I like it! Maybe get ahold of those people who developed VisiCalc way back when and have them patent "A method for applying various mathematical formulas to a tabular array of numerical values with dynamic updates" and little likelyhood of anyone proving prior art. Then they can ding MS (Excel), IBM (Lotus 123), Corel (Quattro Pro), and who knows how many other spreadsheet (and derivative) products until the big players start telling the USTPO that software patents are a bad idea...
Yeah, there's prolly some legal reason why this wouldn't work, but I can dream, can't I?
The early versions didn't, but pop-ups could be re-enabled from the quick prefs panel (f12). The newer version (6 and up?) have an "allow requested" option which opens anything invoked from a mouse-click, but not those from a page-load. Best of both worlds...
I switched to Opera four (or more maybe) years ago. Occaisionally I'll run across a site that doesn't work quite right (like my bank) and other sites (like my local phone service) that I have to spoof into thinking I'm running something more conventional (f12 then alt-s). I like the tabbed windows, the stability, etc. but mostly I like the fact that for four years now a pop-up or pop-under ad has been a novelty that I only experience on other people's machines.
Presumably, after indulging in an experimental and no doubt expensive procedure, I'm betting that the subject would be given a MedicAlert bracelet that would give the attending EMT a head's up...
...nothing new has to be discovered, nothing new has to be invented from scratch...
Uhhm, even in his book, Edwards admits that the carbon nanotubes needed to make this work just aren't there yet; while we can manufacture nanotubes now, we can't make them as strong (by a factor of around 100) or nearly as long (by a factor of 10,000 or more) as needed. While it may well be that, as soon as someone really puts some effort/research bucks into making stronger/longer nanotubes, they will happen, but it seems like 15 years might still be optimistic.
OTOH, this would be way cool, and maybe in my lifetime to boot...
Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech...
That's the abridged version, but the intent is as obvious as it is simple. The people who put the constitution together were worried that a government that suppresses free speech would become the same sort oppressive state they'd just fought a revolution to escape.
But notice this; while the constitution grants free speech, it does not guarantee that you will have an audience! The government can't (well, shouldn't, at least) stop free speech, but when someone says specifically and emphatically that they don't want to hear it, then the intrusive speech is an invasion of privacy.
As far as spyware goes, I think it would be poetic justice if everyone who's been dinged by spyware charge the people responsible with theft a la the "Hacker Crackdown" of yore. If Ma Bell can claim millions of $$ for a single document "theft", imagine what the general populace could get for spyware activity. Alternately, just charge the spyware people as "peeping toms", spying though (ahem) Windows. Keep it simple and take advantage of existing laws...
I don't know about that; I've still got a working Atari Lynx and, so far at least, it hasn't enhanced my coolness noticably...
I do like the DS, what with the backwards compatiblity and wireless. But the whole touch-screen thing strikes me as a gimmick. I have my doubts how well it will serve as a game control, but we'll see... For now, I have a strange urge to to dig out my Lynx and play some Rygar...
While TechTV wasn't all roses, I have to agree; I have yet to see any post-merger G4 show that wasn't either dull or annoying or both. While I do game, I guess I'm just not hardcore enough to watch other people play with smug and "clever" commentary from the hosts...
I seem to recall (from a previous/. article) that the TechTV crew has another month or so before they either move to LA or get sacked. Any updates on that?
My little sister works for the Parks Service at Yellowstone, and she's told me a number of troubling stories about the types of people that SAR has to deal with. Cell phone coverage in the park is limited, but there are still people every year who take their new GPS unit and cell phone and wander off trail and call up with, "I'm at latitude dd mm ss and longitude dd mm ss and and I need you to come and get me. But I'm not lost." In other words, the people that make up the bulk of those in need of SAR are, for the most part, dim. Which means that any solution that requires thought on the part of the participants will not work.
My take? If EULAs can be deemed binding by breaking a plastic seal, it shouldn't be a big stretch to make use of public lands an implicit acceptance of trivial invasions of privacy. I didn't sign any waiver to allow my ATM to take my picture; is this really so different? There are already many public land use policies designed (with varying degrees of success) to keep stupid people safe from themselves. This is one that could actually be useful...
I've been computing since the early 80's (an Apple ][+) and mousing since 1986 (an Atari 1040ST). Somewhere around the early 90's I started having pains in my right wrist. I tried a wrist brace and supportive pads for my keyboard and mouse usage and they reduced the discomfort, but didn't eliminate it. What finally worked (and still works) for me is some wrist stretching exercises I learned for Aikido. There are some fairly clear descriptions here. The most effective (for me at least) is the kotegaishi, with nikkyo a close second.
Okay, maybe a little hyperbole there, but I still prefer the infinity engine. It does everything the ToEE engine does. It has substantially better path-finding routines (I've had characters in ToEE stuck behind a locked door when the adjacent, unlocked door was wide open). The toolbar is a great deal easier/faster than those verdammen radial menus. While I got really (really really) tired of the "You may not continue..." speech, it makes a lot more sense to require the party to be together to leave a map (sneaking one thief past the uber baddies to escape the elemental nodes works, but it still feels like cheating). Repositioning the display from the map is a lot less tedious than scrolling.Overall, I saw nothing in the ToEE engine that was better, other than the screen resolution.
That said, back to the topic at hand: to me, the alternative endings/paths did not create a "story". My experience was this, your band arrives at Hommlet (sp?), they do some subquests, clean out the moathouse, go to Nulb and ask around, then go to the Temple and start wading. Even a few cutscenes could have added some depth, but it is possible to go through the game without really getting into the backstory. The game can be "finished" with half the temple and the all elemental nodes unexplored, and you'll still hit the level 10 experience cap. Maybe someone will come up with some mods (beyond the brothel from Circle of Eight) as was done for BGII...
I've been playing The Temple of Elemental Evil from Troika games. It boasts the latest D&D rules and... well... not much else.
After playing it through, I was very disappointed. The story was damn near absent. Your ultimate goal is reflected in the title; good-aligned characters will expect to destroy the aforementioned temple, while evil-aligned will take it over. I've no idea what would be expected of a neutral party, but the point is, there is only a thin back-story to motivate the player. A couple dozen side-quests fail flesh things out. I keep thinking of the D&D based games from Black Isle, especially Baldur's Gate II and the elaborate stories involved. To add insult to injury, the (five year old?) Infinity engine is superior in every way to the one used in ToEE, except for the number of officially supported screen resolutions (but that's another rant).
The game starts you off with hints of nearby bandits who, once dealt with, will unlock the pirate city adjacent to the Temple itself. That's the extent of the story progression. Once the temple is revealed, the player goes progressively deeper in until a final battle is reached. That's it. None of the prophecy-driven complexities of Morrowind or the episodic progression of NeverWinter Nights. One of the things I like about RPGs over FPSs is the story. Every NPC in Baldur's Gate II has a number of his/her own side-quests. Your character in Morrowind can run straight through the basic prophecy-based quests, or spend some time moving up through the various guilds and their elaborate quests. NeverWinter Nights has a pretty linear storyline, but it is a storyline, and side-kick side quests can add to it...
The bottom line: pretty 3D graphics or elaborate spell-effects can enhance a good game, but when the story is just there to justify rampaging through the levels, well, my copy of Doom 2 is already paid for and I don't need another new fscking video card to play it...
I tried to use LyX for my thesis (the final product was supposed to be in pdf) and, having only a little exposure to LaTeX, it took me nearly three hours of digging (both in the help files and the web) to figure out how to put a caption on a figure. When faced with applying all the fussy, nit-picky standards required by the school, I realized that I was looking at a great deal more time bludgeoning LyX into doing what I wanted (or more learning LaTeX nearly from scratch) than my actual research project. In the end, I booted up my old Win98 machine and did my thesis in WordPerfect V7 (using a rather buggy product provided by the school to convert the result to pdf).
And, yeah, it seems to me that it would make sense for new word processors to be able to read old formats. Unfortunately, these things don't always make sense; one of the things that has kept me from migrtating to OpenOffice is the 30Mb of WordPerfect docs that I can't read with it...
The purpose of speed limits has changed a number of times over the years; this may be a sign of things taking a step back. Previous modes went like this:
safety - When speed limits were first introduced, they were purely about safety. Citizens were "encouraged" to follow the speed limit be having clearly marked police cars setting an example by driving in traffic at the limit. This mode ened before most of us were born.
enforcement - This is the mode which most of us are familiar with; police vehicles, hidden or unmarked, monitor speeds without participating in traffic. The focus has shifted from encouraging to punishing. Sometimes this is even motivated by external factors like...
revenue - Connect a camera to radar gun, throw it into a mirror windowed van, or mount it on the lights at a busy intersection, and you have a way to increase taxes by extorting the owner of the offending vehicle without actually doing anything immediate enough to discourage the bad behaviour.
So now we have a new mode that seems, in theory, to actually provide an immediate negative feedback for bad behavior. Perhaps this new mode is a step back towards safety, forcing drivers to slow down.
Too bad it won't do anything to change the offending behavior.
I used to work in downtown Denver. When I ended up on night shift, I discovered something interesting; driving south from downtown on Broadway (a major arterial with lights at every intersection), I could drive all the way to the I-25 intersection (about 3.5 miles away) catching every light green. It seems that the city's traffic engineers had timed the lights. Driving at the speed limit from downtown to 6th, then speed limit +3 from 6th to Bayaud, then the speed limit for the rest, I would approach each intersection with the light just turning green. A similar result could be accomplished on northbound Lincoln (going from I-25 to downtown). But, when I tried to do this during the day (when other cars were on the road), my efforts were constantly thwarted by the countless feebs who would rocket out of the intersection on green, accelerate past the speed limit, then slam on the brakes at the next light at the end of the block, over and over and over and over again. The only way this new scheme will have any impact with people like that is if there is something, along with the change to red, that indicates why the change happened. Like a big display flashing a picture of the offender with a blinking red banner, "This unnecessary stop was brought to you by this here impatient jerk!" Public shaming as a motivational tool... Hmm.
This feels like a joke, but there are people who might well invest some serious effort in "Keeping Mars Clean". My advisor was involved in the Voyager "Grand Tour" mission back at JPL in the 70's and he was telling me that when the launch was first announced, a group of people protested that Voyager was "stealing energy" from Jupiter with its gravity-assist maneuver. They were concerned that if enough probes were sent that way, Jupiter's orbit would be irrevokably altered. No, really. Obviously not a lot of math skills involved...
The law of unintended consequences strikes again. Maybe the cost could be graduated though; i.e. based on e-mail traffic, rather than a flat rate. It would accomplish the same as a per e-mail cost which would still have the disadvantage of dinging anyone who does mass-mail (legit SIG mail as well as spam), but it would also make things affordable for people who just run their own system.
The question that I have still not seen answered is this; what will keep the spammers from spoofing the headers to appear to be from legit.mail domains? I've looked at this and previous articles and haven't anyone even address this. I know that spammers already alter stuff; will this new schema actually prevent that?
REXX comes in a variety of forms, most of which are free, for platforms that aren't Windows. I know that IBM still charges something like $80 (personal version) to $150 (developer) of Object REXX for Windows. As-is version are available for free for Linux, Solaris and (cough) OS/2. I believe that other versions of REXX do the same thing. That's prolly what the parent post refered to.
Actually, Object REXX is available for Linux no-charge (as is) here. I've been using it with MySQL to kludge up a home inventory, as well as a few data extraction scripts for a project at school. While I'm planning learning a more conventional scripting language for Linux, I still haven't found any that match the power of the PARSE... But I digress.
I thought the movie felt more like a Hercules/Xena spin-off and found it, well, kinda disappointing. I was hoping for better; they did a good job with Dune (certainly better than Dino DeLaurentis did in the 80's). Maybe they'll do okay with EarthSea.
The books are worth reading, at least until they start explaining What It All Means four or five books in...
Hey, someone else noticed! Bush never really said "We're" going to Mars", only that "Someday we might go to the moon and, from there, we could conceivably go on to Mars..."
What really vexes me about all this is that, if we are going to use the moon as a launching platform for exploring the rest of the solar system, in order to be even vaguely practical and/or cost effective we would have to buiild an infrastructure on the moon that would be capable of building the entire exploratory vessel from scratch using native lunar materials. To build such a craft on Earth, then transport it to the moon for launch to Mars would significantly multiply the costs. The Dubya's plan is kinda like saying "We could drive directly from Detroit to LA, but instead let's drive from Detroit to Atlanta, spend a decade building an automobile plant there, then build the car that will get us to LA." Huh?
Red Planet was my first too; I was in the library with my father, looking for a Hardy Boys book that I'd not yet read and my dad pulled it (and Space Platform by Murray Leinster) down and said he'd read them at my age (11). I read them and haven't touched the Hardy Boys since.
Now I'm 42 and I still re-read Have Space Suit, Will Travel, about once a year, Space Cadet and/or Puppet Masters every couple years, the whole "Future History" arc every five years or so, and others at random. In fact, I just finished his "last published novel", and started re-reading his fisrt yesterday.
It could be worse; at least this is a complete and finished work. There was an author named Mack Reynolds who puplished SF novels intermittently in the 60's and 70's. When he died in '83 a number of "unfinished" works were discovered which were then "finished" and published post-mortem. Around ten "new" novels resulted, some of which were obviously very rough early drafts of novels that he actually did publish while still alive.
For Us, the Living is not Heinlein's best work, but it is definitely his work, rather than some well intentioned (or just greedy) effort. The question I want answered is when he tried to have it destroyed; was it before he wrote Lifeline and was still unsure if he could make a living from writing, or after. I'd like to think that, had the copy turned up towards the end of his career, that he may well have let it be published (along with a great deal of "what was I thinking" annotations).
Regardless, I was glad to have a chance to read it.
Yeah, there was only the one Planescape, but two BGs, each with ann expansion pack. I enjoyed planescape well enough, but when I think BIS, it's Baldur's Gate that comes to mind...
"Go for the eyes, Boo! Go for the Eyes! Rahhrrrg!"
I must confess, I never thought of Cosmos as SF, what with it being a documentary and all. I wasn't all that impressed with it anyway; I don't know why, but I much preferred James Burke's Connections. Regardless, BSG started in '78 while Cosmos was originally aired in 1980. That put it up against the short-lived Galactica 1980 series that is frequently ignored in BSG history (yeah, even by the standards of the time, it was that bad).
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I like it! Maybe get ahold of those people who developed VisiCalc way back when and have them patent "A method for applying various mathematical formulas to a tabular array of numerical values with dynamic updates" and little likelyhood of anyone proving prior art. Then they can ding MS (Excel), IBM (Lotus 123), Corel (Quattro Pro), and who knows how many other spreadsheet (and derivative) products until the big players start telling the USTPO that software patents are a bad idea...
Yeah, there's prolly some legal reason why this wouldn't work, but I can dream, can't I?
The early versions didn't, but pop-ups could be re-enabled from the quick prefs panel (f12). The newer version (6 and up?) have an "allow requested" option which opens anything invoked from a mouse-click, but not those from a page-load. Best of both worlds...
I switched to Opera four (or more maybe) years ago. Occaisionally I'll run across a site that doesn't work quite right (like my bank) and other sites (like my local phone service) that I have to spoof into thinking I'm running something more conventional (f12 then alt-s). I like the tabbed windows, the stability, etc. but mostly I like the fact that for four years now a pop-up or pop-under ad has been a novelty that I only experience on other people's machines.
Presumably, after indulging in an experimental and no doubt expensive procedure, I'm betting that the subject would be given a MedicAlert bracelet that would give the attending EMT a head's up...
My body language seems to translate as, "Do as I say and no one gets hurt..."
Uhhm, even in his book, Edwards admits that the carbon nanotubes needed to make this work just aren't there yet; while we can manufacture nanotubes now, we can't make them as strong (by a factor of around 100) or nearly as long (by a factor of 10,000 or more) as needed. While it may well be that, as soon as someone really puts some effort/research bucks into making stronger/longer nanotubes, they will happen, but it seems like 15 years might still be optimistic.
OTOH, this would be way cool, and maybe in my lifetime to boot...
That's the abridged version, but the intent is as obvious as it is simple. The people who put the constitution together were worried that a government that suppresses free speech would become the same sort oppressive state they'd just fought a revolution to escape.
But notice this; while the constitution grants free speech, it does not guarantee that you will have an audience! The government can't (well, shouldn't, at least) stop free speech, but when someone says specifically and emphatically that they don't want to hear it, then the intrusive speech is an invasion of privacy.
As far as spyware goes, I think it would be poetic justice if everyone who's been dinged by spyware charge the people responsible with theft a la the "Hacker Crackdown" of yore. If Ma Bell can claim millions of $$ for a single document "theft", imagine what the general populace could get for spyware activity. Alternately, just charge the spyware people as "peeping toms", spying though (ahem) Windows. Keep it simple and take advantage of existing laws...
I don't know about that; I've still got a working Atari Lynx and, so far at least, it hasn't enhanced my coolness noticably...
I do like the DS, what with the backwards compatiblity and wireless. But the whole touch-screen thing strikes me as a gimmick. I have my doubts how well it will serve as a game control, but we'll see... For now, I have a strange urge to to dig out my Lynx and play some Rygar...
While TechTV wasn't all roses, I have to agree; I have yet to see any post-merger G4 show that wasn't either dull or annoying or both. While I do game, I guess I'm just not hardcore enough to watch other people play with smug and "clever" commentary from the hosts...
I seem to recall (from a previous /. article) that the TechTV crew has another month or so before they either move to LA or get sacked. Any updates on that?
My little sister works for the Parks Service at Yellowstone, and she's told me a number of troubling stories about the types of people that SAR has to deal with. Cell phone coverage in the park is limited, but there are still people every year who take their new GPS unit and cell phone and wander off trail and call up with, "I'm at latitude dd mm ss and longitude dd mm ss and and I need you to come and get me. But I'm not lost." In other words, the people that make up the bulk of those in need of SAR are, for the most part, dim. Which means that any solution that requires thought on the part of the participants will not work.
My take? If EULAs can be deemed binding by breaking a plastic seal, it shouldn't be a big stretch to make use of public lands an implicit acceptance of trivial invasions of privacy. I didn't sign any waiver to allow my ATM to take my picture; is this really so different? There are already many public land use policies designed (with varying degrees of success) to keep stupid people safe from themselves. This is one that could actually be useful...
I've been computing since the early 80's (an Apple ][+) and mousing since 1986 (an Atari 1040ST). Somewhere around the early 90's I started having pains in my right wrist. I tried a wrist brace and supportive pads for my keyboard and mouse usage and they reduced the discomfort, but didn't eliminate it. What finally worked (and still works) for me is some wrist stretching exercises I learned for Aikido. There are some fairly clear descriptions here. The most effective (for me at least) is the kotegaishi, with nikkyo a close second.
Okay, maybe a little hyperbole there, but I still prefer the infinity engine. It does everything the ToEE engine does. It has substantially better path-finding routines (I've had characters in ToEE stuck behind a locked door when the adjacent, unlocked door was wide open). The toolbar is a great deal easier/faster than those verdammen radial menus. While I got really (really really) tired of the "You may not continue..." speech, it makes a lot more sense to require the party to be together to leave a map (sneaking one thief past the uber baddies to escape the elemental nodes works, but it still feels like cheating). Repositioning the display from the map is a lot less tedious than scrolling.Overall, I saw nothing in the ToEE engine that was better, other than the screen resolution.
That said, back to the topic at hand: to me, the alternative endings/paths did not create a "story". My experience was this, your band arrives at Hommlet (sp?), they do some subquests, clean out the moathouse, go to Nulb and ask around, then go to the Temple and start wading. Even a few cutscenes could have added some depth, but it is possible to go through the game without really getting into the backstory. The game can be "finished" with half the temple and the all elemental nodes unexplored, and you'll still hit the level 10 experience cap. Maybe someone will come up with some mods (beyond the brothel from Circle of Eight) as was done for BGII...
I've been playing The Temple of Elemental Evil from Troika games. It boasts the latest D&D rules and... well... not much else.
After playing it through, I was very disappointed. The story was damn near absent. Your ultimate goal is reflected in the title; good-aligned characters will expect to destroy the aforementioned temple, while evil-aligned will take it over. I've no idea what would be expected of a neutral party, but the point is, there is only a thin back-story to motivate the player. A couple dozen side-quests fail flesh things out. I keep thinking of the D&D based games from Black Isle, especially Baldur's Gate II and the elaborate stories involved. To add insult to injury, the (five year old?) Infinity engine is superior in every way to the one used in ToEE, except for the number of officially supported screen resolutions (but that's another rant).
The game starts you off with hints of nearby bandits who, once dealt with, will unlock the pirate city adjacent to the Temple itself. That's the extent of the story progression. Once the temple is revealed, the player goes progressively deeper in until a final battle is reached. That's it. None of the prophecy-driven complexities of Morrowind or the episodic progression of NeverWinter Nights. One of the things I like about RPGs over FPSs is the story. Every NPC in Baldur's Gate II has a number of his/her own side-quests. Your character in Morrowind can run straight through the basic prophecy-based quests, or spend some time moving up through the various guilds and their elaborate quests. NeverWinter Nights has a pretty linear storyline, but it is a storyline, and side-kick side quests can add to it...
The bottom line: pretty 3D graphics or elaborate spell-effects can enhance a good game, but when the story is just there to justify rampaging through the levels, well, my copy of Doom 2 is already paid for and I don't need another new fscking video card to play it...
I tried to use LyX for my thesis (the final product was supposed to be in pdf) and, having only a little exposure to LaTeX, it took me nearly three hours of digging (both in the help files and the web) to figure out how to put a caption on a figure. When faced with applying all the fussy, nit-picky standards required by the school, I realized that I was looking at a great deal more time bludgeoning LyX into doing what I wanted (or more learning LaTeX nearly from scratch) than my actual research project. In the end, I booted up my old Win98 machine and did my thesis in WordPerfect V7 (using a rather buggy product provided by the school to convert the result to pdf).
And, yeah, it seems to me that it would make sense for new word processors to be able to read old formats. Unfortunately, these things don't always make sense; one of the things that has kept me from migrtating to OpenOffice is the 30Mb of WordPerfect docs that I can't read with it...
The purpose of speed limits has changed a number of times over the years; this may be a sign of things taking a step back. Previous modes went like this:
- safety - When speed limits were first introduced, they were purely about safety. Citizens were "encouraged" to follow the speed limit be having clearly marked police cars setting an example by driving in traffic at the limit. This mode ened before most of us were born.
- enforcement - This is the mode which most of us are familiar with; police vehicles, hidden or unmarked, monitor speeds without participating in traffic. The focus has shifted from encouraging to punishing. Sometimes this is even motivated by external factors like...
- revenue - Connect a camera to radar gun, throw it into a mirror windowed van, or mount it on the lights at a busy intersection, and you have a way to increase taxes by extorting the owner of the offending vehicle without actually doing anything immediate enough to discourage the bad behaviour.
So now we have a new mode that seems, in theory, to actually provide an immediate negative feedback for bad behavior. Perhaps this new mode is a step back towards safety, forcing drivers to slow down.Too bad it won't do anything to change the offending behavior.
I used to work in downtown Denver. When I ended up on night shift, I discovered something interesting; driving south from downtown on Broadway (a major arterial with lights at every intersection), I could drive all the way to the I-25 intersection (about 3.5 miles away) catching every light green. It seems that the city's traffic engineers had timed the lights. Driving at the speed limit from downtown to 6th, then speed limit +3 from 6th to Bayaud, then the speed limit for the rest, I would approach each intersection with the light just turning green. A similar result could be accomplished on northbound Lincoln (going from I-25 to downtown). But, when I tried to do this during the day (when other cars were on the road), my efforts were constantly thwarted by the countless feebs who would rocket out of the intersection on green, accelerate past the speed limit, then slam on the brakes at the next light at the end of the block, over and over and over and over again. The only way this new scheme will have any impact with people like that is if there is something, along with the change to red, that indicates why the change happened. Like a big display flashing a picture of the offender with a blinking red banner, "This unnecessary stop was brought to you by this here impatient jerk!" Public shaming as a motivational tool... Hmm.
This feels like a joke, but there are people who might well invest some serious effort in "Keeping Mars Clean". My advisor was involved in the Voyager "Grand Tour" mission back at JPL in the 70's and he was telling me that when the launch was first announced, a group of people protested that Voyager was "stealing energy" from Jupiter with its gravity-assist maneuver. They were concerned that if enough probes were sent that way, Jupiter's orbit would be irrevokably altered. No, really. Obviously not a lot of math skills involved...
The law of unintended consequences strikes again. Maybe the cost could be graduated though; i.e. based on e-mail traffic, rather than a flat rate. It would accomplish the same as a per e-mail cost which would still have the disadvantage of dinging anyone who does mass-mail (legit SIG mail as well as spam), but it would also make things affordable for people who just run their own system.
The question that I have still not seen answered is this; what will keep the spammers from spoofing the headers to appear to be from legit .mail domains? I've looked at this and previous articles and haven't anyone even address this. I know that spammers already alter stuff; will this new schema actually prevent that?
REXX comes in a variety of forms, most of which are free, for platforms that aren't Windows. I know that IBM still charges something like $80 (personal version) to $150 (developer) of Object REXX for Windows. As-is version are available for free for Linux, Solaris and (cough) OS/2. I believe that other versions of REXX do the same thing. That's prolly what the parent post refered to.
Yet another incentive to abandon Windows...
Actually, Object REXX is available for Linux no-charge (as is) here. I've been using it with MySQL to kludge up a home inventory, as well as a few data extraction scripts for a project at school. While I'm planning learning a more conventional scripting language for Linux, I still haven't found any that match the power of the PARSE... But I digress.
I thought the movie felt more like a Hercules/Xena spin-off and found it, well, kinda disappointing. I was hoping for better; they did a good job with Dune (certainly better than Dino DeLaurentis did in the 80's). Maybe they'll do okay with EarthSea.
The books are worth reading, at least until they start explaining What It All Means four or five books in...
Hey, someone else noticed! Bush never really said "We're" going to Mars", only that "Someday we might go to the moon and, from there, we could conceivably go on to Mars..."
What really vexes me about all this is that, if we are going to use the moon as a launching platform for exploring the rest of the solar system, in order to be even vaguely practical and/or cost effective we would have to buiild an infrastructure on the moon that would be capable of building the entire exploratory vessel from scratch using native lunar materials. To build such a craft on Earth, then transport it to the moon for launch to Mars would significantly multiply the costs. The Dubya's plan is kinda like saying "We could drive directly from Detroit to LA, but instead let's drive from Detroit to Atlanta, spend a decade building an automobile plant there, then build the car that will get us to LA." Huh?
Red Planet was my first too; I was in the library with my father, looking for a Hardy Boys book that I'd not yet read and my dad pulled it (and Space Platform by Murray Leinster) down and said he'd read them at my age (11). I read them and haven't touched the Hardy Boys since.
Now I'm 42 and I still re-read Have Space Suit, Will Travel, about once a year, Space Cadet and/or Puppet Masters every couple years, the whole "Future History" arc every five years or so, and others at random. In fact, I just finished his "last published novel", and started re-reading his fisrt yesterday.
It could be worse; at least this is a complete and finished work. There was an author named Mack Reynolds who puplished SF novels intermittently in the 60's and 70's. When he died in '83 a number of "unfinished" works were discovered which were then "finished" and published post-mortem. Around ten "new" novels resulted, some of which were obviously very rough early drafts of novels that he actually did publish while still alive.
For Us, the Living is not Heinlein's best work, but it is definitely his work, rather than some well intentioned (or just greedy) effort. The question I want answered is when he tried to have it destroyed; was it before he wrote Lifeline and was still unsure if he could make a living from writing, or after. I'd like to think that, had the copy turned up towards the end of his career, that he may well have let it be published (along with a great deal of "what was I thinking" annotations).
Regardless, I was glad to have a chance to read it.
Yeah, there was only the one Planescape, but two BGs, each with ann expansion pack. I enjoyed planescape well enough, but when I think BIS, it's Baldur's Gate that comes to mind...
"Go for the eyes, Boo! Go for the Eyes! Rahhrrrg!"
I must confess, I never thought of Cosmos as SF, what with it being a documentary and all. I wasn't all that impressed with it anyway; I don't know why, but I much preferred James Burke's Connections. Regardless, BSG started in '78 while Cosmos was originally aired in 1980. That put it up against the short-lived Galactica 1980 series that is frequently ignored in BSG history (yeah, even by the standards of the time, it was that bad).
Apples and oranges.