I think they are worth it. I read them every five years or so. Some of the dialogue in the later books pisses me off, to be honest with you, but on the whole it's a rich universe to think about.
One thing I particularly like about it is that it's science fiction written with an emphasis on the psychological and philosophical, as opposed to the 'Hard SF' (technologically-based) and fantasy stuff (wizards, goblins, whatever, I couldn't give a fuck, really). There are themes in all 6 books that you don't really find in other science fiction, certainly not as developed anyways.
Tim O'Reilly in an interview with Herbert discovered that a lot of the first 3 books were meant as a riposte to Asimov's Foundation series -- there's a sense in Foundation that 'the wise men of science will save us', whereas Herbert felt quite strongly that trusting in any single group of people was a failure of intellect. (This has elements related to the Hard SF mentioned above, but I digress)
One thing I found interesting about the Bene Gesserit was that they were sketched initially as a female version of the Jesuits.
Enough of this. Read them, they're worth the effort. Really.
Uh, Duncan Idaho back from the dead as Hayt-Idaho? There's a plot to kill Paul's children.
The sacrifice Leto makes is the one that Paul is unwilling to try for; that of using prescience to its logical end (the removal of all free will from the universe).
Basically, the question is, what happens if you know the future? It's an awesome power: Paul eventually blinds himself to take himself out of ruling Dune and the Empire. Leto, having both prescience and the ability to consult his dead ancestors through living memory, realises that humanity will always want to screw with things beyond their control. So by losing his humanity, gaining quasi-immortality, and using that in conjunction with his powers of prescience and living memory, he is able to control the universe as he sees fit. All of it is meant as an instruction not to do the same in succeeding generations: it's a lesson.
At the risk of oversimplifying massively to the point of losing the thread: Leto's life is meant as an answer to the question posed above, in other words --
When you gain prescience, you lose free will.
Which is why Leto has to live for 1600 years -- if he were to stay mortal, there would be nothing to ensure that his ideas, the stagnant culture he creates, and the ossified universe around Dune would last 50 years beyond his death, never mind over a thousand.
This is not to say that Herbert agreed with any of this himself, but he certainly wanted his characters to have these depths of concept.
Chapterhouse's old couple totally escapes me at the moment, so I can't answer that one.
Not to trash the questioner, but if you work for a Fortune 50 company, surely your in-house legal department would have some idea, no? As another poster suggested, Red Hat or IBM will definitely provide this: I'm sure that RH's announcement yesterday of Advanced Server revisions is pertinent (though not directly to do with indemnity issues) to you on some level.
You're an admin guy, you know Unix. The legal people know the law. Ask them to look into it, and cc the manager you talked to so that both sides know you want this examined seriously.
you have a problem, particularly for your CS department. Ask them for their ideas on this. If you forgo any MS products you basically tell them they can't teach how to use MS technologies.
As much as I love using Linux and BSDs, I can't see them accepting this, because the conditions essentially forbid them from preparing people for encountering MS products outside of work -- it's going to blindside students badly.
On the typical arts college side of things I don't think this will bite so much -- you can still use Macs or PCs.
The cost of switching? You save a shedload on software licenses, possibly a bit on labour and maintenance (assuming that you hire fewer Unix or Mac people at a slightly higher per person cost), but the attractiveness of avoiding MS stuff for your potential students is bloody questionable. (I'd want to talk to your college counsellors -- would they recommend it? In this job market?)
Your province should have an ombudsman and privacy commissioner as well. You will want to get a package of data or evidence together documenting this, and fire it off to the cops, ombudsman and privacy commissioner. You will also want to talk to the federal government's privacy and information access commissioners.
The media would be a double-edged sword. Once this hits the police you won't have to worry about media interest.
Get a lawyer, now, and don't waste any more time about it.
They should talk to both entities. MOL for the PPC translations, VMware for the emulation for x86. One of the final comments in the article noted that 'some other emulation' would be a good choice. Bochs is just too slow. They can figure out the licensing later, but Apple should get started now. Ignoring the licensing for the time being, Bochs' slow performance currently is one hell of an obstacle. I would wonder just how much improvement is really achievable (I know plex86 is still around -- but how viable is it?).
VMware's stability and success in selling contracts to US Governmental departments is a strong point in my view. The fact that they don't have a PPC version, obviously, is a strike against.
Oh well. And no, I don't think it's a good idea to have emulations on Macs dominated by MS. Not trolling, but evidently MS is thinking the Connectix technology would be a good thing to add to their.NET strategy or whatever it is called now.
Boron and phosphorus. Basically the doping materials make the current feasible.
There are installations extant for the last 20 to 30 years, still producing electricity.
My company makes modules (no, I'm not interested in advertising it here, so no names) guaranteed for 20 years. This is against weather damage. We use tempered glass tested by firing half-inch steel balls at a distance of 2-3m at 15m/s to hold the cells. (No damage, by the way) The plastic sheeting, or polyvinyl fluoride (Tedlar, by DuPont -- OK, I'll concede the point here), is a derivative/related material to Kevlar... it lasts for similar periods. What you really need to worry about is delamination, which comes from the adhesive you stick in between the cells and the glass coming apart. Again, we sell ours for a guaranteed 20 years, which is standard in the industry, so replacement costs on the part of the consumer or installer are a moot point.
Electricity is still too expensive compared to non-renewable sources, I will freely admit this. However, I think you need to get out of the US-centric mindset: Japan has by far the highest level of PV installations, currently about half the world total. Africa finds it an economical alternative to nonrenewables. I don't think either region would do it just to make a ecological statement, do you?
Yes, both for the end user and for the producers, solar panels are much cleaner than coal, natural gas or nuclear energy. There's no waste product, unless you consider EM radiation from the alternating current -- which would be true of all electricity sources.
As the bloke below points out, Lomborg's argument on cost is very much relevant and explains a great deal of the slow uptake in the industry over the last few decades. This being said, however, worldwide usage of PV technologies (excluding in toys like solar calculators and whatnot) has easily demonstrated 25% growth rates year-on-year for the last few years or so (Ispra report, June 2002, European Commission Joint Research Centre; also at
PVNet).
Of course, when you start from nothing, anything sounds impressive. However, in Europe we have around 6% of total energy consumption coming from renewable sources. Less than everyone aside from the petrol industry (and even these guys are heavily invested in renewable energy) expects, but still, you have to start somewhere...
PS: No idea why the http://www.pv-net.net link doesn't work, so I've just included it in plaintext
As someone now employed in photovoltaics, I have to ask you this. Most commercially-available solar panels of the silicon variety are derived from purified sand. Pure silicon does not exist naturally, so silicon dioxide (duh, sand) is broken down and refined into ingots. How is this environmentally unfriendly?
If you're talking about GaAs-panels (cells), they are dirty, I'll grant you that. They are not, however, at all popular. The largest makers of PV are Kyocera, Sharp, RWE Schott Solar and Astropower. None, as far as I know, are selling exotic PV cells or modules in any numbers. They're expensive, and the current technology offers enough benefits to outweigh the point of bothering with fancy stuff.
What, Myst or Deus Ex weren't good enough?
on
Infinite Games?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm joking. I'm not a big gaming person, mostly because I suck at FPS-stuff. I do, however, think that Myst/Riven/Exile/whatever-Mudpie-is-called-now pretty much hit this one on the head. The problem they mention in the article, of infinite storylines, isn't really addressed by the gaming people they interviewed -- the balance has to be between one person or group's 'vision', or telling a story, and the player's receptivity to listen to that storyline. In Deus Ex, the Ion Storm Austin people decided to limit the narrative possibilities around a set two or three paths, and only in the final parts of the game.
OK, so you make a 'game universe' : how is this any different from the mmo games now around?
I'd think this would be more useful to people wanting to develop interactive environment simulations, rather than straight-ahead games : the aquarium as a metaphor probably works between than the FPS idea.
My submission had nothing to do with the submission on blank levy proposal. I don't live in Canada any longer, so finding news from home can be a bit difficult at times.
It's not a shock, but as someone who used to work in the dreaded field of advertising while abroad, I do think it would be nice to occasionally see the odd show from home. Or the odd show from the foreign country in Canada.
Personal history out of the way first: * Started with RH 5.1 * Mandrake 7 - 8.0 * Debian unstable (woody) two years ago on home machine * Used SuSE for work (8.0 -- they wanted commercial support) * Now on Debian at work (yay)
The primary problem with mdk and rh is not the rpm architecture, it's in 'fit and finish' issues. Mdk in particular always seemed a bit less sturdy to me, and a little closer in attitude to Windows -- it looked fairly easy, but anything more complicated than the most basic of problems got you in a heap of doo. Now granted, I use a distro that is 180 degrees opposite to this -- there *is* no fit and finish issue with Debian -- but it either works, or it doesn't, and I'm usually able to figure out why.
Policy (in terms of mechanics, not politics) is all-important, and I just like that with Debian. Similarly SuSE during the year I used it was a very solid, sturdy distro, with none of the hidden agonies I noticed with Mandrake and Red Hat. I do wish Mandrake all luck possible, because I feel it's important to have a newbie-focused distro. At the same time I would hope that they get some of those f&f issues looked at, and resolved.
Namely, the fact that the US acts as a gigantic research sink (read 'brain drain') for the rest of the world. No idea what proportion of those foreign researchers return to countries of origin, but I imagine America holds on to quite a lot of them. The US dwarfs every other country on Earth in terms of money spent on research and is a player, if not the dominant 'hegemon' in just about every field. If native-born Americans are unwilling to take up science (which I don't think is really true, but anyway), believe me, there's plenty of people from abroad who will.
And that's not a bad thing at all, at least for Americans. Other countries might have a problem with brain drains, but America certainly does not.
Re:Without drugs better?
on
Got Sleep?
·
· Score: 2
No one ever said the military were the brightest sparks:)
Without drugs better?
on
Got Sleep?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Methods already exist, without drugs.
Note that it's not without sleep altogether -- anyone see Jacob's Ladder?
Of course, they don't mention what a cursory search would turn up:
Fear serves a number of useful roles, not least the one of self-preservation. What's that old saw about discretion being the better part of valour?
I can think of two reasons why this is just BS on the part of the editors (well, many others too, but let's leave that for now). Let's take as a starting point that the leap is valid.
Possible follow-on points: 1. 'Emotional intelligence' seems to play a role in most people's rationality (no, I'm not going to dig up the reference to the EQ book; that's for a Google / Amazon search) and intelligence generally. 2. Removing fear could possibly remove a certain level of rational appreciation of things ie/ the need to keep oneself intact. 3. This would be tantamount to partially lobotomising one's own army. Would any country want to do this?
I guess I'm answering my own question (later in the discussion), but I was on the committee that had the name of the building changed.
The invitation did go out. Unfortunately there were intimations that we were embarrassing him, and that we were doing it to hit him up for cash (at the time McGill was the most indebted university in the world), so he politely declined. He did go back briefly, and this was filmed for a 'Life and Times' segment on CBC several years back. As to the embarrassment portion, well, we didn't want to change it to 'Starfleet Academy'; we just wanted to be a bit less serious than our reputation suggests.
Shatner was a Commerce student, if I remember correctly, when he started doing short plays and whatnot on something of a lark (at least, this is what I've heard). Probably didn't want to freeze in winter there!
I was involved many moons ago in the campaign to have the Student building at McGill in Montréal change its name to the Shatner University Centre. Did we embarrass you, or did you like it?
Is there any way to just simply mix and match different disks? I'm wondering if you could install the PGI-enabled first CD, then when tasksel or whatever prompts you for additional CDs, use the other 6 in the set. I get the impression you can't, as the Progeny site talks about creating your own installer CDs (plural, not singular).
* Schedule annual months of hallucinogen intake * Finally get that electronic music thing together * Polish up my languages (foreign and computer) * Get some land and learn -- very slowly -- how to farm it * Go to university again (See no. 2)
... but while your suggestion is valid, given that the Anglo-American legal system, from participants to the laws themselves are not really looking out for the techie/geek, do you really think that this law is going to have any effect?
Another poster in this forum suggested that Canadian extra-territoriality law has some relevance (as a Canadian, I'm inclined to agree) -- to wit, our laws to do with your Cuba embargo (Helms-Burton being the most recent example) specifically hold the American act and its provisions to be invalid in Canada. I imagine the Aussie law to be much the same sort of thrust. Then again, how many of you Americans are aware of the Canadian law? Do you know how many cases have been brought to trial? The number of cases can be counted on one hand with a couple of fingers missing. And, truthfully, how many of you could care less?
Anyway, this is all a moot point. All this talk is not going to force US-based 'meeja' executives to resort to e-mails and conference calls only, no matter how much the constituency here wants to see it done. Unfortunately.
I doubt very much the executives themselves will be attempting any cracking of systems here, don't you?
And please, don't quote the Gandhi 'First, they laugh at you' thing again. Without a concerted effort from other Western nations (at a minimum), the closest thing this approximates is a soggy spitball and straw against a tank.
That said, I selected the Epson Colour Stylus 670, used Mandrake (right after they upgraded to using CUPS), and bought those colour refill kits another poster mentioned.
I killed it in 14 months. I did a lot of printing, and the print heads were completely shot by the very end.
I've thrown out that printer. I've used plenty of printers over the years, and I have to second JabberWokky's assertions. Essentially, LJIIIs render colour printing unnecessary, and my old objections have no relevance today.
LJIIIs *are* built like tanks, and the technologies behind them are very well understood now. The fact that HP supports Linux doesn't hurt, either. True, they don't print colour, and new cartridges can be expensive. However, refurbished cartridges aren't dear any longer, and if I had just found an old LJIII I'm sure it would still be in use. You can often find them at auction houses, or in the classifieds, or eBay.
Upshot, get a used LJIII and print a test page or two to check the quality. You probably will be satisfied.
Well, I'll lose some karma for this, but what the hell is going on with the editorial staff here?
OK. The staff can't be perfect, but this is not even close to being all that unique. I remember this story as well.
I suggest the department headings be changed from frivolous titles to useful ones, to help with categorisation. I'd also like to see duplication URLs recorded, as Sircus suggests.
Someone here noted that Slashdot has an option to show all sections. Perhaps editors should have this as a mandatory condition on their own logged-in sessions.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they are worth it. I read them every five years or so. Some of the dialogue in the later books pisses me off, to be honest with you, but on the whole it's a rich universe to think about.
One thing I particularly like about it is that it's science fiction written with an emphasis on the psychological and philosophical, as opposed to the 'Hard SF' (technologically-based) and fantasy stuff (wizards, goblins, whatever, I couldn't give a fuck, really). There are themes in all 6 books that you don't really find in other science fiction, certainly not as developed anyways.
Tim O'Reilly in an interview with Herbert discovered that a lot of the first 3 books were meant as a riposte to Asimov's Foundation series -- there's a sense in Foundation that 'the wise men of science will save us', whereas Herbert felt quite strongly that trusting in any single group of people was a failure of intellect. (This has elements related to the Hard SF mentioned above, but I digress)
One thing I found interesting about the Bene Gesserit was that they were sketched initially as a female version of the Jesuits.
Enough of this. Read them, they're worth the effort. Really.
Uh, Duncan Idaho back from the dead as Hayt-Idaho?
There's a plot to kill Paul's children.
The sacrifice Leto makes is the one that Paul is unwilling to try for; that of using prescience to its logical end (the removal of all free will from the universe).
Basically, the question is, what happens if you know the future? It's an awesome power: Paul eventually blinds himself to take himself out of ruling Dune and the Empire. Leto, having both prescience and the ability to consult his dead ancestors through living memory, realises that humanity will always want to screw with things beyond their control. So by losing his humanity, gaining quasi-immortality, and using that in conjunction with his powers of prescience and living memory, he is able to control the universe as he sees fit. All of it is meant as an instruction not to do the same in succeeding generations: it's a lesson.
At the risk of oversimplifying massively to the point of losing the thread: Leto's life is meant as an answer to the question posed above, in other words --
When you gain prescience, you lose free will.
Which is why Leto has to live for 1600 years -- if he were to stay mortal, there would be nothing to ensure that his ideas, the stagnant culture he creates, and the ossified universe around Dune would last 50 years beyond his death, never mind over a thousand.
This is not to say that Herbert agreed with any of this himself, but he certainly wanted his characters to have these depths of concept.
Chapterhouse's old couple totally escapes me at the moment, so I can't answer that one.
Not to trash the questioner, but if you work for a Fortune 50 company, surely your in-house legal department would have some idea, no? As another poster suggested, Red Hat or IBM will definitely provide this: I'm sure that RH's announcement yesterday of Advanced Server revisions is pertinent (though not directly to do with indemnity issues) to you on some level.
You're an admin guy, you know Unix. The legal people know the law. Ask them to look into it, and cc the manager you talked to so that both sides know you want this examined seriously.
you have a problem, particularly for your CS department. Ask them for their ideas on this. If you forgo any MS products you basically tell them they can't teach how to use MS technologies.
As much as I love using Linux and BSDs, I can't see them accepting this, because the conditions essentially forbid them from preparing people for encountering MS products outside of work -- it's going to blindside students badly.
On the typical arts college side of things I don't think this will bite so much -- you can still use Macs or PCs.
The cost of switching? You save a shedload on software licenses, possibly a bit on labour and maintenance (assuming that you hire fewer Unix or Mac people at a slightly higher per person cost), but the attractiveness of avoiding MS stuff for your potential students is bloody questionable. (I'd want to talk to your college counsellors -- would they recommend it? In this job market?)
Your province should have an ombudsman and privacy commissioner as well. You will want to get a package of data or evidence together documenting this, and fire it off to the cops, ombudsman and privacy commissioner. You will also want to talk to the federal government's privacy and information access commissioners.
The media would be a double-edged sword. Once this hits the police you won't have to worry about media interest.
Get a lawyer, now, and don't waste any more time about it.
They should talk to both entities. MOL for the PPC translations, VMware for the emulation for x86. One of the final comments in the article noted that 'some other emulation' would be a good choice. Bochs is just too slow. They can figure out the licensing later, but Apple should get started now. Ignoring the licensing for the time being, Bochs' slow performance currently is one hell of an obstacle. I would wonder just how much improvement is really achievable (I know plex86 is still around -- but how viable is it?).
.NET strategy or whatever it is called now.
VMware's stability and success in selling contracts to US Governmental departments is a strong point in my view. The fact that they don't have a PPC version, obviously, is a strike against.
Oh well. And no, I don't think it's a good idea to have emulations on Macs dominated by MS. Not trolling, but evidently MS is thinking the Connectix technology would be a good thing to add to their
If I had thought about it, I would have posted your reply. Perfect post! Good reference too, that book's been a great education for us here.
Boron and phosphorus. Basically the doping materials make the current feasible.
... it lasts for similar periods. What you really need to worry about is delamination, which comes from the adhesive you stick in between the cells and the glass coming apart. Again, we sell ours for a guaranteed 20 years, which is standard in the industry, so replacement costs on the part of the consumer or installer are a moot point.
There are installations extant for the last 20 to 30 years, still producing electricity.
My company makes modules (no, I'm not interested in advertising it here, so no names) guaranteed for 20 years. This is against weather damage. We use tempered glass tested by firing half-inch steel balls at a distance of 2-3m at 15m/s to hold the cells. (No damage, by the way) The plastic sheeting, or polyvinyl fluoride (Tedlar, by DuPont -- OK, I'll concede the point here), is a derivative/related material to Kevlar
Electricity is still too expensive compared to non-renewable sources, I will freely admit this. However, I think you need to get out of the US-centric mindset: Japan has by far the highest level of PV installations, currently about half the world total. Africa finds it an economical alternative to nonrenewables. I don't think either region would do it just to make a ecological statement, do you?
As the bloke below points out, Lomborg's argument on cost is very much relevant and explains a great deal of the slow uptake in the industry over the last few decades. This being said, however, worldwide usage of PV technologies (excluding in toys like solar calculators and whatnot) has easily demonstrated 25% growth rates year-on-year for the last few years or so (Ispra report, June 2002, European Commission Joint Research Centre; also at PVNet).
Of course, when you start from nothing, anything sounds impressive. However, in Europe we have around 6% of total energy consumption coming from renewable sources. Less than everyone aside from the petrol industry (and even these guys are heavily invested in renewable energy) expects, but still, you have to start somewhere...
PS: No idea why the http://www.pv-net.net link doesn't work, so I've just included it in plaintext
As someone now employed in photovoltaics, I have to ask you this. Most commercially-available solar panels of the silicon variety are derived from purified sand. Pure silicon does not exist naturally, so silicon dioxide (duh, sand) is broken down and refined into ingots. How is this environmentally unfriendly?
If you're talking about GaAs-panels (cells), they are dirty, I'll grant you that. They are not, however, at all popular. The largest makers of PV are Kyocera, Sharp, RWE Schott Solar and Astropower. None, as far as I know, are selling exotic PV cells or modules in any numbers. They're expensive, and the current technology offers enough benefits to outweigh the point of bothering with fancy stuff.
I'm joking. I'm not a big gaming person, mostly because I suck at FPS-stuff. I do, however, think that Myst/Riven/Exile/whatever-Mudpie-is-called-now pretty much hit this one on the head. The problem they mention in the article, of infinite storylines, isn't really addressed by the gaming people they interviewed -- the balance has to be between one person or group's 'vision', or telling a story, and the player's receptivity to listen to that storyline. In Deus Ex, the Ion Storm Austin people decided to limit the narrative possibilities around a set two or three paths, and only in the final parts of the game.
OK, so you make a 'game universe' : how is this any different from the mmo games now around?
I'd think this would be more useful to people wanting to develop interactive environment simulations, rather than straight-ahead games : the aquarium as a metaphor probably works between than the FPS idea.
Or maybe I'll just read a book instead.
My submission had nothing to do with the submission on blank levy proposal. I don't live in Canada any longer, so finding news from home can be a bit difficult at times.
It's not a shock, but as someone who used to work in the dreaded field of advertising while abroad, I do think it would be nice to occasionally see the odd show from home. Or the odd show from the foreign country in Canada.
Personal history out of the way first:
* Started with RH 5.1
* Mandrake 7 - 8.0
* Debian unstable (woody) two years ago on home machine
* Used SuSE for work (8.0 -- they wanted commercial support)
* Now on Debian at work (yay)
The primary problem with mdk and rh is not the rpm architecture, it's in 'fit and finish' issues. Mdk in particular always seemed a bit less sturdy to me, and a little closer in attitude to Windows -- it looked fairly easy, but anything more complicated than the most basic of problems got you in a heap of doo. Now granted, I use a distro that is 180 degrees opposite to this -- there *is* no fit and finish issue with Debian -- but it either works, or it doesn't, and I'm usually able to figure out why.
Policy (in terms of mechanics, not politics) is all-important, and I just like that with Debian. Similarly SuSE during the year I used it was a very solid, sturdy distro, with none of the hidden agonies I noticed with Mandrake and Red Hat. I do wish Mandrake all luck possible, because I feel it's important to have a newbie-focused distro. At the same time I would hope that they get some of those f&f issues looked at, and resolved.
Namely, the fact that the US acts as a gigantic research sink (read 'brain drain') for the rest of the world. No idea what proportion of those foreign researchers return to countries of origin, but I imagine America holds on to quite a lot of them. The US dwarfs every other country on Earth in terms of money spent on research and is a player, if not the dominant 'hegemon' in just about every field. If native-born Americans are unwilling to take up science (which I don't think is really true, but anyway), believe me, there's plenty of people from abroad who will.
And that's not a bad thing at all, at least for Americans. Other countries might have a problem with brain drains, but America certainly does not.
No one ever said the military were the brightest sparks :)
Methods already exist, without drugs.
Note that it's not without sleep altogether -- anyone see Jacob's Ladder ? Of course, they don't mention what a cursory search would turn up:
Polyphasic sleep
The 'Uberman Sleep Schedule'
Apparently Buckminster Fuller and Thomas Jefferson practiced variants of this, getting as little as three to four hours per 24-hour period.
That editors were the sharpest tools in the box.
Fear serves a number of useful roles, not least the one of self-preservation. What's that old saw about discretion being the better part of valour?
I can think of two reasons why this is just BS on the part of the editors (well, many others too, but let's leave that for now). Let's take as a starting point that the leap is valid.
Possible follow-on points:
1. 'Emotional intelligence' seems to play a role in most people's rationality (no, I'm not going to dig up the reference to the EQ book; that's for a Google / Amazon search) and intelligence generally.
2. Removing fear could possibly remove a certain level of rational appreciation of things ie/ the need to keep oneself intact.
3. This would be tantamount to partially lobotomising one's own army. Would any country want to do this?
I guess I'm answering my own question (later in the discussion), but I was on the committee that had the name of the building changed.
The invitation did go out. Unfortunately there were intimations that we were embarrassing him, and that we were doing it to hit him up for cash (at the time McGill was the most indebted university in the world), so he politely declined. He did go back briefly, and this was filmed for a 'Life and Times' segment on CBC several years back. As to the embarrassment portion, well, we didn't want to change it to 'Starfleet Academy'; we just wanted to be a bit less serious than our reputation suggests.
Shatner was a Commerce student, if I remember correctly, when he started doing short plays and whatnot on something of a lark (at least, this is what I've heard). Probably didn't want to freeze in winter there!
I was involved many moons ago in the campaign to have the Student building at McGill in Montréal change its name to the Shatner University Centre. Did we embarrass you, or did you like it?
Is there any way to just simply mix and match different disks? I'm wondering if you could install the PGI-enabled first CD, then when tasksel or whatever prompts you for additional CDs, use the other 6 in the set. I get the impression you can't, as the Progeny site talks about creating your own installer CDs (plural, not singular).
* Schedule annual months of hallucinogen intake
* Finally get that electronic music thing together
* Polish up my languages (foreign and computer)
* Get some land and learn -- very slowly -- how to farm it
* Go to university again (See no. 2)
er, that's it for now....
Another poster in this forum suggested that Canadian extra-territoriality law has some relevance (as a Canadian, I'm inclined to agree) -- to wit, our laws to do with your Cuba embargo (Helms-Burton being the most recent example) specifically hold the American act and its provisions to be invalid in Canada. I imagine the Aussie law to be much the same sort of thrust. Then again, how many of you Americans are aware of the Canadian law? Do you know how many cases have been brought to trial? The number of cases can be counted on one hand with a couple of fingers missing. And, truthfully, how many of you could care less?
Anyway, this is all a moot point. All this talk is not going to force US-based 'meeja' executives to resort to e-mails and conference calls only, no matter how much the constituency here wants to see it done. Unfortunately.
And please, don't quote the Gandhi 'First, they laugh at you' thing again. Without a concerted effort from other Western nations (at a minimum), the closest thing this approximates is a soggy spitball and straw against a tank.
- It had to print well under Linux
- I wanted to use colour most of the time
- Ink replacement had to be cheap-ish
That said, I selected the Epson Colour Stylus 670, used Mandrake (right after they upgraded to using CUPS), and bought those colour refill kits another poster mentioned.I killed it in 14 months. I did a lot of printing, and the print heads were completely shot by the very end.
I've thrown out that printer. I've used plenty of printers over the years, and I have to second JabberWokky's assertions. Essentially, LJIIIs render colour printing unnecessary, and my old objections have no relevance today.
LJIIIs *are* built like tanks, and the technologies behind them are very well understood now. The fact that HP supports Linux doesn't hurt, either. True, they don't print colour, and new cartridges can be expensive. However, refurbished cartridges aren't dear any longer, and if I had just found an old LJIII I'm sure it would still be in use. You can often find them at auction houses, or in the classifieds, or eBay.
Upshot, get a used LJIII and print a test page or two to check the quality. You probably will be satisfied.
OK. The staff can't be perfect, but this is not even close to being all that unique. I remember this story as well.
I suggest the department headings be changed from frivolous titles to useful ones, to help with categorisation. I'd also like to see duplication URLs recorded, as Sircus suggests.
Someone here noted that Slashdot has an option to show all sections. Perhaps editors should have this as a mandatory condition on their own logged-in sessions.