"Dream of a Thousand Cats" was the first Sandman issue I bought, thanks to an on-line review; it made me a life-long Gaiman and Sandman fan (though Neil has re-earned that any number of times).
The following issue, "Mid-Summer Night's Dream", wasn't too bad either...
The novel that introduced "bobbles" is "The Peace War"; the setting is pre-Singularity (the Singularity being Vinge's point in time when Everything Changes). "Marooned in Real Time" is a sequal, set after the Singularity (involving those people who were "bobbled" at the time of the Singularity). Both novels (originally serialized in Analog) were later published in a single book, along with a related story, but I don't recall that title; surely an Amazon search can find it.
> Wide distribution of the paper materials make ex-post facto modifications (i.e. rewriting history) much more difficult and almost impossible to hide.
Digital signature systems (i.e. MD5) make rewriting quite difficult. Add in a protocol to go through a trusted server which adds a timestamp and such, and you can get as secure as you want/need.
>...there can only be 2 Sith lords at one time (the master and the apprentice)...
This has been explained, I believe through official Lucas sources, as a strong rule of thumb, not as a law of the universe (like those of thermodynamics). A lone master would naturally seek out an assistant (and, I presume, someone with whom to gloat); but two apprentices (or an apprentice with his own sub-apprentice) would overpower the master and reduce the count to two (just as Vader offered to Luke in ESB). And of course two independent masters could not co-exist.
Peter David has a story, soon to appear in a comic from Dark Horse, about "Skippy the Jedi Droid". Skippy is not R2D2, but it did appear on-screen in one of the movies; further information would be a spoiler.
As a Unix admin for over a decade, this is the one thing that has most boggled my mind about WNT since I've had it inflicted on me in the last year: almost no attention is paid to file system security. When installed from scratch, the default file system (FAT) doesn't even allow for the possibility of security (ACLs), you have to convert to NTFS, and at that point, all the ACLs are blank and wide open. This makes negative sense to me.
> Deep Blue's slaying Kasparov was not a breakthrough but simply inevitable...
Kasparov was not at his best in his match against Deep Blue; he resigned one game when there was a line of play that would have given him a draw, and in another game he made a gross error in the opening, effectively giving away that game.
Have I missed something, or is negative mass and negative energy still in the "pure speculation" state -- the equations allow for it, and from a symmetry point of view it seems plausible, but last I heard we have no evidence for its existance, no theoretical way to produce any, etc.?
(Note: Negative mass is not anti-matter. Anti-matter has positive mass, and opposite charge/spin/other properties of "normal" matter. Matter plus anti-matter equals energy (which manifests as other postive-mass particles). Matter plus negative matter should equal nothing, zero, zip.)
> In high school I once wrote that "it is possible that George Washington existed, the revolutionary war could have really been faught, but Yoda IS real, and Star Wars DID happen."
"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot." - Morpheus, as written by Neil Gaiman, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", _Sandman_ issue 19.
> If there are x items before and now there are x+1, how can you claim something was stolen?
What has been stolen is the *right* to create that +1. The creators/producers of the content have that right, and have granted it or licensed it to the distributors; you do not have that right.
If the article were about Linux, and made that kind of mistake, it would be worth that kind of reaction. But the article was about O'Reilly, so that error doesn't really deserve much more than a previous poster's "*sigh*"...
I have no idea what the moderator's interface is like, but I would assume that being granted moderator status does not require you to exercise that power. It has been said that some twenty percent of replies are being moderated; surely the moderators as a whole are reading more than that fraction of the comments, they're just not rating more that that fraction.
Slashdot Mirror
"Dream of a Thousand Cats" was the first Sandman issue I bought, thanks to an on-line review; it made me a life-long Gaiman and Sandman fan (though Neil has re-earned that any number of times).
The following issue, "Mid-Summer Night's Dream", wasn't too bad either...
The novel that introduced "bobbles" is "The Peace War"; the setting is pre-Singularity (the Singularity being Vinge's point in time when Everything Changes). "Marooned in Real Time" is a sequal, set after the Singularity (involving those people who were "bobbled" at the time of the Singularity). Both novels (originally serialized in Analog) were later published in a single book, along with a related story, but I don't recall that title; surely an Amazon search can find it.
People who don't care for the Slashdot system have less of a tendency to read Slashdot or to become moderators or to use their moderation points...
> Wide distribution of the paper materials make ex-post facto modifications (i.e. rewriting history) much more difficult and almost impossible to hide.
Digital signature systems (i.e. MD5) make rewriting quite difficult. Add in a protocol to go through a trusted server which adds a timestamp and such, and you can get as secure as you want/need.
> ...there can only be 2 Sith lords at one time (the master and the apprentice)...
This has been explained, I believe through official Lucas sources, as a strong rule of thumb, not as a law of the universe (like those of thermodynamics). A lone master would naturally seek out an assistant (and, I presume, someone with whom to gloat); but two apprentices (or an apprentice with his own sub-apprentice) would overpower the master and reduce the count to two (just as Vader offered to Luke in ESB). And of course two independent masters could not co-exist.
Peter David has a story, soon to appear in a comic from Dark Horse, about "Skippy the Jedi Droid". Skippy is not R2D2, but it did appear on-screen in one of the movies; further information would be a spoiler.
As a Unix admin for over a decade, this is the one thing that has most boggled my mind about WNT since I've had it inflicted on me in the last year: almost no attention is paid to file system security. When installed from scratch, the default file system (FAT) doesn't even allow for the possibility of security (ACLs), you have to convert to NTFS, and at that point, all the ACLs are blank and wide open. This makes negative sense to me.
> Deep Blue's slaying Kasparov was not a breakthrough but simply inevitable...
Kasparov was not at his best in his match against Deep Blue; he resigned one game when there was a line of play that would have given him a draw, and in another game he made a gross error in the opening, effectively giving away that game.
Inevitable, maybe; but avoidable at that time.
Have I missed something, or is negative mass and negative energy still in the "pure speculation" state -- the equations allow for it, and from a symmetry point of view it seems plausible, but last I heard we have no evidence for its existance, no theoretical way to produce any, etc.?
(Note: Negative mass is not anti-matter. Anti-matter has positive mass, and opposite charge/spin/other properties of "normal" matter. Matter plus anti-matter equals energy (which manifests as other postive-mass particles). Matter plus negative matter should equal nothing, zero, zip.)
Breaking Divx isn't worth the effort; the format will die of starvation soon enough, it doesn't need to be helped along.
"Never trust the storyteller; trust only the story." -- Neil Gaiman, _Sandman_ issue 38.
> In high school I once wrote that "it is possible that George Washington existed, the revolutionary war could have really been faught, but Yoda IS real, and Star Wars DID happen."
"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot." - Morpheus, as written by Neil Gaiman, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", _Sandman_ issue 19.
> If you wouldn't use it, unless it's free, it's ok...
No it isn't ok. It's not your right to decide whether it should be available for free, it's the creator's.
> If there are x items before and now there are x+1, how can you claim something was stolen?
What has been stolen is the *right* to create that +1. The creators/producers of the content have that right, and have granted it or licensed it to the distributors; you do not have that right.
If the article were about Linux, and made that kind of mistake, it would be worth that kind of reaction. But the article was about O'Reilly, so that error doesn't really deserve much more than a previous poster's "*sigh*"...
I have no idea what the moderator's interface is like, but I would assume that being granted moderator status does not require you to exercise that power. It has been said that some twenty percent of replies are being moderated; surely the moderators as a whole are reading more than that fraction of the comments, they're just not rating more that that fraction.
When there's a tie for second (mice and monitors), the next available position is fourth, damnit...
MacOS sleeping doesn't depend on the Finder, so quitting all apps doesn't disable it. Look at the Energy Saver control panel.