I understand, and even agree, with much of what you're stating. I too think that if there is a creator, it is no longer a tweaker or adjuster, but simply an observer of our reality (perhaps even for a sort of divine scientific purpose).
You yourself phrase it as "evidence-based doubt." A true Faithful would just say that even if the Knight were to learn the rules of the chessboard during the game, the Knight would not notice if the players had changed the rules since the last game, or even if time had been rewound to an earlier move in the current game. For every experiment, an all-powerful being can simply change what is necessary to select the desired outcome. And they assume that the creator wants to have plausible deniability, "for without faith, I am nothing." There is always wiggle room to the faithful, as they do not hold to the same metaphysics that the scientist has developed from observations.
I find preachy Creationists to be highly annoying. But I also find shrill atheists to be highly annoying. Not all scientists are atheists, and not all theists are anti-science. Religion and Science are both a part of this world just as much as politics and money. Get over it, they're not going away in the next couple millennia.
For those who must say that God exists, try this: science is for understanding how we exist, spirituality is for understanding why. It's far more mind-boggling for a God to have worked out the delicacy of our whole existence in advance by designing the laws of physics that would play out Correctly all the way from Big Bang to Big Crunch, than it would have been if we were just modeled directly in clay and moved around like puppets at the slightest whim. For those of you who must take the "seven days" literal view of Genesis, then consider this: since God's view of time is not the same as ours (Psalm 90:), we may indeed still be in His Sixth Day (day of Man), awaiting His Seventh Day (day of Rest) (Revelations 20:).
For those who must say that God does not exist, try this: your position is just as unprovable as theirs, and yet raising your voice to argue your point is just as pointless as theirs. There is no arguing with religion. It's not that they are right, it's that the whole exercise is just as bad for the blood pressures of everyone involved. Yes, continue to fight for equality of position and separation of Church and State, as this is important. Quibbling over scriptures (as I admit I am doing above) will not change many minds. Both the Priest and the Atheist are fond of telling someone that they are Wrong, without any way of proving the point once and for all. The fact is, science doesn't know everything and will never know everything. Stick to proving negatives with observations; teaching axioms and laws and theories and hypotheses built from observations; and showing how science, unlike faith, can be proven wrong with evidence and this is a good thing. If they want to pray to their flying spaghetti monster, until it's impinging on your personal rights, just leave them to it.
For pretty much any useful stock problem solved by regular expressions, see Perl's Regex::Common module. A lot of these patterns are fiendishly complicated to deal with edge-cases properly.
While I have all the game development experience, and the Java development skills, and the interest in supporting the Android platform in my spare time, I have to say that at this point, I can't see spending the dough on buying a G1.
I don't mind the idea of paying for a data plan for a data-oriented device, but I just don't need a phone. The cheapest voice plan is more expensive than the data plan. With the required voice plus data plus hardware, I'd pay $1,520 over two years. Many little apps are being released for free (which is as it should be) but we have yet to see how for-pay apps will fare on the Android Market.
There's no way for users to get a G1 with no voice plan, as they do with a Sidekick. AT&T apparently briefly offered a "deaf users" plan, or said they were going to do so, but then retracted that offer.
I guess the only other option would be to develop what I can on the SDK without owning a device, then ask other people to help me test it. That doesn't really seem particularly fun or useful, if I can't use the apps I write.
First, the blurb is very misleading. I took from it that the bank yelled at the use of the phrase "one hexadecimal dollar" which no banker would understand how to equate to the digits, $2.56. Since it's the text that wins in most audited disputes about amounts, that's a problem.
He's just paranoid about the MICR routing numbers, and how banks are not secure. This has not changed, and is not at all particular to him. It is odd that he's had multiple attacks while I've had zero, since he claims the attack is entirely despite any knowledge of the account holder's name or wealth.
Pseudocode:// I was going to write this in WEB but fuck that
Set up an independent "Knuth's Mistake Fund" checking account.
If a mistake is found, deposit $2.56 and send paper check, valid within 30 days
If a month goes by and the guy didn't cash it, withdraw $2.56 and void the check.
(Mistake-finder framed the check for his wall.)
But you see, the images (even the 2GB ones) actually ARE source materials. Panoramic projects can have 100 or more source images and several partial composites before the final composite step. And as I said, I also want recall of back versions without having to resort to filename distinctions. And while I agree that "image management system" sounds nice, I don't care about the viewing or thumbnailing or keywording. These files aren't just in one format, they are camera raw, jpeg, xcf, tiff, png, all kinds. I care about versions and branches and changes.
I've been using CVS forever, mainly because it was the only real noncommercial option ten years ago. But I'm interested in trying out any versioning system that will work better, because I know I'm abusing CVS with my file storage needs.
I do a fair amount of hobby coding, so any of the systems work well for that. Thousands of tiny text files are easy to merge. The sandboxes are fast and I can set up my repository on another machine on my lan.
However, I also do a fair amount of semi-professional photography. My sandbox may have a couple thousand binary files that range anywhere from 2 MB to 2 GB. The number of versions of a file may typically go as far as 4 or 5, rarely as high as 10. A new version is best handled by simply snapshotting the whole new binary file, like the old VMS filesystem does. My repository on my lan machine has several tens of thousands of these binary files. My sandbox is rarely complete: I only sync certain subfolders now and then, and when I've checked in my changes and need space, I just erase that area of the sandbox. As long as I don't try to (cvs update -d) at the top level, I'm fine.
I know I may be wrong, but if I switched to git or mercurial, as I understand it, every sandbox is/has its own repository with complete history, and these tools are more interested in how to merge changes from repository to repository. This is not what I want, in that the local sandbox+history would easily bloom into the many-gigabyte range and start to crowd my regular working space. I read a bit about their repository 'packing' options but that's not a solution, it's a maintenance feature.
My pointing device has about 103 buttons in a very convenient layout. It did take a little while to get used to, but some schools even have classes on how to use it effectively. It's great, because with this pointing device, I can also enter new textual information, rather than pointing and grunting at the stuff that's already on the screen.
I can't begin to guess about all "Asians" but I can see a few reasons why the Japanese in particular have taken to this trend.
For centuries, the Japanese mind has enjoyed consistency and fine craftsmanship. Kids have to write complicated kanji characters thousands of times to develop a consistency to it. Antique dolls made of wood with tiny clockwork cams have been built that can 'walk' into a room and serve you tea, or dip a brush into ink and do fine calligraphy. Attention to detail and exacting standards has been their culture. It's not like every Japanese person performs basic household chores like a finely choreographed martial arts technique, but there's a nugget of truth to it.
Today, we see this as corporate buzzwords such as "six sigma" and "pervasive automation." Six Sigma measures how often you fail to achieve a positive result, with very strict standards. One book gives an example of making pizza: rather than marking a failure if you burn the pepperonis black, mark a failure if you slightly blacken the crust. Then relentlessly work on your processes until you virtually never fail to make an exactly perfect pie every time. Often, the only way to achieve that level of adherence to the perfect process is to take the human out of the loop.
The average Japanese salaryman works insanely long hours. The Europeans laugh at the US for how many hours we put in, but that's peanuts to Japan. A bit of help to make the home a little more autonomous is a welcome idea.
In addition, Japan's population is very very old. Fewer and fewer children are growing and replacing their elders in the work force. As the mean age of the population rises, they are trying to come to grips with the cultural impact of importing labor from other countries. While they're pretty far behind in this respect, due to many centuries of isolationism, they are making headway. In the meantime, they're experimenting with robots as a way of filling that labor gap.
Yup, familiar with the web interfaces, but want an offline tool that has the full EDICT (and other dicts) I can use anytime, not just where I can beg wifi signal. I have used both the Zaurus and Nokia in this capacity and it's great.
The G1 looks like it's so close to the general feature set of the Nokia internet tablets, plus the phone bits obviously. I'm wondering what the next stage of Nokia's 770, N800, N810 series will look like. They made a WiMax version of the N810 but I haven't seen any info about a new successor. The slide-out keyboard for the N810 seems to be a lot nicer than the G1's, and the general maemo development platform has been okay for me (especially since python is well-supported with fairly extensive maemo bindings).
If the G1 or its successor (G2?) supports Japanese input and output "out of the box" (but with English as the primary interface language) and has suitable J-E/E-J dictionary support, I'd be more interested. Haven't seen much info about that in the reviews or discussions of Android.
I didn't want to install some stupid plugins and codecs for other networks, so I just hopped over to the BBC for their live streaming web broadcasts. The little screen is not going to be confused for HD but there were no hiccups or dropouts for the other three debates so far. Why depend on US broadcasters when all eyes around the world are paying attention to the high-stakes face off of US political elections?
* I've got MBP 17" now. I like it. They are dropping that size.
* I don't like the new "partial tapered" (their term) or "puffy" (my term) lid.
* I don't like the black bezel inside the lid. Match the whole case.
* I hate the fugly new keyboards that feel and look like IBM PCjr chicklet.
* I don't care if it's magnetic or a button to pop the lid.
* I don't care if there's a slot visible on the front.
* I don't like having to carry yet another kind of custom one-use rat tail to put my laptop on someone else's cheap VGA-style projector.
* I don't like losing a Firewire port. All the little RAID cabinets like Firewire.
* I do wish my MBP had heat sensors on the graphics system; the processor sensors are sometimes midrange while the graphics head is starting to exhibit heat-induced artifacts. When running clamshell I have to run it on top of a cooling tray device or crank the internal fans to 3000rpm.
* I do wish they'd fix the runaway-syslogd problem in Leopard. I have read all the howtos and forum lists, nothing but a 15min cronjob to kill it is helping.
* I do wish they'd fix the too-many-hd-resets problem in Leopard, if I leave the machine on overnight with little disk activity, my drive will reset itself to a state it won't spin up again. Everything RAM-resident runs, but more and more processes go zombie when the disk doesn't spin up.
With all this preoccupation about flash and gloss in the hardware, there is a growing list of software problems. Return to the basics.
True fact: after Windows 3.1 shipped, and before the same team came up with the "Chicago" codename, the slated product name was going to be "Windows 93." When the scope started slipping, "Chicago" was invented to paper over the calendar controversy. The team ballooned from about 70 developers (SDEs) to about 300 developers, the program management (PMs) had even larger growth, and management complained about the extravagant employee morale spending, aka shrimp vs weenies. Yet somehow they chalked it up to an "on time" release.
I won't recommend it for everyone, but this spring I got one of those generic Chinese-built 50cc 4-stroke scooters, which is running a fairly consistent 118 miles per gallon (or just about 2.0 liters per 100 kilometers). On the plus side, many states exempt or simplify the rules for 50cc engines, and the total price of the generic models are 1/4th the price of the trendy brand names like Vespa or Honda. On the minus side, besides the extra risk due to stupid "cage drivers", these generic brands take a bit more self-maintenance and self-reliance. I have a nice eight mile commute that I can cover on back roads, so it's been very pleasant all summer, saving me hundreds of dollars on the gasoline already.
Thanks, that's why I put "geosynchronous" at orbit-- we know what it means but it's not the right word exactly. I also thought that such an orbit might be unworkable due to the low rotational speed, but appreciate the math you gave. I don't think we've injected anything into body-synchronous orbits for any body other than Earth, have we? I can't be bothered to figure out the portion of "dark side" real estate is inside or outside the line of sight of L4 and L5.
Travel across the surface is expensive and cumbersome and dangerous. Multiple landings here and there is expensive and cumbersome and dangerous. The moon is not geologically active on its own, but in case you hadn't noticed, rocks hit the moon all the time. You'd have to harden ALL that cable length against hard solar radiation and also significant meteorite damage, or you'll be out there every week fixing some crack that's developed.
Loved Bloom County but it was stuck in time. I think I paid attention to Berkeley Breathed for about two months after he ended Bloom County. I read a couple Outland strips. Even Berkeley must have realized they sucked, because he had to save it by reintroducing Opus and friends, which he had announced he didn't want to do. But it still sucked. Other than reading someone's Bloom County anthology, and smiling with the fond memory, I haven't looked at them since.
The so-called "dark side of the moon" does not refer to the lack of sunlight or nighttime conditions. All parts of the moon go through the same kind of night/day cycle that the Earth does, only 29.53x slower.
The phrase refers to radio darkness. The moon spins at the same rate it orbits the Earth, so the same familiar craters are always facing us. Anyone standing amongst those craters is being bombarded by the radio noise chatter of the whole Earth population. Anyone standing on the opposite side of the moon can pick up none of that.
One potential problem with setting up bases on the dark side is how to communicate with them. To maintain the radio silence, you can't just stick a radio-based communication moon-satellite out there. It would be very expensive to maintain a cable or laser hookup for any significant distance along the moon surface. So you're left with small windows of time you can communicate, or you work on a focused laser-based comm link with a moon-satellite. That reminds me... what's the "geosynchronous" radius for moon-satellites?
Slashdot Mirror
I understand, and even agree, with much of what you're stating. I too think that if there is a creator, it is no longer a tweaker or adjuster, but simply an observer of our reality (perhaps even for a sort of divine scientific purpose).
You yourself phrase it as "evidence-based doubt." A true Faithful would just say that even if the Knight were to learn the rules of the chessboard during the game, the Knight would not notice if the players had changed the rules since the last game, or even if time had been rewound to an earlier move in the current game. For every experiment, an all-powerful being can simply change what is necessary to select the desired outcome. And they assume that the creator wants to have plausible deniability, "for without faith, I am nothing." There is always wiggle room to the faithful, as they do not hold to the same metaphysics that the scientist has developed from observations.
I find preachy Creationists to be highly annoying. But I also find shrill atheists to be highly annoying. Not all scientists are atheists, and not all theists are anti-science. Religion and Science are both a part of this world just as much as politics and money. Get over it, they're not going away in the next couple millennia.
For those who must say that God exists, try this: science is for understanding how we exist, spirituality is for understanding why . It's far more mind-boggling for a God to have worked out the delicacy of our whole existence in advance by designing the laws of physics that would play out Correctly all the way from Big Bang to Big Crunch, than it would have been if we were just modeled directly in clay and moved around like puppets at the slightest whim. For those of you who must take the "seven days" literal view of Genesis, then consider this: since God's view of time is not the same as ours (Psalm 90:), we may indeed still be in His Sixth Day (day of Man), awaiting His Seventh Day (day of Rest) (Revelations 20:).
For those who must say that God does not exist, try this: your position is just as unprovable as theirs, and yet raising your voice to argue your point is just as pointless as theirs. There is no arguing with religion. It's not that they are right, it's that the whole exercise is just as bad for the blood pressures of everyone involved. Yes, continue to fight for equality of position and separation of Church and State, as this is important. Quibbling over scriptures (as I admit I am doing above) will not change many minds. Both the Priest and the Atheist are fond of telling someone that they are Wrong, without any way of proving the point once and for all. The fact is, science doesn't know everything and will never know everything. Stick to proving negatives with observations; teaching axioms and laws and theories and hypotheses built from observations; and showing how science, unlike faith, can be proven wrong with evidence and this is a good thing. If they want to pray to their flying spaghetti monster, until it's impinging on your personal rights, just leave them to it.
Bert and Ernie's Fucking Awesome Adventure ...it's still fine for a child to play assuming you don't care if they pick up any fowl language.
I wouldn't want my kid talking like Big Bird, what the hell is wrong with you?
Fixed that for you.
For pretty much any useful stock problem solved by regular expressions, see Perl's Regex::Common module. A lot of these patterns are fiendishly complicated to deal with edge-cases properly.
While I have all the game development experience, and the Java development skills, and the interest in supporting the Android platform in my spare time, I have to say that at this point, I can't see spending the dough on buying a G1.
I don't mind the idea of paying for a data plan for a data-oriented device, but I just don't need a phone. The cheapest voice plan is more expensive than the data plan. With the required voice plus data plus hardware, I'd pay $1,520 over two years. Many little apps are being released for free (which is as it should be) but we have yet to see how for-pay apps will fare on the Android Market.
There's no way for users to get a G1 with no voice plan, as they do with a Sidekick. AT&T apparently briefly offered a "deaf users" plan, or said they were going to do so, but then retracted that offer.
I guess the only other option would be to develop what I can on the SDK without owning a device, then ask other people to help me test it. That doesn't really seem particularly fun or useful, if I can't use the apps I write.
(And if you don't know who, turn in your Slashdot account by tomorrow morning.)
Translation:
(And if you don't know who, I'm too lazy to google it for you as it has slipped my mind also.)
Your right, dammit. Should be "NULL && void*".
Wow, that's two languages in which you've completely failed. In less than sixty characters.
First, the blurb is very misleading. I took from it that the bank yelled at the use of the phrase "one hexadecimal dollar" which no banker would understand how to equate to the digits, $2.56. Since it's the text that wins in most audited disputes about amounts, that's a problem.
He's just paranoid about the MICR routing numbers, and how banks are not secure. This has not changed, and is not at all particular to him. It is odd that he's had multiple attacks while I've had zero, since he claims the attack is entirely despite any knowledge of the account holder's name or wealth.
Pseudocode: // I was going to write this in WEB but fuck that
(Mistake-finder framed the check for his wall.)
"Do not stare into table with remaining eye."
...at least the US is trying.
As another USian, I have to say that in many ways, the US is very trying.
Here's a "interesting biz in our area" piece in my local paper. Contact them, or any other local design house: http://www.courant.com/business/hc-cornershop1008.artoct08,0,6635443.story
But you see, the images (even the 2GB ones) actually ARE source materials. Panoramic projects can have 100 or more source images and several partial composites before the final composite step. And as I said, I also want recall of back versions without having to resort to filename distinctions. And while I agree that "image management system" sounds nice, I don't care about the viewing or thumbnailing or keywording. These files aren't just in one format, they are camera raw, jpeg, xcf, tiff, png, all kinds. I care about versions and branches and changes.
I've been using CVS forever, mainly because it was the only real noncommercial option ten years ago. But I'm interested in trying out any versioning system that will work better, because I know I'm abusing CVS with my file storage needs.
I do a fair amount of hobby coding, so any of the systems work well for that. Thousands of tiny text files are easy to merge. The sandboxes are fast and I can set up my repository on another machine on my lan.
However, I also do a fair amount of semi-professional photography. My sandbox may have a couple thousand binary files that range anywhere from 2 MB to 2 GB. The number of versions of a file may typically go as far as 4 or 5, rarely as high as 10. A new version is best handled by simply snapshotting the whole new binary file, like the old VMS filesystem does. My repository on my lan machine has several tens of thousands of these binary files. My sandbox is rarely complete: I only sync certain subfolders now and then, and when I've checked in my changes and need space, I just erase that area of the sandbox. As long as I don't try to (cvs update -d) at the top level, I'm fine.
I know I may be wrong, but if I switched to git or mercurial, as I understand it, every sandbox is/has its own repository with complete history, and these tools are more interested in how to merge changes from repository to repository. This is not what I want, in that the local sandbox+history would easily bloom into the many-gigabyte range and start to crowd my regular working space. I read a bit about their repository 'packing' options but that's not a solution, it's a maintenance feature.
My pointing device has about 103 buttons in a very convenient layout. It did take a little while to get used to, but some schools even have classes on how to use it effectively. It's great, because with this pointing device, I can also enter new textual information, rather than pointing and grunting at the stuff that's already on the screen.
I can't begin to guess about all "Asians" but I can see a few reasons why the Japanese in particular have taken to this trend.
For centuries, the Japanese mind has enjoyed consistency and fine craftsmanship. Kids have to write complicated kanji characters thousands of times to develop a consistency to it. Antique dolls made of wood with tiny clockwork cams have been built that can 'walk' into a room and serve you tea, or dip a brush into ink and do fine calligraphy. Attention to detail and exacting standards has been their culture. It's not like every Japanese person performs basic household chores like a finely choreographed martial arts technique, but there's a nugget of truth to it.
Today, we see this as corporate buzzwords such as "six sigma" and "pervasive automation." Six Sigma measures how often you fail to achieve a positive result, with very strict standards. One book gives an example of making pizza: rather than marking a failure if you burn the pepperonis black, mark a failure if you slightly blacken the crust. Then relentlessly work on your processes until you virtually never fail to make an exactly perfect pie every time. Often, the only way to achieve that level of adherence to the perfect process is to take the human out of the loop.
The average Japanese salaryman works insanely long hours. The Europeans laugh at the US for how many hours we put in, but that's peanuts to Japan. A bit of help to make the home a little more autonomous is a welcome idea.
In addition, Japan's population is very very old. Fewer and fewer children are growing and replacing their elders in the work force. As the mean age of the population rises, they are trying to come to grips with the cultural impact of importing labor from other countries. While they're pretty far behind in this respect, due to many centuries of isolationism, they are making headway. In the meantime, they're experimenting with robots as a way of filling that labor gap.
Yup, familiar with the web interfaces, but want an offline tool that has the full EDICT (and other dicts) I can use anytime, not just where I can beg wifi signal. I have used both the Zaurus and Nokia in this capacity and it's great.
The G1 looks like it's so close to the general feature set of the Nokia internet tablets, plus the phone bits obviously. I'm wondering what the next stage of Nokia's 770, N800, N810 series will look like. They made a WiMax version of the N810 but I haven't seen any info about a new successor. The slide-out keyboard for the N810 seems to be a lot nicer than the G1's, and the general maemo development platform has been okay for me (especially since python is well-supported with fairly extensive maemo bindings).
If the G1 or its successor (G2?) supports Japanese input and output "out of the box" (but with English as the primary interface language) and has suitable J-E/E-J dictionary support, I'd be more interested. Haven't seen much info about that in the reviews or discussions of Android.
I didn't want to install some stupid plugins and codecs for other networks, so I just hopped over to the BBC for their live streaming web broadcasts. The little screen is not going to be confused for HD but there were no hiccups or dropouts for the other three debates so far. Why depend on US broadcasters when all eyes around the world are paying attention to the high-stakes face off of US political elections?
* I've got MBP 17" now. I like it. They are dropping that size.
* I don't like the new "partial tapered" (their term) or "puffy" (my term) lid.
* I don't like the black bezel inside the lid. Match the whole case.
* I hate the fugly new keyboards that feel and look like IBM PCjr chicklet.
* I don't care if it's magnetic or a button to pop the lid.
* I don't care if there's a slot visible on the front.
* I don't like having to carry yet another kind of custom one-use rat tail to put my laptop on someone else's cheap VGA-style projector.
* I don't like losing a Firewire port. All the little RAID cabinets like Firewire.
* I do wish my MBP had heat sensors on the graphics system; the processor sensors are sometimes midrange while the graphics head is starting to exhibit heat-induced artifacts. When running clamshell I have to run it on top of a cooling tray device or crank the internal fans to 3000rpm.
* I do wish they'd fix the runaway-syslogd problem in Leopard. I have read all the howtos and forum lists, nothing but a 15min cronjob to kill it is helping.
* I do wish they'd fix the too-many-hd-resets problem in Leopard, if I leave the machine on overnight with little disk activity, my drive will reset itself to a state it won't spin up again. Everything RAM-resident runs, but more and more processes go zombie when the disk doesn't spin up.
With all this preoccupation about flash and gloss in the hardware, there is a growing list of software problems. Return to the basics.
True fact: after Windows 3.1 shipped, and before the same team came up with the "Chicago" codename, the slated product name was going to be "Windows 93." When the scope started slipping, "Chicago" was invented to paper over the calendar controversy. The team ballooned from about 70 developers (SDEs) to about 300 developers, the program management (PMs) had even larger growth, and management complained about the extravagant employee morale spending, aka shrimp vs weenies. Yet somehow they chalked it up to an "on time" release.
I won't recommend it for everyone, but this spring I got one of those generic Chinese-built 50cc 4-stroke scooters, which is running a fairly consistent 118 miles per gallon (or just about 2.0 liters per 100 kilometers). On the plus side, many states exempt or simplify the rules for 50cc engines, and the total price of the generic models are 1/4th the price of the trendy brand names like Vespa or Honda. On the minus side, besides the extra risk due to stupid "cage drivers", these generic brands take a bit more self-maintenance and self-reliance. I have a nice eight mile commute that I can cover on back roads, so it's been very pleasant all summer, saving me hundreds of dollars on the gasoline already.
Thanks, that's why I put "geosynchronous" at orbit-- we know what it means but it's not the right word exactly. I also thought that such an orbit might be unworkable due to the low rotational speed, but appreciate the math you gave. I don't think we've injected anything into body-synchronous orbits for any body other than Earth, have we? I can't be bothered to figure out the portion of "dark side" real estate is inside or outside the line of sight of L4 and L5.
Travel across the surface is expensive and cumbersome and dangerous. Multiple landings here and there is expensive and cumbersome and dangerous. The moon is not geologically active on its own, but in case you hadn't noticed, rocks hit the moon all the time. You'd have to harden ALL that cable length against hard solar radiation and also significant meteorite damage, or you'll be out there every week fixing some crack that's developed.
Loved Bloom County but it was stuck in time. I think I paid attention to Berkeley Breathed for about two months after he ended Bloom County. I read a couple Outland strips. Even Berkeley must have realized they sucked, because he had to save it by reintroducing Opus and friends, which he had announced he didn't want to do. But it still sucked. Other than reading someone's Bloom County anthology, and smiling with the fond memory, I haven't looked at them since.
The so-called "dark side of the moon" does not refer to the lack of sunlight or nighttime conditions. All parts of the moon go through the same kind of night/day cycle that the Earth does, only 29.53x slower.
The phrase refers to radio darkness. The moon spins at the same rate it orbits the Earth, so the same familiar craters are always facing us. Anyone standing amongst those craters is being bombarded by the radio noise chatter of the whole Earth population. Anyone standing on the opposite side of the moon can pick up none of that.
One potential problem with setting up bases on the dark side is how to communicate with them. To maintain the radio silence, you can't just stick a radio-based communication moon-satellite out there. It would be very expensive to maintain a cable or laser hookup for any significant distance along the moon surface. So you're left with small windows of time you can communicate, or you work on a focused laser-based comm link with a moon-satellite. That reminds me... what's the "geosynchronous" radius for moon-satellites?