no-no in software engineering. Unfortunately, there are scenarios thinkable, in which it will happen nonetheless.
Back when I was still working on my Bachelor's degree I and a couple of friends of mine tried to simulate this theoretical possibility and see what happens. We had two processes, called 'ss1' and 'ss2', accessing the same resource at the same time:
ss1 would create a file sized X and go into an endless loop writing random bytes at random positions in the file. ss2 would open that file and mmap() it. That way it would be in the buffer cache as long as data was written to it (and since data was written to it by the other process, that was actually the case). The result of the mmap() was a character array and ss2 would write random bytes to that character array at random positions.
We tested this on the following OSes: Linux 2.0, Linux 2.2, Solaris x86 (can't remember which version), FreeBSD 3.3, Irix 4.0.5, 5.3 and 6.2 and Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. We ran the application with administrative or superuser privileges.
As long as the size (X) did not approach half the physical amount of RAM present in the machine, there were no problems whatsoever. However, as soon as X passed that threshold, bad things started to happen. The only exception was Windows NT, which simply aborted the process with a page fault and an out-of-memory error.
All the aforementioned machines that were running Linux or a variant of UNIX, suffered the same problem: a non-responsive system. The processes could only be terminated by doing a hardware reset of the machine. A kill -9 of the two processes did not work, because they were in a non-interruptable sleep. And the reason they were was that the OS was trying to fullfill the resource demands of the processes by swapping out other stuff, including, as we theorized, other parts of the file that were not "hot" at that time.
This piece of intentionally bad-written software and intentionally bad system operatorship of course proved that, while it was highly unlikely to happen, it could happen and would have dire consequences for the system.
Ordinarily, one should never run programs as a privileged user unless one absolutely has to and the two competing processes would have been terminated by the OS had they not run as root on the Linux and UNIX machines. But regardless of whether the OS in question uses the optimistic or pessimistic approach when allocating resources for a new process, the net result of having such a (in our case intentionally) badly written piece of software is the same: the system becomes non-responsive.
In this case, it does not matter much how much swap space you have, the only difference is that if you have only a little amount of swap space the "dreaded" OOM killer starts to kill of processes at a very early hour instead of when it is already too late (and virtually incapable of functioning properly and actually do its job).
Personally, I would still recommend using at least the same amount of swap space as you have physical RAM, and preferably at twice the amount. Bad things happen all the time, and it is better to be prepared for it. Therefore, the rule of thumb still applies.
*nods* A buckminster fullerene molecule (which is the actual name for the substance, is a very nice piece of chemical engineering. It shape is much like a football and it is big enough to contain atoms or molecules in its interior.