Comment Re:Asus shipping Linux again? I know what that mea (Score 2) 142
Microsoft must have been late with its kickback check this quarter.
Where is that funny & insightful mod button when you need it?
Microsoft must have been late with its kickback check this quarter.
Where is that funny & insightful mod button when you need it?
Great that they're switching to Ubuntu. I've got Ubuntu running on a little Asus EeeBox in the kitchen for the past two years. It came with some Asus-branded version of Linux that was terrible; but I dumped that right away for Ubuntu. It works great; never had any problems. It's a nice, small box, humming away under the cabinet, connected to a monitor mounted on the wall. My wife and kids use it primarily for email and web stuff, and play music on it. None of them have ever complained about Ubuntu or asked how to use it. I'm not sure my wife even knows it's not MacOS or Windows...
I'd add Kazuo Ishiguro to the list for "Never Let Me Go", which was very well accepted by the literary establishment, and was somewhat science fiction.
Most lists I've seen of the best books of the last 150 years or so include some science fiction such as Orwell's '1984', Huxley's 'Brave New World', Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five', and Burgess' 'A Clockwork Orange'.
I think literary establishment acceptance depends on several factors:
-- Writing other 'literary' books that aren't science-fiction
-- Using SF to set or enhance the situation, rather than having it be the focus of the book
-- Serious topics
-- Plain good writing
-- A setting that is closer to present-day. Seems like the farther out in the future the book is set, the less 'literary' it will be considered.
Sure, a mindlessly entertaining SF book is not going to be accepted by the literary establishment, but then again, neither is a mindlessly entertaining present-day book. The bar is probably higher for SF though; it's going to take a more highbrow SF book to break into 'literary' circles than a present-day book.
I do find it interesting to note that about 10-20% of the books that my (non-geek) wife's bookclub reads could be considered SF.
Yeah, thanks for the summary with no explanatory information whatsoever for anyone not familiar with this case already. The Ars article didn't really explain much about it either. Not sure how I missed such a huge news story, maybe I was reading about minor stuff like tsunamis...
But hey, it's
"the movie version of "Starship Troopers" was much better than the book. There, I said it."
Of course it was; it had Denise Richards.
I fail to see what is funny about that. If I had mod points, I'd mod it 'insightful'. I thought the movie was barely OK, but I might have to watch it a few more times now that I remember she's in it...
that's what I get for blowing though the preview page -- I meant much higher levels of pain
Clearly it's the penguins that are helping!
In another study, patients who played a game that featured windows and paper-clips reported much levels of pain...
Of course, pretty soon you've got millions of small pieces of web page debris orbiting your browser. Then your real, working web pages run a real risk of getting hit and destroyed by a piece of debris at over 20,000 mph, thus contributing even more to the debris belt. And when the Chinese start testing their anti-web-page rockets and making even more debris? Well, it's pretty much game over for the Intertubes at that point...
Find/steal gasoline along the way, and, well, I ate the dog...
PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone's trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath
a sawed off shotgun, lots of ammo, and a Ford Falcon XB Interceptor
I haven't been to Weird Stuff, but I hit Halted / HSC every few months. From the pictures, it seems like Weird Stuff has more old junk. HSC has plenty of old stuff, but most of it is still usable, and someone probably will eventually buy it. Not sure why anyone wants a copy of early 90s era MS Word though; good luck getting rid of some of that stuff.
Regarding attorney's fees, from the decision:
In addition to the defendant's delayed disclosures, Beckerman, defendant's counsel, adopted an unduly contentious approach throughout this litigation (albeit the same can be said of plaintiff's counsel). For that reason alone, his request for attorney's fees and costs is not only denied but is also inappropriate.
Sounds like the judge was pretty annoyed, and is taking his ball and going home.
Exactly. If we go to the moon now, it will be with very expensive, one-off vehicles, with no reusability, and we'll have no lasting presence there. It will just be going to the moon to go to the moon. Maybe there will be some learning that we can then apply to very expensive, one-off vehicles to go to other destinations, like Mars. Not very compelling, except for the wow factor.
What NASA really needs to do is concentrate on unmanned science, and infrastructure. What we should be doing is perfecting designs to deliver standard payloads to the moon, to Mars, to the outer system, etc, so we can achieve some real economies of scale on these unmanned missions. Seems like we're reinventing the wheel everytime we send a mission out there. If we could get the delivery vehicles standardized, we could be sending up missions every month.
To prepare for future manned missions, we should be developing the unmanned infrastructure to support them: sending up missions to the moon to pre-place supplies, buildings, vehicles, etc. And in the process, developing the capability to manufacture some of this stuff on site. Assuming the raw materials are there, could we develop technology that will manufacture photovoltaic cells on the moon, or metals? Or mine for water? Or mine for propellants for an eventual trip to Mars? Eventually, we'd get to the point where we had enough infrastructure up there and running, that all we'd have to do is send up a few people to crew the base that's already in place.
That's the kind of long-term thinking we need at NASA. Manned missions right now don't make a lot of sense, scientifically or economically. But we should be using the unmanned missions to prepare for a return to manned missions at some future date.
It's customary to explicitly define the acronym before its first use in the main body.
Come on, here on Slashdot, everyone knows that ETF stands for "Exchange Traded Fund". Google is giving out Nexus Ones to all investors in some fund, and charging them for it. Or is it "Electron-transferring flavoproteins"? Maybe "Emergency Task Force"?
No, no. They were uploaded to AT&T's 3G network (sort of an online backup, y'know), and it took all year to download them again via an iPhone!
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss
