Comment "Blood Moon" (Score 0) 146
Please drop this idiotic phrase.
Besides, total lunar eclipses aren't red at all, at least, none I've ever seen. They're a neat copper colour.
...laura
Please drop this idiotic phrase.
Besides, total lunar eclipses aren't red at all, at least, none I've ever seen. They're a neat copper colour.
...laura
...and the world is all the better for it!
...laura
Chrome just uses the operating system for a lot of the certificate validation of HTTPS, so it can be vulnerable to security holes that apply to the operating system. Chrome wasn't vulnerable to "goto fail", but presumably it has been vulnerable to others in Windows and Mac OS.
(Technically, as Git is SVN compatible, so you could get this effect simply by using Git 'locally'.)
git2svn has a problem that we ran into recently: because git does not support hierarchical branching, if you do not keep all your branches in a single Subversion directory, it will take an excessively long time for a local git repository to synchronize with a Subversion repository.
For example, let's say that you have the typical
Because git doesn't support hierarchical branch names, from git's naive perspective, what Myria has done is make a copy of the entire repository into a new directory named "new-crypto" inside of her "myria" branch. Git does not interpret her commit as a creation of a branch - it sees "myria" as the branch, and "new-crypto" as merely a directory within the branch. Subversion gives no special meaning to the directory named "branches", so git2svn is simply using a hack of assuming that the "branches" directory contains objects that it can convert into git's branch objects. Git thus sees her commit as one giant commit of 100,000 files, and consequently takes forever processing it.
The above was a recently-encountered real-life situation at the office from about two weeks ago.
80% of firms CANNOT beat the S&P in the same timeframe.
Long-term, it's unsustainable for any company to beat the stock market as a whole. I wish I could find the Warren Buffet quote on this matter.
Yup. Declare normal human variation pathological, make money by "treating" it, laugh all the way to the bank.
I would also add that many of the "autistic" children I see aren't autistic at all, not by any standard I understand. They are children desperate for attention, and have found a way to get that attention.
Some may even be jumping on the autism bandwagon to be trendy. I've seen this with allergies, where kids want inhalers and shit so they fit in with their over-medicated peers.
...laura
For the most part, TNG was competent. At its best it was brilliant. I'm with people on episodes like The Inner Light and The Measure of a Man. Add in, for me, Cause and Effect, The Emissary, a few others. The human condition, in space. Good stuff.
Unlike many, I actually liked The Dauphin.
I thought Darmok was an interesting idea. How do you make aliens who are, well, alien, but not so alien that you can't interact with them? This was an issue with the Borg, badass aliens who could kick the shit out of Klingons and not work up a sweat, but who were so alien that no meaningful interaction was possible.
Bad episodes? Yeah, there were a few. I prefer to remember the good ones.
...laura
One advantage of having closure is that it greatly reduces the challenges the victim faces going forward.
Some of those reductions in challenges are warranted. Some of those reductions are not.
We, as a society, endorse the concept of innocent victimization: if someone is made to suffer at the hands of another, the sufferer ought not have any further social obligation. For the most part, that's fair.
However, life can never be made completely fair, and I argue it should not be. If such were the case, we would not require any higher level of mental functioning than simple seeking and avoidance behaviors. There would be no point to sophisticated problem-solving, as there would be no complex problems that needed solving. Natural selection seems to favor some species developing higher skills of reasoning, which could indicate that this is an expected consequence of our form of life in our environment. Genetics also provides little incentive to reduce gradual increases in complexity that aren't strictly necessary; indeed, one of the resultant characteristics of this is diversity of life, which as a whole seems to promote the continuance of life in general in an ever-changing environment.
I cannot pretend to empathize with most of the suffering in the world, particularly the more severe forms, but I can say that personally, most of the suffering I have experienced has been challenges providing opportunities for personal growth. I did not always see things this way. I do not want this to read as an endorsement of mild forms of suffering, but merely as a reason to not try to eliminate completely nor balance absolutely the unfairness inherent in the human condition.
There is something to be said for the psychological benefit of having some degree of closure. I do not believe lawmakers should try to enforce the maximum possible closure. I favor the idea of rehabilitation of criminals; in the cases where re-entry to society would be irreducably dangerous, such as strong cases of sociopathy or impaired functioning resulting from traumatic brain injury or genetic predisposition, I would tend to favor restrictions of mobility and physical functioning only as necessary to prevent most of the possible social damage. These restrictions would, to the extent possible, scale inversely with the level to which a criminal seeks to maximize their benefit to society.
Note that, by rehabilitation, I do not wish to imply sudden and unsupervised social re-entry. Rehabilitation is a tricky game that human culture has only begun to play with a modest level of success.
In other words, closure oughtn't be absolute, rehabilitation should be sought when possible, and where it is not possible, an individual's pursuit to integrate with society should influence the degree of their confinement.
Of course, this could all be a crock of shit. I haven't done any deep research into the statistics of recidivism to support my point of view.
Do you need to know how fast you're going? Yes.
Do you need to know how your car is performing? Yes.
Do you need to know where you are and where you're going? Yes.
We already have head-up displays that show car parameters, as well as navigation systems that help you get where you're going. This could be incorporated in to an HUD ("turn here ->").
Anything more would be information overload. I do not need ads to tell me how cool the store I'm driving by is (i.e. how much they paid for the ad), nor do I need neat pictures other people have taken in the vicinity.
Look at how they do it in airplanes: the pilots have the essential information in front of them, but can access other information as needed.
...laura
I've always thought ARM was a cool design. Simple, minimalist, sort of a latter-day PDP-11, one of those canonical architectures that just works. Simple chip, not many transistors, low power, good chip for mobile devices. It seems so obvious in retrospect. Especially since that's not what the designers had in mind. They were designing a simple chip because they only had a couple of people and that was all they could afford.
In one of the later scenes in Micro Men there is a whiteboard in the background with the original ARM requirements, right down to the barrel shifter.
...laura
I sometimes wonder if Google Glass is going to be another CueCat. Somebody thought it was a really neat idea and pushed it hard, but nobody else thought it was a neat idea and it died.
People view Google Glass as creepy and weird. That's hard sell, even for Google.
...laura
Is current GA activity intrinsically low, or is it low compared to the Good Old Days of the 1950s and 1960s general aviation boom?
Our GA airports are somewhat less than inviting to visitors. There was an editorial/blog in Flying magazine on this subject recently.
Airplanes really are expensive to buy and to operate.
Does anybody learn to fly for fun or for private transportation anymore? Everybody nowadays gets their PPL because it's the prerequisite for everything else. After the novelty wore off I too came to the realization that a PPL was sterile, a dead end, and am now working on my commercial license.
...laura
Right, and this is why the viewer was supposed to make the assumption that the AI had emotions programmed in. No stupidity here.
Remember the discussion in 2001. HAL was programmed to sound emotional, since it made it easier to talk to him. Whether he actually felt emotions was much harder to say.
...laura
the horsepower per hour of engine life? That thing looks like it'll last 20 hours before it needs rebuilding.
A point the story ignores. Any idiot can get buttloads of power out of an engine if it doesn't have to do so for very long. Two-stroke engines are particularly good for this if fuel consumption and exhaust emissions are minor considerations.
...laura
My biggest scope is an 18" dob, made by the now-defunct Starsplitter. It looks a lot like an Obsession 18", and uses Obsession accessories.
While large, with the wheelbarrow handles it's easy to move around and set up. When I bought it I refurbished it, including redoing the teflon bearings in the mount. A local industrial plastics shop sold me an offcut of real virgin GE sheet teflon. The result is pure dobsonian: rock steady, stays where it's pointed. And perfectly balanced: it moves with one finger.
Jupiter's moons are different colours and are non-stellar. Titan is an interesting colour. M13 has a friend, NGC 6207.
...laura
What good is a ticket to the good life, if you can't find the entrance?
