I've not registered with facebook so I can't see much of it. Perhaps good.
In any event, I wish slashdot would go back to the old days of more tech stuff, with more about programming etc. The latest version of afterstep, new C compilers, and of course other stuff such as physics. But too much business crap just and stuff about drivel level science (e.g. global warming deniers, which anyone can show as being nutters with nearly zero time spent) takes much of the fun away.
Perhaps I'm misremembering, perhaps I'm getting different interests and don't want to select rubbish any more.
Being philosophical: I think that's actually what old people have: They are tired of hearing the same old crap again and again from people. They see through the BS and have had enough...
And all this business stuff is such BS, that will always remain, just like politicians are always bad, in just about all countries. These are given.
If you really want to prepare people to use math in the real world, you need to include teaching them how to use today's tools. Teaching students how to do things by hand is great, but utterly useless by itself after they complete the final.
You are giving the same bogus "it saves time" argument as above, but then you give an even worse one. No, mathematics shouldn't teaching pure thinking, it should prepare you for the real world.
Maths prepares you for the real world by giving you basic skills you can use everywhere. But you will have to apply them yourself. Making mathematics classes a trade school class as you are suggesting is a travesty. This is similar to crap courses at university where you learn to use some fashionable programming language...
If you're any good at all, you get your graphing calculator out with manual, and learn how to do it within a short time. Ditto for learning a a new programming language...
Sure, I can do it by hand, but I don't always have time on a test
All you are talking about is saving time. But exams are set up such that when they are to be made without a graphing calculator, they can be made without running out of time (unless you are really bad, in which case running out of time is part of the reason you get a low grade, caused by being bad, so deserved). So this is just bogus.
He made similar economic predictions in the BBC Horizon episode "The dark secret of Hendrik Schoen" (2004).
That was the day I lost all respect for Kaku. His economic predictions are moronic (there will always be change, abrupt changes in what creates wealth), and in that Horizon documentary his comments seemed ludicrously off track as well.
The real problem is the mass suffering in third world countries will be less mitigated as we throttle back technological advancement to set policy in line with shoddy politically-driven characterizations of the science (i.e. like truncating, splicing, and smoothing two data sets to 'hide the decline' or to put it more precisely, hide correlation issues with a proxy). Not to mention the blow that science will take when it's announced that "whoops, there's no crisis."
Bullshit! The only reasonable course of action, when faced with what we (the reasonable people, not the nutjob climate skeptics) think may happen, is to take action! Taking no or not enough action (not enough according to what we think will happen etc.) is just insane as it means gambling with the planet. We've only got 1 planet so you cannot gamble with that! Anyones who disagrees with this is just 1 thing: Insane.
they should buy the rights to SGA, SG1 and SGU and make SGA S6 and SGU S3!
They don't need to make SGU S3. Just go watch "As the world turns", it will give you the same excitement, the same deep drama that even Shakespeare can't match, and similar fantastic quality camera work! The science fiction content is slightly less, but so little it's just not worth talking about. Really!
Ca. 2000 I did a speed test with a few machines: Pentium pro 200, AMD K6 233, and my old BBC micro, running a program to find all the possible permutations of the upper layer of a rubik's cube with a given number of quarter-turns. I did this already in 1984/1985 but couldn't get very far, I think 11-12 speedwise was the maximum. In the end I got the result that all permutations can be reached in 19 quarter turns. This took about 60 days of CPU power, which I split over a few machines. Then I found a bug in the program:-( This made all results worthless so I programmed in code to check if that the cutoffs I made in the program, were correct. This resulted in a speedup that eventually made the program run in ca. 2 days on the ppro, instead of 60. With all the low level optimizations I'd done the only speedup was a few percent! This showed me once again that algorithmic improvements are what you need to spend most of your time on...
Allright, the interesting bit was how much faster a pentium pro 200 was (which was slightly slower than the K6-233): About 500 times faster than the 2 Mhz 6502 (this is without any cutoffs, which I did with handmade + large computer tables). This was not that impressive but of course, all the program did was move bytes around in a fairly small set of datalocations (for which I used zpage on the 6502). I did just program the ppro/k6 using gcc, so no assembly as I never really got comfy with x86 assembly language and using C seems more appropriate anyway as that's what you program these CPUs in in most cases (I'm not sure if I checked the output of gcc -S to see what quality asm gcc produced).
An AMD 3000 (ca. 2.2 GHz) that I bought several years ago is about 10 times faster than the ppro200, so ca. 5000 times faster than the 6502 at 2MHz.
Of course you have to keep in mind the small memory of the 6502, it will get slower once you allow it to acces more memory, and for the large cutoff tables (the computed ones were many megabytes) it would need a super-6502 that has such large memory addressing ability which would be slower. So the factor for the algorithmically optimized search program on a ppro vs. a super-6502 would be higher than 500.
Who would have thought that Dr. Who would be the only scifi show on the air at one point?
Where did the market go for shows like Star Trek and ST:TNG?
What is going on?
I'll tell you what's going on: Idiot writers and producers have been making soap opera pseudo-sci-fi and it's good the trash that is SGU and Caprica will be gone soon.
I heard a complaint about the writing in Fringe. Well, Fringe is a million times more interesting and enjoyable than either of them. It looks fine to me. If I want real drama, I will perhaps go read Shakespeare, I'm certainly not interested in the rubbish pseudo drama (a.k.a. soap opera level drama) that is presented in series such as SGU and Caprica.
This announcement about SGU made my day. I'd been searching for "SGU cancelled" a few times this year...
At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information.
Actually, I'm not. The worst thing that is happening and has been happening for at least the last 20 years (probably much longer, but I haven't checked) is the non critical attitude of the media, in particular incompetent journalists who publish manipulative stories using the manipulative press releases from antisocial nutters and corporations (with their sociopath-type leaders and boards also consisting of such people). Actually, many of these press releases are just printed nearly verbatim which is at least as bad.
Any jourmalist and newspaper who publish a near verbatim press release from a corporation is helping that corporation doing their propaganda (ditto for politicians of course); all press releases should be analysed before being published and that analysis should accompany the press release. Analysed in an as neutral manner as possible, but it should *always* be critical.
As strongly as people feel about President Obama, and there is as much _strong_ feelings against him as there ever were for President Bush, I've never heard anyone wish physical harm on him. I've never heard of people in the media fantasizing on the airwaves about his assassination or any of the many other reprehensible things that were directed towards Bush, and seemingly accepted as perfectly reasonable by people I would think are above all that.
Disagreement, dislike, protest, and harsh criticism are all legitimate and honorable actions to take in politics, but the unbridled hatred I've seen directed against President Bush (or any politician, or any _person_ for that matter) has no place in civilized society.
Give me a fooking break!
George W. Bush is one of the biggest assholes I have ever seen and anything bad anyone says about is is deserved. Don't give me the crap "unbridled hatred has no place in civilized society". If society were better oranised (and/or voters or better yet the media, less stupid) such that sociopaths like him don't get elected, then you don't have such 'problems'.
The first time I saw him on TV I knew this guy was the worst a-hole I'd ever seen as he said, when the results of the elections were being recounted etc., that Gore should give up as he wanted to continue preparing for hist term. As the vote count was close, Gore could have used the same argument! These sort of reversible arguments immediately show someone is a sociopath. And that's been proven time and again by his reactions. You want to talk about civilized society? Then talk about why such a guy is not immediately taken away unfit to 'rule' anyone. Why such a guy is allowed to stand for office anywhere in any position.
I'm as big a geek as the next slashdot guy but I just don't see how you can support piracy, as a software developer that has to make a living from writing software my lively-hood depends on profiting from my own work. Why do so many people believe that the pirate bay is a good thing when clearly it is not.
Because free trumps (most) peoples morals:) Sad but true.
To be honest that's part of why people use it, but there are more issues involved:
1. Ridiculous copyright length. This means you have to pay again and again for stuff that's become part of culture, i.e. as I mentioned in a previous posting quite a while back, in my view the media companies get to have a stranglehold on your memories, on nostalgia. Stuff may not be great but may be nostalgic. Why should I have to pay (again!) to watch/use it? Why should people get to be rewarded for something that may not be good, but only be enjoyable for a reason not having anything to do with its 'real' value?
2. Attitude of the RIAA and similar groups in just about all countries.
3. Having to pay for media/printers/copying machines/video camera's because you might copy something with a copyright with/onto it. This happens in many countries, so why should I feel I'm doing something unethical if I'm paying for the 'just in case' scenario whether I do or not?
I can go on but this is enough to show your response is rather simplistic.
David Cameron (UK prime minister) has let all the rhetoric go to his head. He actually believes it when the US politicians pat him on the head and tell him that the UK and USA do indeed have a special relationship.
And he is right! There is a special relationship between the USA and the UK. It's the same relationship as that between master and dog...
The result: BSG was barely science fiction - at least to purists.
I risk to differ: Good science fiction can and should also refer to social sciences by putting people into extreme situations that are probably easier to conceive in a fictional setting then in a setting of the current world. When doing that kind of science fiction it will most likely tell you more about the time when it was created then about a possible future and IMO that is a good thing, because the future is not foreseeable anyway and the fiction should reflect and influence the now. I think BSG did an excellent job at that.
I agree with the one you quoted: The new battlestar Galactica series was interesting in some aspects, but contains huge amounts of melodrama, useless drama, and even soap opera level drama that was completely worthless. Many an episode I used fastforward/skip on xine for the entire episode, then concluded: That was a complete waste of time.
I skipped a lot after season 2, then the last season was a pretty poor and the ending a boring interpretation of making the story fit into the world as we know it. Interesting? Not very. Surprising? Perhaps but not that interesting.
It was a bit like Pierre Boulle's story 'planet of the apes', or rather, the film made from the book. The ending of the book is much better than that of the film even though it can be argued they are essentially the same in varies respects. Boulle's ending gives you a shock of leaving a planet, then seeing the same thing they escaped from happened on their own planet, suggesting this is something that will always happen due to human stupidity, whereas the film's ending gives more a regretful ending of 'Oh how stupid we humans are', a 'once' event, that perhaps could have been averted, nothing more...
"The sci-fi TV series Caprica, a prequel spinoff from Battlestar Galactica, was just canceled by the Syfy channel. In response to the cancellation and the recent theme of many similar good sci-fi shows
What do you mean 'good sci-fi shows'? Caprica's pilot was good although ended poorly, then it went downhill fast with mafia type rubbish, and just crap like some woman being married to someone 20 years younger or something like that and more rubbish, and this being some sort of lifestyle. Sci-fi? I vaguely recall seeing her or someone looking like her in another crap series, Rome. Perhaps it wasn't her, but she has the face for this sort of situation. Why you may ask? Because actors are chosen for certain parts, how they look, etc., so for a series with lots of soapy drama, people with soapy drama faces get chosen.
Take Stargate universe. Before the first episode came on TV (or PC) I read somewhere it would have more drama. I watched the first episode, saw them coming through the stargate on the ship far away, and it was going so slowly (pauses between one, and the next coming through) with such camera work, that I said to myself "they were right, it IS more drama. Also, the faces of the actors told me enough, esp. one of the women (Chloe?), damn, that's just straight "as the world turns" material.
Please cancel stargate universe or put in a daytime slot and say it's a soap opera. It's not sci-fi, it's interesting/good drama, it's just boring, pathetic soap opera rubbish.
So, to get back on topic: I disagre with the statement from the poster about quality sci-fi getting cancelled, at least in these cases:)
'If it's possible to make a decent living selling books online, then why does it feel so shameful to do this work?' concludes Savitz."
Because he's not really adding value, only a markup for selling in a different place. Whether that's of use to anyone (by making it available where it will be appreciated more) is debateable, and it may be of some worth, but I would say he is indeed more profiteering than adding value.
After watching King of Kong I'm extremely happy to hear Wiebe is back on top. Something about Billy Mitchell has never sat right with me.
Perhaps how the 'documentary' demonized him [slashdot.org]? Is he egotistical and full of himself? Probably. But it seems the documentary was either not entirely truthful or misrepresented time lines. I met Walter Day at the Mall of America in college and will say that in the few minutes I chatted with him he was the kindest and most honest person I have met. If Walter Day doesn't think Billy Mitchell is pure evil than neither do I. If Billy had tried to do anything truly sinister I think Day would have short circuited it and I'm not clear on whether or not the mailed in tape that beat Wiebe in the documentary was actually accepted.
You chatted a few minutes? Under which circumstances? You should know that matters... That's why the film does without doubt portray Billy Mitchell as he is, an asshole. From the previous slashdot story on this as mentioned by others there's a comment by someone who nails it on the head:
[ SydShamino wrote: ]
In the film, Billy Mitchell is not portrayed as an asshole. Billy Mitchell is an asshole. The film just portrays him in his natural habitat. It also shows how Twin Galaxies has its own "Good Ol' Boy Network" to identify who it trusts regarding scoring. This comes into play because most high scores are earned at homes, where the proof is a video camera pointed at the screen. Theoretically, someone could modify their boards so that the game acts differently, thereby cheating to win.
and
[ SydShamino wrote: ]
Anyone can play nice for their grandmother or for the cameras. However, there are some things that a person simply does not do if they are a polite, non-asshole person.
It's not like the film editors put words in his mouth, or manipulated long continuously-filmed scenes where he acts like a dick. It doesn't matter how many kittens he saves during the day, if he does certain things, he's an asshole.
As to Walter Day, what I noticed most of all is that he said Steve Wiebe 'redeemed' himself. Redeemed? He didn't do anything wrong! He just confirmed his ability that day. As to that dual circuit board that may or may not act differently than a regular one: Not his fault if it did act differently, so W.Day should have said Wiebe confirmed his ability, not that he redeemed himself. And if you think this is just an error, I think not, such things show how people think...
Further:
I'd be careful to accept something as truth when it could have made for gripping cinema. Mitchell is such a villain in the documentary that it's almost too good to be true when juxtaposing him to Wiebe.
I would caution your "doesn't sit right with me" assessment from a film and point out it's probably as reliable as anything meant to entertain someone can be. Yeah there's probably some truth to it. But Mitchell is no more purely evil than Wiebe is purely good. Selective footage can make it seem that way though. Before you jump all over Mitchell I would suggest you read the this [mtv.com] and meet him first. You've selected one single source that is a highly entertaining movie and it has a very high chance of being unfairly biased to represent an epic battle between good and evil. They may be foils of each other in several ways but I would imagine some of it is manufactured to put you on Wiebe's side. Mitchell's devoted a lot of his life to video games and has held other records. The documentary really doesn't seem to investigate the positives of Mitchell as much as it does Wiebe.
I read the mtv interview and very little of Mitchell's personality comes through (in fact there's fairly little of his own words in it!), except that he tries to talk his way out stuff. Also, the inaccuracies are more the normal
The key example being Snooki from Jersey Shore, who supposedly is being sent handbags by companies... but the bags being sent are of competitors' handbags as a way to avoid Snooki carrying their own handbag, and thus potentially damaging their brand."
Snooki who? Carrying in the sense of having in stock? I suppose if you know what's going on, you know what's meant with the above, but it's gobbledygook to me.
Perhaps it's good thing I normally don't look at idle posts;-)
He's the rich founder of MS, yet he's an awesome philanthropist and geek father keen to educate his kids properly.
He gives money away that he has no use for anyway. Result: He can steer the direction of research that 'his' money goes to, he gets to decide which charities get money. With being an criminal in how he did business in Microsoft, he's effectively stolen money from hundreds of millions of people, driven other business into the ground, and taken away the choice to give to charity to other people. Whether that would have been done is another matter, he's still taken away the choice.
Oh and as to giving away 'his' money, from what I've read he has not actually done so but in effect set up another business (the business of providing money to his selected charities) which is based on 'his' money but mainly giving other people's money, those people who have given their money to his foundation, away to his selected charities.
You have stuff to learn from this guy.
Let me me be quite blunt here because it's appropriate: Give me a fooking break!
There is nothing I can learn from a sociopath like Billy gates.
Carolina study posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband provider showed up in their neighborhood,
Unsurprising, and for language skills too as children just spend more time doing stuff on the computer, than properly doing their homework.
What surpises me about todays school education (in the Netherlands) is that programmable graphing calculators are allowed everywhere. If I were a teacher I'd only allow those in perhaps 1 test per year. All else to be done on paper, manually.
When I see my niece who's quite intelligent, she's nowhere near as good at calculating stuff on paper or in her head as she should be. For what I consider te be trivial stuff that I do in my head, she picks up a calculator. And those skills of doing it yourself are important, e.g. to make estimates so you don't blindly trust what the calculator spews out. And those results can be wrong, if you say enter a wrong number somewhere...
In my schooldays, I liked to calculate stuff in my head even though I was a programmable calculator nut (remember the great Casio FX-602P? The excellent but slow HP-41CX?). I did the following trick for example: Someone gave me a calculation that I would then try to give a close estimate to. E.g. 14.6 ^ 2.7. Using various methods I usually got within a few percent. Useless? No, those skills are useful to check calculations. If the outcome is completely different from a manual estimate, somewhere there's a problem...
I remember estimating skills being taught in primary school. At that point they didn't make sense to me, because for me they were too easy, e.g. calculate 125*43. I would just calculate the exact answer, quicker than making an estimate. So estimating needs to be explained too which wasn't done properly then. Only many years later did I see the use of it...
Make of all that what you will, I see no suprises in any event, in the results of the article.
I think you will find some problems with the idea of man made warming, although they do find a slight warming trend that is consistent with Historical Solar flux. (11 Year Sun Spot Cycles) and the gradual changes in the earths orbital and processional characteristics.
More CO2 output = more energy retained in the atmosphere, therefore man made global warming is a fact. The exact results of that differ in the models, but denying it is equivalent to saying you're a moron...
...can't he just throw the C&D in the garbage and forget about it?
If you read TFA, that's exactly what he is asking himself.
Yes he can. A patent is public, therefore even if he was living in a country where the patent applies (in most of the EU software patents are not allowed), he is allowed to publish an implementation which is in effect nothing more than elucidating the patent.
So, this is a bullshit claim. I would scan the C&D, put it on my website and make fun of these morons.
Btw., if the author doesn't feel like keeping it on his blog/website, I'd be happy to put a copy up on mine. My provider is xs4all who doesn't cave in to any outside pressure (unless a NL court tells them to do something), and the same goes for me...
I want to see the proper letter, with letterhead, contact details etc. At the moment this looks like it can be fake.
If it's not fake then these people are insane and by not wanting to allow people to choose another type of licence, they are taking away rights that they do want for themselves (to choose their own licence).
Assuming for the moment the letter is real:
They say they are advocates of consumer rights, but the truth is these groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our music.
It's not about music. And in case of music, if it's 15 years old or more, I have no problem with copying without paying for it. It should have paid the author, if not, tough luck, that's life.
The long copyright duration (essentially unlimited) also means companies and individuals who don't allow free copying after say 15 years, are hogging our past. Want to see a film again for nostalgia, or some music? (That you probably paid for already, via cable networks, records) Then you have to pay for it again. It's a great business model, getting paid for nostalgia etc. [ Note: Cleaning up very old records etc. and making those available should be rewarded, but for most music there's very little cost, lots of profit, and still lots of whining. ]
In other words, the observed vote pattern for Rawl could be expected to occur only about 10% of the time by chance.
In other words, the observed vote pattern is something you will expect to see a lot when checking various machines and various elections over time.
An unusual, non-random pattern in the precinct-level results suggests tampering, or at least machine malfunction, perhaps at the highest level.
A 10% chance of a pattern in no way suggests any tampering. Perhaps together with other evidence it is a tiny indicator. It's hard to take any article seriously that doesn't examine the facts properly. Now if the chance was one in a million it might suggest tampering, but one in 10? I'll put it bluntly: Give me a fooking break
Slashdot Mirror
Who gives a damn about peer review!
There is no need for cellphones in school. Parents want to contact a kid: Call the school. kids want internet: use internet via wires.
Therefore, banning wireless when there is no (or not enough) data to be certain of anything, is a good precaution.
I've not registered with facebook so I can't see much of it. Perhaps good.
In any event, I wish slashdot would go back to the old days of more tech stuff, with more about programming etc. The latest version of afterstep, new C compilers, and of course other stuff such as physics. But too much business crap just and stuff about drivel level science (e.g. global warming deniers, which anyone can show as being nutters with nearly zero time spent) takes much of the fun away.
Perhaps I'm misremembering, perhaps I'm getting different interests and don't want to select rubbish any more.
Being philosophical: I think that's actually what old people have: They are tired of hearing the same old crap again and again from people. They see through the BS and have had enough...
And all this business stuff is such BS, that will always remain, just like politicians are always bad, in just about all countries. These are given.
If you really want to prepare people to use math in the real world, you need to include teaching them how to use today's tools. Teaching students how to do things by hand is great, but utterly useless by itself after they complete the final.
You are giving the same bogus "it saves time" argument as above, but then you give an even worse one. No, mathematics shouldn't teaching pure thinking, it should prepare you for the real world.
Maths prepares you for the real world by giving you basic skills you can use everywhere. But you will have to apply them yourself. Making mathematics classes a trade school class as you are suggesting is a travesty. This is similar to crap courses at university where you learn to use some fashionable programming language...
If you're any good at all, you get your graphing calculator out with manual, and learn how to do it within a short time. Ditto for learning a a new programming language...
All you are talking about is saving time. But exams are set up such that when they are to be made without a graphing calculator, they can be made without running out of time (unless you are really bad, in which case running out of time is part of the reason you get a low grade, caused by being bad, so deserved). So this is just bogus.
He made similar economic predictions in the BBC Horizon episode "The dark secret of Hendrik Schoen" (2004).
That was the day I lost all respect for Kaku. His economic predictions are moronic (there will always be change, abrupt changes in what creates wealth), and in that Horizon documentary his comments seemed ludicrously off track as well.
Bullshit! The only reasonable course of action, when faced with what we (the reasonable people, not the nutjob climate skeptics) think may happen, is to take action! Taking no or not enough action (not enough according to what we think will happen etc.) is just insane as it means gambling with the planet. We've only got 1 planet so you cannot gamble with that! Anyones who disagrees with this is just 1 thing: Insane.
They don't need to make SGU S3. Just go watch "As the world turns", it will give you the same excitement, the same deep drama that even Shakespeare can't match, and similar fantastic quality camera work! The science fiction content is slightly less, but so little it's just not worth talking about. Really!
Ca. 2000 I did a speed test with a few machines: Pentium pro 200, AMD K6 233, and my old BBC micro, running a program to find all the possible permutations of the upper layer of a rubik's cube with a given number of quarter-turns. I did this already in 1984/1985 but couldn't get very far, I think 11-12 speedwise was the maximum. In the end I got the result that all permutations can be reached in 19 quarter turns. This took about 60 days of CPU power, which I split over a few machines. Then I found a bug in the program :-( This made all results worthless so I programmed in code to check if that the cutoffs I made in the program, were correct. This resulted in a speedup that eventually made the program run in ca. 2 days on the ppro, instead of 60. With all the low level optimizations I'd done the only speedup was a few percent! This showed me once again that algorithmic improvements are what you need to spend most of your time on...
Allright, the interesting bit was how much faster a pentium pro 200 was (which was slightly slower than the K6-233): About 500 times faster than the 2 Mhz 6502 (this is without any cutoffs, which I did with handmade + large computer tables). This was not that impressive but of course, all the program did was move bytes around in a fairly small set of datalocations (for which I used zpage on the 6502). I did just program the ppro/k6 using gcc, so no assembly as I never really got comfy with x86 assembly language and using C seems more appropriate anyway as that's what you program these CPUs in in most cases (I'm not sure if I checked the output of gcc -S to see what quality asm gcc produced).
An AMD 3000 (ca. 2.2 GHz) that I bought several years ago is about 10 times faster than the ppro200, so ca. 5000 times faster than the 6502 at 2MHz.
Of course you have to keep in mind the small memory of the 6502, it will get slower once you allow it to acces more memory, and for the large cutoff tables (the computed ones were many megabytes) it would need a super-6502 that has such large memory addressing ability which would be slower. So the factor for the algorithmically optimized search program on a ppro vs. a super-6502 would be higher than 500.
I'll tell you what's going on: Idiot writers and producers have been making soap opera pseudo-sci-fi and it's good the trash that is SGU and Caprica will be gone soon.
I heard a complaint about the writing in Fringe. Well, Fringe is a million times more interesting and enjoyable than either of them. It looks fine to me. If I want real drama, I will perhaps go read Shakespeare, I'm certainly not interested in the rubbish pseudo drama (a.k.a. soap opera level drama) that is presented in series such as SGU and Caprica.
This announcement about SGU made my day. I'd been searching for "SGU cancelled" a few times this year...
Actually, I'm not. The worst thing that is happening and has been happening for at least the last 20 years (probably much longer, but I haven't checked) is the non critical attitude of the media, in particular incompetent journalists who publish manipulative stories using the manipulative press releases from antisocial nutters and corporations (with their sociopath-type leaders and boards also consisting of such people). Actually, many of these press releases are just printed nearly verbatim which is at least as bad.
Any jourmalist and newspaper who publish a near verbatim press release from a corporation is helping that corporation doing their propaganda (ditto for politicians of course); all press releases should be analysed before being published and that analysis should accompany the press release. Analysed in an as neutral manner as possible, but it should *always* be critical.
Give me a fooking break!
George W. Bush is one of the biggest assholes I have ever seen and anything bad anyone says about is is deserved. Don't give me the crap "unbridled hatred has no place in civilized society". If society were better oranised (and/or voters or better yet the media, less stupid) such that sociopaths like him don't get elected, then you don't have such 'problems'.
The first time I saw him on TV I knew this guy was the worst a-hole I'd ever seen as he said, when the results of the elections were being recounted etc., that Gore should give up as he wanted to continue preparing for hist term. As the vote count was close, Gore could have used the same argument! These sort of reversible arguments immediately show someone is a sociopath. And that's been proven time and again by his reactions. You want to talk about civilized society? Then talk about why such a guy is not immediately taken away unfit to 'rule' anyone. Why such a guy is allowed to stand for office anywhere in any position.
To be honest that's part of why people use it, but there are more issues involved:
1. Ridiculous copyright length. This means you have to pay again and again for stuff that's become part of culture, i.e. as I mentioned in a previous posting quite a while back, in my view the media companies get to have a stranglehold on your memories, on nostalgia. Stuff may not be great but may be nostalgic. Why should I have to pay (again!) to watch/use it? Why should people get to be rewarded for something that may not be good, but only be enjoyable for a reason not having anything to do with its 'real' value?
2. Attitude of the RIAA and similar groups in just about all countries.
3. Having to pay for media/printers/copying machines/video camera's because you might copy something with a copyright with/onto it. This happens in many countries, so why should I feel I'm doing something unethical if I'm paying for the 'just in case' scenario whether I do or not?
I can go on but this is enough to show your response is rather simplistic.
And he is right! There is a special relationship between the USA and the UK. It's the same relationship as that between master and dog...
I agree with the one you quoted: The new battlestar Galactica series was interesting in some aspects, but contains huge amounts of melodrama, useless drama, and even soap opera level drama that was completely worthless. Many an episode I used fastforward/skip on xine for the entire episode, then concluded: That was a complete waste of time.
I skipped a lot after season 2, then the last season was a pretty poor and the ending a boring interpretation of making the story fit into the world as we know it. Interesting? Not very. Surprising? Perhaps but not that interesting. It was a bit like Pierre Boulle's story 'planet of the apes', or rather, the film made from the book. The ending of the book is much better than that of the film even though it can be argued they are essentially the same in varies respects. Boulle's ending gives you a shock of leaving a planet, then seeing the same thing they escaped from happened on their own planet, suggesting this is something that will always happen due to human stupidity, whereas the film's ending gives more a regretful ending of 'Oh how stupid we humans are', a 'once' event, that perhaps could have been averted, nothing more...
What do you mean 'good sci-fi shows'? Caprica's pilot was good although ended poorly, then it went downhill fast with mafia type rubbish, and just crap like some woman being married to someone 20 years younger or something like that and more rubbish, and this being some sort of lifestyle. Sci-fi? I vaguely recall seeing her or someone looking like her in another crap series, Rome. Perhaps it wasn't her, but she has the face for this sort of situation. Why you may ask? Because actors are chosen for certain parts, how they look, etc., so for a series with lots of soapy drama, people with soapy drama faces get chosen.
:)
Take Stargate universe. Before the first episode came on TV (or PC) I read somewhere it would have more drama. I watched the first episode, saw them coming through the stargate on the ship far away, and it was going so slowly (pauses between one, and the next coming through) with such camera work, that I said to myself "they were right, it IS more drama. Also, the faces of the actors told me enough, esp. one of the women (Chloe?), damn, that's just straight "as the world turns" material.
Please cancel stargate universe or put in a daytime slot and say it's a soap opera. It's not sci-fi, it's interesting/good drama, it's just boring, pathetic soap opera rubbish.
So, to get back on topic: I disagre with the statement from the poster about quality sci-fi getting cancelled, at least in these cases
Because he's not really adding value, only a markup for selling in a different place. Whether that's of use to anyone (by making it available where it will be appreciated more) is debateable, and it may be of some worth, but I would say he is indeed more profiteering than adding value.
You chatted a few minutes? Under which circumstances? You should know that matters... That's why the film does without doubt portray Billy Mitchell as he is, an asshole. From the previous slashdot story on this as mentioned by others there's a comment by someone who nails it on the head:
and
As to Walter Day, what I noticed most of all is that he said Steve Wiebe 'redeemed' himself. Redeemed? He didn't do anything wrong! He just confirmed his ability that day. As to that dual circuit board that may or may not act differently than a regular one: Not his fault if it did act differently, so W.Day should have said Wiebe confirmed his ability, not that he redeemed himself. And if you think this is just an error, I think not, such things show how people think... Further:
I read the mtv interview and very little of Mitchell's personality comes through (in fact there's fairly little of his own words in it!), except that he tries to talk his way out stuff. Also, the inaccuracies are more the normal
Snooki who? Carrying in the sense of having in stock? I suppose if you know what's going on, you know what's meant with the above, but it's gobbledygook to me.
;-)
Perhaps it's good thing I normally don't look at idle posts
He gives money away that he has no use for anyway. Result: He can steer the direction of research that 'his' money goes to, he gets to decide which charities get money. With being an criminal in how he did business in Microsoft, he's effectively stolen money from hundreds of millions of people, driven other business into the ground, and taken away the choice to give to charity to other people. Whether that would have been done is another matter, he's still taken away the choice. Oh and as to giving away 'his' money, from what I've read he has not actually done so but in effect set up another business (the business of providing money to his selected charities) which is based on 'his' money but mainly giving other people's money, those people who have given their money to his foundation, away to his selected charities.
Let me me be quite blunt here because it's appropriate: Give me a fooking break! There is nothing I can learn from a sociopath like Billy gates.
They should have introduced 'look' seconds before they introduced 'leap' seconds. Would have saved a lot of trouble.
Unsurprising, and for language skills too as children just spend more time doing stuff on the computer, than properly doing their homework.
What surpises me about todays school education (in the Netherlands) is that programmable graphing calculators are allowed everywhere. If I were a teacher I'd only allow those in perhaps 1 test per year. All else to be done on paper, manually.
When I see my niece who's quite intelligent, she's nowhere near as good at calculating stuff on paper or in her head as she should be. For what I consider te be trivial stuff that I do in my head, she picks up a calculator. And those skills of doing it yourself are important, e.g. to make estimates so you don't blindly trust what the calculator spews out. And those results can be wrong, if you say enter a wrong number somewhere...
In my schooldays, I liked to calculate stuff in my head even though I was a programmable calculator nut (remember the great Casio FX-602P? The excellent but slow HP-41CX?). I did the following trick for example: Someone gave me a calculation that I would then try to give a close estimate to. E.g. 14.6 ^ 2.7. Using various methods I usually got within a few percent. Useless? No, those skills are useful to check calculations. If the outcome is completely different from a manual estimate, somewhere there's a problem...
I remember estimating skills being taught in primary school. At that point they didn't make sense to me, because for me they were too easy, e.g. calculate 125*43. I would just calculate the exact answer, quicker than making an estimate. So estimating needs to be explained too which wasn't done properly then. Only many years later did I see the use of it...
Make of all that what you will, I see no suprises in any event, in the results of the article.
More CO2 output = more energy retained in the atmosphere, therefore man made global warming is a fact. The exact results of that differ in the models, but denying it is equivalent to saying you're a moron...
Yes he can. A patent is public, therefore even if he was living in a country where the patent applies (in most of the EU software patents are not allowed), he is allowed to publish an implementation which is in effect nothing more than elucidating the patent.
So, this is a bullshit claim. I would scan the C&D, put it on my website and make fun of these morons.
Btw., if the author doesn't feel like keeping it on his blog/website, I'd be happy to put a copy up on mine. My provider is xs4all who doesn't cave in to any outside pressure (unless a NL court tells them to do something), and the same goes for me...
I want to see the proper letter, with letterhead, contact details etc. At the moment this looks like it can be fake.
If it's not fake then these people are insane and by not wanting to allow people to choose another type of licence, they are taking away rights that they do want for themselves (to choose their own licence).
Assuming for the moment the letter is real:
It's not about music. And in case of music, if it's 15 years old or more, I have no problem with copying without paying for it. It should have paid the author, if not, tough luck, that's life.
The long copyright duration (essentially unlimited) also means companies and individuals who don't allow free copying after say 15 years, are hogging our past. Want to see a film again for nostalgia, or some music? (That you probably paid for already, via cable networks, records) Then you have to pay for it again. It's a great business model, getting paid for nostalgia etc. [ Note: Cleaning up very old records etc. and making those available should be rewarded, but for most music there's very little cost, lots of profit, and still lots of whining. ]
In other words, the observed vote pattern is something you will expect to see a lot when checking various machines and various elections over time.
A 10% chance of a pattern in no way suggests any tampering. Perhaps together with other evidence it is a tiny indicator. It's hard to take any article seriously that doesn't examine the facts properly. Now if the chance was one in a million it might suggest tampering, but one in 10? I'll put it bluntly: Give me a fooking break