dammit, now I have that themesong running round my head. You're right though. I sat down to watch episode one, and was reduced to a shocked silence by the theme song.
Every episode of the few I watched after that was muted until the last few dregs of theme tune crept through the digibox and slunk away in shame.
I had heard that they changed writing style and went to a three episode story arc thing for the last season. However it was too little too late, by that time I was so fed up with the awful writing that had preceeded it that I'd given up on the series.
Out of morbid curiosity I did watch the last episode. It was sheer desperate self congratulatory nonsense, I struggled to stay watching.
When it comes to new style star trek (as in post original series) that had to be the worst ever final episode, closely followed by DS9's finale (and I liked that series). The final voyager episode did suck on first viewing, but then it grew on me, becoming rewatchable. The only really good finale was the tng one, which stands out as being an interesting story with great acting, one of my favorite star trek double episodes.
It was good, well in places it was great, but not everywhere, but all they are doing is trying to get more money from a story that has been told and retold until they are inescapably trapped in a quagmire of ever repeating storylines.
Enterprise was a good example. They assembled a team of great actors, then forced them to regurgitate shit storylines until even the diehard fans started to cry out in pain. Its the only star trek where if I see its on I won't flick over to watch it.
If they left it for a decade or three that might be good. Let the dust settle, let some fresh talent tackle the story in a new way.
I've had this problem this very evening on my xp box, clearing out thousands of old object files from an ancient code store, god it took ages. 5500 ish small object files in disperate folders, 10 minutes to complete.
to be fair though, if I use rm to kill a few thousand files under linux on my lab machine three hundred miles away using a terminal in vnc it over dsl, it can be a tiny bit slow.
I mean, sometimes it takes more then a few seconds, twenty even if I'm using a bash script to move through folders, omg shocks!
never mind doesn't work on windows, what about the Windows Media Player only thing? I haven't used WMP for, ooh, must be about seven years. THat alone is enough to stop me using this service.
Yes I also use linux, but for me linux is strictly a console only affair, I love the OS, but I need all its power and superb process management to run my software, no media gets anywhere near it. I treat Windows as a media and gaming box.
Re:Havn't I seen this before?
on
Rails Cookbook
·
· Score: 1
Then may I interest you in my 'Cookbook on Rails' publication?
Only 999,999 doller, love you long time...
Or there's the Extreme Programming edition of the above for an extra ten bucks.
(wtf is extreme programming anyhow, hell I've been a coder for 7 years and I haven't met a single extreme programmer face to face)
But you say you buy the dvd. Therefore no issue really, same as me. I objected to people using crappy cinemas as a justification for downloading movies.
Don't get me wrong though, I don't think they're doing anything evil by downloading, its not like a few bits downloaded risks world peace or anything. What I object to is the hypocrisy of the argument.
Incidentally, I just moved from a town where the cinema had a nice bar you could wait in, pleasant seating, and a really good atmosphere (aka hot chicks behind the bar) to a big town with a cattleshed cinima monstrosity, so the next film I want to see - Hot Fuzz, is waiting till dvd release for me.
I hear this 'can't stand the theatre' argument trotted out by people who download movies a lot.
It's a crock, no really. If you don't like it, then why are you downloading the film you would have gone to see? And how is a lower quality rip/cam job better then widescreen full on surround sound goodness?
Is it the shitty theatre food? Take your own, its not hard.
So you don't want to wait for the dvd? Well lets face it, you aren't going to buy it anyway, you have the rip...
Dvd's don't take too long to come out most of the time, and if you wanted to watch it beforehand, well there was the cinema, but you 'can't stand' those, can you.
I don't bother downloading movies myself, I decided long ago that since I don't much enjoy going to the cinema on my own, and people I know are mostly in the 'can't stand it so I'll D/L for free' group, that I'd just wait till films came out on dvd and buy those instead. I care not that its legal, I care more about enjoying decent quality visuals in my film experience.
That hollywood only exists because they moved to california to escape opressive patents and use the patented technology without paying rights holders..
who needs email? Anyone who thinks they might. How many people 'needed' comnputers in the seventies? From my point of view it was the ultra cool guys who worked at the local power plant.
In the eighties it was a hobbyist scene, of which I was part (and it was great in ways I cannot describe, no really), but still 'ordinary' people?' using computers? Nah, they didn't 'need' them....
And yet nowadays almost everyone I know, many of whom are the same people, or new people doing the same old normal day to day stuff, 'really need' their machines, and often rely on email for everything from business to family issues.
So who needs email? Probably anyone, about a week after they first start using it.
Why talk up the threats if they themselves haven't done a little analysis and realised that Linux is in fact superior?
Excellent networking - more tools, ssh in built, thoroughly up to date and constantly checked TCP/IP stack Superior Security model - even if one simply takes user/root seperation as standard in linux as an example Higher quality code base - peer reviewed I'm thinking here Freely available applications - Almost anything is one google query away.
About the only things it lacks are decent games and full vendor support, but both those things are getting there. Add to that the fact that most distributions come complete virtually everything you might need, being as they are 'distributions' rather then just OS, microsoft have a great deal to worry about.
Just let them try to shut down Linux. First off, how could they do it? Second, can you imagine what shit they would be in if they tried?
Hell, Pamala Jones would probably have multiple orgasms over the prospect:-)
Trouble is, in the original PC world, such a system was simply inconceivable. Their business plan for the future was utterly blown apart by its emergance.
Not living in America I can't say whether using swat was overdoing it. How many such engagements have ended in gunplay? I have no idea.
We get a distorted view of american justice issues in the UK. If its a peaceful arrest situation no-one cares, we only hear if there's been deaths, and that a lot, or significant ones. That's what you get for a hype driven media system.
My sister lives in the states, and she see's nothing of the out of control gun culture we get blasted at us though the media. I'm not surprised. Although we did once know a family who lived in New York and had bullet proof glass in all their windows. They were rich mind, so perhaps they had reason to fear violence, or perhaps they were just overdoing it because they had the money to buy the stuff. Beats me, if someone wants to kill you, what is bullet proof glass going to do beyond stop them breifly?
The UK is apparently hardly immune from gun problems, as current events here are showing.
I've had a think about this. It seems to me that if your ability to go home at the end of your working day in a car instead of a box depended on being heavily armed when raiding places that might or might not be dangerous, perhaps it isn't so extreme to act that way.
Its a heck of a lot easier to argue the rights and wrongs if you're not being buried while the debate progresses. They did not, at least in this case, go in with all guns blazing, just with them ready should anyone else select the blazing option.
Actually Captive Universe is a very good book that deals with the problem of the generational ship in a very interesting manner, one should not discount SF as a starting point in a scientific thought process.
The Amish are non agressive, this is true. However they are (except for tragic recent events) sheilded by existing in a vast country that chooses to allow their continued existance, and well they might, the Amish are an example of a well ordered society. This is, is it not, the whole reason they came to america in the first place?
I am however given to ponder how far their peaceful nature would have taken them in the old world, or if it would have survived at all. We tended to be a nasty bunch, remember the Cathars? No? Barely anyone does, but they were somewhat similer to the Amish I beleive, and also very extinct.
Thats way outside my field though, I profess no more than curiosity.
so, the sheriffs office are going to pimp their patrol cars and start wearing huge (and I presume bullet proof) gold medallions?
Instead of going on patrol they will be 'checking up on mah bitches'. Public relations will be replaced by 'keeping it real' and 'giving respect to da man...'.
I can see it now, sounds like a plan with no drawbacks:-)
I don't see anything in the article about them being hired then being busted for doing the thing they were hired to do.
Seems to me they had been hired once, but that wasn't anything to do with the raid. Mind you, the raid itself seemed a bit extreme. They found none of the stuff that made them think they should go in armed. Still, I don't know what percentage of raids of this type do turn up arms/drugs, or how many they have to do, the gun toting could simply be policy.
The suppresion of semi ligitimate music outlets is all part of the RIAAs remit, so this shouldn't be surprising. They aren't defenders of law, they are defenders of a business model, and have worked to change laws to protect that business model.
By what measure do you assume religous obsession to be more likely to be stable? Every time religous groups become fundamental they become intolerant and prone to acts of violence against even those of their faith who are less fanatical. A system like that would likely self destruct before ever arriving.
Try reading 'Captive Universe' by Harry Harrison, he uses a broadly similar theme, that of passengers contrained by superstition and being held unaware of the reality of the situation and a separate group of engineer types steering the ship but also held to strict beleifs. Suffice to say it doesn't go well.
I see your point. However, in the case of a space colony, disputes could well arise over water supply and food production, and rather then being inconvenient, those would be fatal, if for example someone took the all too familier path of killing to prove a point. Even if no open disputes were to start, those area's are going to be utterly critical. On Earth colonies can survive levels of hardship and dispute that would wipe out an off world colony.
I'm assuming here that no colony would be established on a world without breathable atmosphere, but I could be wrong. Ifd that were the case a single argument or crazy person could kill everyone.
I dispute that a caste system would work. All Caste systems have involved strict control based on, in some cases, thousands of years of established tradition. I doubt very much that unless all history on the first generation were erased people would be happy that their ancestor came on board as, say a highly qualified biomolecular engineer, and they were relegated to gardening *for life* because someone had decided that this was their lot.
Can you say you would take that? I don't know that I would, and yes I did get told long ago that I was to expect to work in factories for the rest of my life, and this was for the best. Now I have a phd. I'm a normal person and I refused to accept my 'required' role, we can assume colonists would be too.
Space colonies are going to be, no matter how nominally well prepared, intensly fragile entities. One can see that simply by deduction without having to have one exist yet.
Any group of people so large together for so long would have one over-riding problem, that of humanities prediliction to segment itself by beleif or role.
There has not yet been a succesful attempt to produce a 'perfect' society, with the first attempt being by Plato.
What if the military ship model is used then? Well then you have centuries of one group being in charge, with either hereditary succession or selection by ability (democratic methods have never worked in the military model). Either way you end up with a perception of the controllers and controlled, partition is a natural result of the militaristic method, a caste system emerges.
Then what about the choice of the people who are born to the ship? They may realise that they have no choice, but humans have rarely prospered and worked at their best when their destiny is completelly laid out. The potential for unrest is quite pronounced. Ghandi demonstrated clearly that even non violent protest can be highly disruptive.
And at the end of the journey? Well you have a society which is partitioned already, and the people who were in charge are likely (human nature) to weant to stay in charge, even though the members of the expedition who were not in the ruling class (of whatever form) are now in the position of being able to say they no longer need that control, indeed of demanding it.
War is the most likely result in that circumstance, or at the very least dissent resulting in societal disruption. That's not something a colony could survive, even if it found somewhere to stay when it arrived at the destination.
A bit bleak I know. I think we'd be better off waiting until the participants in the journey could, in whole or majority, or in shifts, sit out the travel time in hibernation. That way they are not born to a society which has experienced centuries of partition.
managers manage well by having people below them who know their jobs. That way they manage the people themselves, not micromanage everything they have to do.
A good manager should appear to have very little to do, because everything is so well organised.
A bad manager is very easy to spot. People under them feel unsupported, become over relient on rules and regulations, and everything takes so long to do that nothing gets done.
I've experienced both types of management, the bad type is painful. When I've managed (in medicine) I worked very hard to train my people to trust in their own abilities and take on and enjoy responsibility.
Nothing to do with spam in this post I realise, but then I hate spam, nasty fatty stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes I do watch voyager...
three reasons:
1: seven of nine.
2: seven of nine.
3: seven of nine.
I rest my case.
dammit, now I have that themesong running round my head. You're right though. I sat down to watch episode one, and was reduced to a shocked silence by the theme song.
Every episode of the few I watched after that was muted until the last few dregs of theme tune crept through the digibox and slunk away in shame.
oh yeah, well when I installed WMP 11 my computer got up, ran out of the room and invaded poland, *then* melted and blew up.
I had heard that they changed writing style and went to a three episode story arc thing for the last season. However it was too little too late, by that time I was so fed up with the awful writing that had preceeded it that I'd given up on the series.
Out of morbid curiosity I did watch the last episode. It was sheer desperate self congratulatory nonsense, I struggled to stay watching.
When it comes to new style star trek (as in post original series) that had to be the worst ever final episode, closely followed by DS9's finale (and I liked that series). The final voyager episode did suck on first viewing, but then it grew on me, becoming rewatchable. The only really good finale was the tng one, which stands out as being an interesting story with great acting, one of my favorite star trek double episodes.
No really.
It was good, well in places it was great, but not everywhere, but all they are doing is trying to get more money from a story that has been told and retold until they are inescapably trapped in a quagmire of ever repeating storylines.
Enterprise was a good example. They assembled a team of great actors, then forced them to regurgitate shit storylines until even the diehard fans started to cry out in pain. Its the only star trek where if I see its on I won't flick over to watch it.
If they left it for a decade or three that might be good. Let the dust settle, let some fresh talent tackle the story in a new way.
I've had this problem this very evening on my xp box, clearing out thousands of old object files from an ancient code store, god it took ages. 5500 ish small object files in disperate folders, 10 minutes to complete.
to be fair though, if I use rm to kill a few thousand files under linux on my lab machine three hundred miles away using a terminal in vnc it over dsl, it can be a tiny bit slow.
I mean, sometimes it takes more then a few seconds, twenty even if I'm using a bash script to move through folders, omg shocks!
That's a fair comparison, right?
searching for 'evolution' in the title of a paper brings back 5,180,000 results...
never mind doesn't work on windows, what about the Windows Media Player only thing? I haven't used WMP for, ooh, must be about seven years. THat alone is enough to stop me using this service.
Yes I also use linux, but for me linux is strictly a console only affair, I love the OS, but I need all its power and superb process management to run my software, no media gets anywhere near it. I treat Windows as a media and gaming box.
Then may I interest you in my 'Cookbook on Rails' publication?
Only 999,999 doller, love you long time...
Or there's the Extreme Programming edition of the above for an extra ten bucks.
(wtf is extreme programming anyhow, hell I've been a coder for 7 years and I haven't met a single extreme programmer face to face)
But you say you buy the dvd. Therefore no issue really, same as me. I objected to people using crappy cinemas as a justification for downloading movies.
Don't get me wrong though, I don't think they're doing anything evil by downloading, its not like a few bits downloaded risks world peace or anything. What I object to is the hypocrisy of the argument.
Incidentally, I just moved from a town where the cinema had a nice bar you could wait in, pleasant seating, and a really good atmosphere (aka hot chicks behind the bar) to a big town with a cattleshed cinima monstrosity, so the next film I want to see - Hot Fuzz, is waiting till dvd release for me.
I hear this 'can't stand the theatre' argument trotted out by people who download movies a lot.
It's a crock, no really. If you don't like it, then why are you downloading the film you would have gone to see? And how is a lower quality rip/cam job better then widescreen full on surround sound goodness?
Is it the shitty theatre food? Take your own, its not hard.
So you don't want to wait for the dvd? Well lets face it, you aren't going to buy it anyway, you have the rip...
Dvd's don't take too long to come out most of the time, and if you wanted to watch it beforehand, well there was the cinema, but you 'can't stand' those, can you.
I don't bother downloading movies myself, I decided long ago that since I don't much enjoy going to the cinema on my own, and people I know are mostly in the 'can't stand it so I'll D/L for free' group, that I'd just wait till films came out on dvd and buy those instead. I care not that its legal, I care more about enjoying decent quality visuals in my film experience.
That hollywood only exists because they moved to california to escape opressive patents and use the patented technology without paying rights holders..
That makes me giggle.
who needs email? Anyone who thinks they might.
How many people 'needed' comnputers in the seventies? From my point of view it was the ultra cool guys who worked at the local power plant.
In the eighties it was a hobbyist scene, of which I was part (and it was great in ways I cannot describe, no really), but still 'ordinary' people?' using computers? Nah, they didn't 'need' them....
And yet nowadays almost everyone I know, many of whom are the same people, or new people doing the same old normal day to day stuff, 'really need' their machines, and often rely on email for everything from business to family issues.
So who needs email? Probably anyone, about a week after they first start using it.
wrong, complex tool use did not spontaniously emerge in humans either.
Things like this take a long time to develop, starting, most likely, with a chimp who hunted for something in a hole that already had a stick in it.
Perhaps they knocked the stick, the prey came out, and they decided to put their own stick in next time, something like that.
To require the involvement of humans is a bit, well, arrogant.
Why talk up the threats if they themselves haven't done a little analysis and realised that Linux is in fact superior?
:-)
Excellent networking - more tools, ssh in built, thoroughly up to date and constantly checked TCP/IP stack
Superior Security model - even if one simply takes user/root seperation as standard in linux as an example
Higher quality code base - peer reviewed I'm thinking here
Freely available applications - Almost anything is one google query away.
About the only things it lacks are decent games and full vendor support, but both those things are getting there.
Add to that the fact that most distributions come complete virtually everything you might need, being as they are 'distributions' rather then just OS, microsoft have a great deal to worry about.
Just let them try to shut down Linux. First off, how could they do it? Second, can you imagine what shit they would be in if they tried?
Hell, Pamala Jones would probably have multiple orgasms over the prospect
Trouble is, in the original PC world, such a system was simply inconceivable. Their business plan for the future was utterly blown apart by its emergance.
SO yes, I imagine they are very worried.
Hmm, so the galaxy could be littered with the remains of ancient exctinct races?
I wonder if they dropped any good stuff?
I mean, that turns the whole 'colonise space' thing into one giant real world MMORG, I'm in!
Not living in America I can't say whether using swat was overdoing it. How many such engagements have ended in gunplay? I have no idea.
We get a distorted view of american justice issues in the UK. If its a peaceful arrest situation no-one cares, we only hear if there's been deaths, and that a lot, or significant ones. That's what you get for a hype driven media system.
My sister lives in the states, and she see's nothing of the out of control gun culture we get blasted at us though the media. I'm not surprised. Although we did once know a family who lived in New York and had bullet proof glass in all their windows. They were rich mind, so perhaps they had reason to fear violence, or perhaps they were just overdoing it because they had the money to buy the stuff. Beats me, if someone wants to kill you, what is bullet proof glass going to do beyond stop them breifly?
The UK is apparently hardly immune from gun problems, as current events here are showing.
I've had a think about this. It seems to me that if your ability to go home at the end of your working day in a car instead of a box depended on being heavily armed when raiding places that might or might not be dangerous, perhaps it isn't so extreme to act that way.
Its a heck of a lot easier to argue the rights and wrongs if you're not being buried while the debate progresses. They did not, at least in this case, go in with all guns blazing, just with them ready should anyone else select the blazing option.
Actually Captive Universe is a very good book that deals with the problem of the generational ship in a very interesting manner, one should not discount SF as a starting point in a scientific thought process.
The Amish are non agressive, this is true. However they are (except for tragic recent events) sheilded by existing in a vast country that chooses to allow their continued existance, and well they might, the Amish are an example of a well ordered society. This is, is it not, the whole reason they came to america in the first place?
I am however given to ponder how far their peaceful nature would have taken them in the old world, or if it would have survived at all. We tended to be a nasty bunch, remember the Cathars? No? Barely anyone does, but they were somewhat similer to the Amish I beleive, and also very extinct.
Thats way outside my field though, I profess no more than curiosity.
so, the sheriffs office are going to pimp their patrol cars and start wearing huge (and I presume bullet proof) gold medallions?
:-)
Instead of going on patrol they will be 'checking up on mah bitches'. Public relations will be replaced by 'keeping it real' and 'giving respect to da man...'.
I can see it now, sounds like a plan with no drawbacks
I don't see anything in the article about them being hired then being busted for doing the thing they were hired to do.
Seems to me they had been hired once, but that wasn't anything to do with the raid.
Mind you, the raid itself seemed a bit extreme.
They found none of the stuff that made them think they should go in armed. Still, I don't know what percentage of raids of this type do turn up arms/drugs, or how many they have to do, the gun toting could simply be policy.
The suppresion of semi ligitimate music outlets is all part of the RIAAs remit, so this shouldn't be surprising. They aren't defenders of law, they are defenders of a business model, and have worked to change laws to protect that business model.
Pardon?
By what measure do you assume religous obsession to be more likely to be stable? Every time religous groups become fundamental they become intolerant and prone to acts of violence against even those of their faith who are less fanatical. A system like that would likely self destruct before ever arriving.
Try reading 'Captive Universe' by Harry Harrison, he uses a broadly similar theme, that of passengers contrained by superstition and being held unaware of the reality of the situation and a separate group of engineer types steering the ship but also held to strict beleifs. Suffice to say it doesn't go well.
I see your point. However, in the case of a space colony, disputes could well arise over water supply and food production, and rather then being inconvenient, those would be fatal, if for example someone took the all too familier path of killing to prove a point. Even if no open disputes were to start, those area's are going to be utterly critical.
On Earth colonies can survive levels of hardship and dispute that would wipe out an off world colony.
I'm assuming here that no colony would be established on a world without breathable atmosphere, but I could be wrong. Ifd that were the case a single argument or crazy person could kill everyone.
I dispute that a caste system would work. All Caste systems have involved strict control based on, in some cases, thousands of years of established tradition. I doubt very much that unless all history on the first generation were erased people would be happy that their ancestor came on board as, say a highly qualified biomolecular engineer, and they were relegated to gardening *for life* because someone had decided that this was their lot.
Can you say you would take that? I don't know that I would, and yes I did get told long ago that I was to expect to work in factories for the rest of my life, and this was for the best. Now I have a phd. I'm a normal person and I refused to accept my 'required' role, we can assume colonists would be too.
Space colonies are going to be, no matter how nominally well prepared, intensly fragile entities. One can see that simply by deduction without having to have one exist yet.
Any group of people so large together for so long would have one over-riding problem, that of humanities prediliction to segment itself by beleif or role.
There has not yet been a succesful attempt to produce a 'perfect' society, with the first attempt being by Plato.
What if the military ship model is used then? Well then you have centuries of one group being in charge, with either hereditary succession or selection by ability (democratic methods have never worked in the military model). Either way you end up with a perception of the controllers and controlled, partition is a natural result of the militaristic method, a caste system emerges.
Then what about the choice of the people who are born to the ship? They may realise that they have no choice, but humans have rarely prospered and worked at their best when their destiny is completelly laid out. The potential for unrest is quite pronounced. Ghandi demonstrated clearly that even non violent protest can be highly disruptive.
And at the end of the journey? Well you have a society which is partitioned already, and the people who were in charge are likely (human nature) to weant to stay in charge, even though the members of the expedition who were not in the ruling class (of whatever form) are now in the position of being able to say they no longer need that control, indeed of demanding it.
War is the most likely result in that circumstance, or at the very least dissent resulting in societal disruption. That's not something a colony could survive, even if it found somewhere to stay when it arrived at the destination.
A bit bleak I know. I think we'd be better off waiting until the participants in the journey could, in whole or majority, or in shifts, sit out the travel time in hibernation. That way they are not born to a society which has experienced centuries of partition.
managers manage well by having people below them who know their jobs. That way they manage the people themselves, not micromanage everything they have to do.
A good manager should appear to have very little to do, because everything is so well organised.
A bad manager is very easy to spot. People under them feel unsupported, become over relient on rules and regulations, and everything takes so long to do that nothing gets done.
I've experienced both types of management, the bad type is painful. When I've managed (in medicine) I worked very hard to train my people to trust in their own abilities and take on and enjoy responsibility.
Nothing to do with spam in this post I realise, but then I hate spam, nasty fatty stuff.