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I read about that in Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos. Amazing stuff.

consoles just don't cut the muster

is it "muster" or "mustard"?

• mustard
• tie?
• muster
• mustard

nobody seems to know for sure

No, Jon Katz was sincerely wrong. He watched Buffy reruns and thought he understood modern teens, read Kevin Mitnick interviews in 2600 and thought he understood hacker culture, read Slashdot comments and thought they were a representative sample of American geeks. I think he was genuinely surprised at how detested some of his rambling became around here.

The problem with Katz was he projected his need for social revolution on to mundane situation. He was connecting dots that just weren't there. Anyone know what happened to him?

I Googled a bit, and discovered some interesting things ... Before he was pilloried on Slashdot , he was the executive producer of the CBS Evening News.

It seems he moved to the country and became a farmer, and wrote a book about owning dogs.

A Dog Year , The New Work of Dogs and The Dogs of Bedlam Farm appear to be by him in 2002/3/4.

Incidentally your comment is one of the best summaries of "what went wrong" I've seen.

Good luck Mr. Katz, you did try :-)

No, Jon Katz was sincerely wrong. He watched Buffy reruns and thought he understood modern teens, read Kevin Mitnick interviews in 2600 and thought he understood hacker culture, read Slashdot comments and thought they were a representative sample of American geeks. I think he was genuinely surprised at how detested some of his rambling became around here.

The problem with Katz was he projected his need for social revolution on to mundane situation. He was connecting dots that just weren't there. Anyone know what happened to him?

I Googled a bit, and discovered some interesting things ... Before he was pilloried on Slashdot , he was the executive producer of the CBS Evening News.

It seems he moved to the country and became a farmer, and wrote a book about owning dogs.

A Dog Year , The New Work of Dogs and The Dogs of Bedlam Farm appear to be by him in 2002/3/4.

Incidentally your comment is one of the best summaries of "what went wrong" I've seen.

Good luck Mr. Katz, you did try :-)

No, Jon Katz was sincerely wrong. He watched Buffy reruns and thought he understood modern teens, read Kevin Mitnick interviews in 2600 and thought he understood hacker culture, read Slashdot comments and thought they were a representative sample of American geeks. I think he was genuinely surprised at how detested some of his rambling became around here.

The problem with Katz was he projected his need for social revolution on to mundane situation. He was connecting dots that just weren't there. Anyone know what happened to him?

I Googled a bit, and discovered some interesting things ... Before he was pilloried on Slashdot , he was the executive producer of the CBS Evening News.

It seems he moved to the country and became a farmer, and wrote a book about owning dogs.

A Dog Year , The New Work of Dogs and The Dogs of Bedlam Farm appear to be by him in 2002/3/4.

Incidentally your comment is one of the best summaries of "what went wrong" I've seen.

Good luck Mr. Katz, you did try :-)

Option 6 wasn't warranted by the evidence. Don't take it too personally, the comment I quoted was just too PHB-like to pass up.

As for deadpan, dictionary definitions sometimes don't do justice to words. Try this description. Note the part about being "connotative, in that the circumstances might be expected to require some humor or emotion." On Slashdot, writing like a marketroid, when it's done it all, is often done humorously and/or sarcastically. Doing this without any indication of the intended humor would be an example of deadpan delivery, in the online context. I knew you weren't being humorous, but I was kidding about your deadpanning.

Someone needs to tell O'Reilly that "mook" is already a word. And, um, a derogatory one at that.

Another example of modern usage:

The Mook is what critics call the crude, loud, obnoxious, in-your-face character that can be found almost any hour of day or night somewhere on MTV. He's a teen frozen in permanent adolescence. There's MTV's Tom Green of the "Tom Green Show"

And the daredevils on "Jackass" who indulge in dignity-defying feats like poo diving. The Mook is also found in the frat boys on MTV's ubiquitous "Spring Break" specials. And, the Mook has migrated to MTV's sister network, Comedy Central, where he's the cartoon cutouts of "South Park," or the lads on the "Man Show."

First post to mention The Diamond Age : Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book) by NEAL STEPHENSON. All about nano-tech and fabricators and stuff.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/263/1
and
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/spybook/spy/96 1115.html

Great stuff!

R3

"Velásquez commissioned Hernán Cortés to explore, trade, and search for Christian captives in the Yucatán."

There are lots of other descriptions of the early trade between Europeans and American tribes, when the newcomers were at a disadvantage for mere survival, let alone conquest. When that phase passed, Europeans leveraged their superior firepower and transportation into conquest. All in the name of taking what the Americans had produced, in their lifetimes or over generations of breeding. Most of these Europeans, whose families lived in the relative squalor of European villages and countryside, were peasants whose Christianity hadn't changed their own clan/tribal culture much since around 1200, when they started to resemble the sophistication of the American tribal civilizations. Try reading The Indian Givers, which documents details of superior American culture taken by Europeans. Though they might have believed the Americans were "savages", or even devils, that doesn't change their interest in the superior agricultural products of those American people.

When Europeans landed in the Americas, they found lands filled with bounty produced by people. They stayed to get more of that bounty for themselves, whether they kept it all in their colonies, or sent some back to Europe. When we set up space colonies, colonists will be easier to justify and support when working within a human context than just extracting alien matter from an airless rock.

Can't help it. Read this article yesterday and found it hilarious. Had to share :-)

Before posting the inevitable abuse, please bear in mind that the author is American.

There has been some investigation into the predictive capacity of vibration theory. Results were not consistent with Turin's predictions.

"We didn't disprove the vibration theory. We just didn't find anything to support it," says assistant professor Leslie B. Vosshall, Ph.D., head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior. "All of our data are consistent with the shape theory, but don't prove the shape theory."

One thing in the Nobel prize press release that should jump out at anyone who is familiar with Turin is, "most odours are composed of multiple odorant molecules." They do hedge that claim immediately with, "each odorant molecule activates several odorant receptors."

The major mark against traditional explanations of smell is there are just too many smells for each one to correspond to a unique receptor. Certainly receptors working in combination may explains many thousands of unique smells coming from some 1000 receptors. However we know of many thousands of different smells coming from pure molecules. Any theory of smell should consider mixtures, but cannot depend on mixtures to explain the wide range of smells coming from a limited number of receptors.

The press release is light on methodology, and I have not read the original papers, but it seems the winning work is strictly theoretical.

Buck's research group examined the sensitivity of individual olfactory receptor cells to specific odorants. By means of a pipette, they emptied the contents of each cell and showed exactly which odorant receptor gene was expressed in that cell. In this way, they could correlate the response to a specific odorant with the particular type of receptor carried by that cell.

I don't think it's time to dismiss Turin completely, but I don't expect to see him making any acceptance speeches in Stockholm any time soon.

By the way, have you smelled the perfume he developed?

Not to push the Neal Stephenson thing again on the heels of the recent link between WorldWind and the Earth program in "Snow Crash", but I believe he had some great ideas with respect to the future of storytelling in "The Diamond Age"... Anyone?

Not to push the Neal Stephenson thing again on the heels of the recent link between WorldWind and the Earth program in "Snow Crash", but I believe he had some great ideas with respect to the future of storytelling in "The Diamond Age"... Anyone?

Most research money does not come from federal grants....The reason the drugs cost so much has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of marketing. It is almost entirely due to the cost of research and developmen

Care to back that statement up with some numbers? Because Marcia Angell, who was editor of The New England Journal of Medicine for twenty years, disagrees with you and agrees with the poster. She's just published The Truth About Drug Companies . The core thesis of this book is that Currently Americans spend a staggering $200 billion each year on prescription drugs. As Dr. Angell powerfully demonstrates, claims that high drug prices are necessary to fund research and development are unfounded: The truth is that drug companies funnel the bulk of their resources into the marketing of products of dubious benefit. Meanwhile, as profits soar, the companies brazenly use their wealth and power to push their agenda through Congress, the FDA, and academic medical centers...Drug companies, she shows, routinely rely on publicly funded institutions for their basic research; they rig clinical trials to make their products look better than they are; and they use their legions of lawyers to stretch out government-granted exclusive marketing rights for years. They also flood the market with copycat drugs that cost a lot more than the drugs they mimic but are no more effective.

If you're looking for more than the book blurb, The New York Review of Books has a footnooted, condensed version of the book's argument, noting:

In the past two years, we have started to see, for the first time, the beginnings of public resistance to rapacious pricing and other dubious practices of th e pharmaceutical industry. It is mainly because of this resistance that drug companies are now blanketing us with public relations messages. And the magic words, repeated over and over like an incantation, are research, innovation, and American. Research. Innovation. American. It makes a great story.

But while the rhetoric is stirring, it has very little to do with reality. First, research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies--dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration, and smaller even than profits. In fact, year after year, for over two decades, this industry has been far and away the most profitable in the United States. (In 2003, for the first time, the industry lost its first-place position, coming in third, behind "mining, crude oil production," and "commercial banks.") The prices drug companies charge have little relationship to the costs of making the drugs and could be cut dramatically without coming anywhere close to threatening R&D.

Second, the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

and

At least a third of drugs marketed by the major drug companies are now licensed from universities or small biotech companies, and these tend to be the most innovative ones.

It's bupkis.

Noch a chochem!

Okay people. Let me explain.

The Odyssey was written by Homer 4000 years ago, and is about a famous greek and his trip home. It is a fun and easy read.

Ulysses is by James Joyce, it is almost 700 pages of the most ferociously post modern work ever put to paper and is simultaniously the "Best book ever written" and one of the most hated and feared pieces of modern lit.

The point is quite simple.

Your guess and my guess will probably be different due to different influences.

The theory goes, if you take a large enough sample of opinions from a mixture of sources, tech experts, financial experts, normal people the market prediction (i.e. the average of all the guesses) will be a closer guess than any one single expert.

It isn't like gambling on a slot machine as a slot machine is pretty much a game of chance and odds.

I'd suggest that you might find The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki useful, if your really interested in how these kind of decision markets work.

J. Gregory Keyes' cycle "The Age of Unreason" pictures a world where science is systematized alchemy and it works. Newton is the master of the art and takes a colonial boy named Ben Franklin as an apprentice.

Some "scientific" inventions are the fervefactum, the ethergraph, shoes that float on water and the kraftpistole.

To take a non-computer-science example, if you write a novel about solders in the U.S. Civil War, and lift twenty or thirty pages from Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, you can be reasonably sure that either Random House's lawyers, Mr. Frazier's lawyers, or both, will come after you.

This is essentially what SCO is claiming with their copyright arguments, as I understand it. Nothing to do with patented file formats at all (which is not to say those formats cannot be patented, just that it's not what is going on here.)

Don't get me wrong -- I still think SCO are a bunch of crack-smoking weasels -- but their argument falls apart on its substance, not necessarily its form.

-HJ

Where does it come from? Maybe this randomly selected link provides a clue?

My own opinion is that it and similar misspellings arose some time after Latin was dropped from your local high school curriculum. That was a few years before the humanities became an exercise in political correctness, History was reborn as Social Studies, and learning a foreign language (any language) became something only immigrants did.

More snide and elitist commentary available on request.

Quantum Computing is not something to be understood in a blurb.

It is just too counterintuitive to what we observe to make sense. I'd recommend picking up a copy of A Shortcut Through Time by George Johnson.
It is a very good read and lets you understand just how different and powerful Quantum Computing is.

If you are still not sure...he describes how to build a Tic-Tac-Toe playing tinkertoy computer.

That's a gross oversimplification. Trial by jury is prone to the influence of money in that better lawyers can be hired by one side or the other, but in the end it's even more prone to the social context in which the case takes place.

For example, jury trials in the American South before the enacting of federal Civil Rights legislation were absurdly biased in favor of whites and against blacks. This had nothing to do with money and everything to do with racism.

Big companies in the age of Rockafeller and Carnegie were left relatively unfettered until Americans began to resent the range and depth of the Robber Barons' influence. Then in trial after trial, the monopolies were hit hard by plaintiffs seeking damages from large companies. When Americans perceive a powerful entity as being generally useful, they tend not to press it too hard, but when they see it as having overstepped its bounds, juries tend to come down against Big Business.

Witness the recent spate of Wall Street trials. While there was certainly widespread malfeasance during the Dot-Com era, the Tyco execs, Martha Stewart, et. al. are in some ways being convicted not because of what they specifically did, but because the American public, as represented by jurors, is tired of this sort of rampant greed and wants to send a message to the executive class.

Lawrence Friedman's Law in America is a great primer (only 200 pages) on how the American legal system evolved, and how it has shaped and been shaped by American society.

ref: Operation Ivy Bells

"The Demon Haunted World" by Carl Sagan has some excellent examples of how extreme political interference with science led to major catastrophes. It's definitely worth reading.

I used the modifier "extreme" intentionally. You should always expect a certain amount of political meddling/grandstanding with govt funded science, but outright suppression and heavy distortion is over the line.

And yes, I am posting this AC since my job is a result of federal research money.

As anyone who's read the Star Wars storyline as it continues past the 4/5/6, if Lucas uses these as a baseline for more movies, rejoice your ass off.

The stories (for the most part) have great depth, a wealth of plot scenarios to choose from (which might be the biggest stumble to what to make for sequels), and continue the stories of the principals through the next 30 years (kids, getting old, death, etc.). It actually makes the characters a helluva lot more believable.

Hats off to the editors who have made EVERY story that followed the movies tie into one another -- their consistency checks have got to be brain numbing, they're so thorough. That alone has made the stories a lot of fun to read.

And the authors include some well-known names in modern sci-fi, including James Luceno, Michael P. Kube-McDowell, and Michael Stackpole.

So, go read some dead tree, and see what kind of potential there is for three (or more!) sequels from Lucas. Let's just hope he uses some of the material available to him, instead of striking off on his own.

Not to accuse you or anything, but what an interesting suggestion.

If you don't understand it can mean anything. Diary

You need to go read The Princess Bride . I mean, maybe the terrorists will figure this out and use the phones anyway...

Replying to my own post in effort to reply to all those who replied to it as well.

First: I am VERY impressed with the decorum exersized in the replies so far! There are some VERY good arguments made.

There seems to be a common thread of "What if they could find out you were gay," and I'd like to suggest that maybe if it were easy to tell if someone was gay (not so much a matter of public record, but just easy to tell) then we'd realize how totally NORMAL this is and the biggotry might be greatly dimished.

I think this kind of idea was planted in my head when I read the book by Halperin called The Truth Machine in which he makes some predictions on what would happen if we had a perfect lie detector. People couldn't lie, and would have no reason to lie or protect someone else's ability to lie.

I apologize if I've made too big a jump from privacy and the "Ability to Lie." Sometimes I think that's what people consider privacy though.

Again, thanks for so many great rebuttles!

M@

Sorry, but grammar nazis are one of my pet peeves.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go to the ATM machine. I hope I remember my PIN number.

I would leave this on the train and pick up someone else's case by mistake.

Ah, but at least it would be ethical. Disagree? Many would side with you.

Yeah, I know this is (-1, Offtopic). Mod as you wish.

That's a REALLY nice thing to say about all the Germans that were alive when Adolf took over. He was just the representation of the societal Id. Everyone in Germany was just like him, right?

Well, you know, I'm not sure how to break this to you. Actually, why don't you just get off your duff, and read some books like Hitler's Willing Executioners? I'm sure you've been watching the television, and come to believe that everyone just wants to be just like us - all the commercials, and the sitcoms want you to believe that. But hey, is that a flag that mob of (insert nationality you listed here) is burning?

Gee, it sounds to me like they really might not want us to 'save' them from their government.

Well, I just got back in town and have arrived on this topic a bit late, so forgive me for not reading all four pages of posts. I got .25 of the way down the first page and got tired of reading about NEAL Stephenson (whose books I have enjoyed enough to read more than once). Somone mentioned Marion Zimmer Bradley, but I did not see The Mists Of Avalon, but I'm sure you have already read this (based on your original post claiming to have read just about every Arthuran tale :P).

A couple of my favorite authors are Tad Williams (his books) and Mickey Zucker Reichert, check her chronological bio (complete with books) here and a nice book listing here (has book covers).

Tad Williams has a tendency to be quite wordy, especially in the Otherland series, but if you are a fan of detailed worlds, be sure to check him out. I would suggest starting with the Memory, Sorrow And Thorn series. As for Reichert, I can only attest to the Renshai books (pretty good IMO) and the first of the Bifrost Guardians (having never finished the series due to some distraction which I can not remember).

Should you feel the need for something different and wish to try some straight fiction, try Richard Russo of which, Straight Man is my favorite. Very witty and a great read.

To wrap things up, you may want to check out Gnod. Just search for an author and you'll get a kind of cool mapping of suggested reads based on your search. I haven't examined this site to see how accurate the suggestions are, but it looks like it may have potential.

Regardless of which authors you choose out of all these posts, I hope you find some fresh content that can keep you going. I always find myself in the same situation you described where I tend to just cycle through all of my books. Good luck on your search!

Its a little campy, but I like Michael Stackpole's writing. His most recent series (which I believe he calls the DragonCrown War Cycle) is a series of four books (at least just four planned so far). So far three of the books are in print:

• The Dark Glory War [amazon]
• Fortress Draconis [amazon]
• When Dragons Rage [amazon]
• The Grand Crusade [most likely due out in Nov 2003]

I got turned on to Michael Stackpole when I was in my Battletech phase (if anyone plays this game you probably know Michael from the novels and the game materials). He has just started writing Mechwarrior novels once again as well.

Another of my recent favorites is Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel trilogy. Good writing, interesting story line (more of an alternate history/universe than fantasy in my mind). The trilogy:

• Kushiel's Dart [amazon]
• Kushiel's Chosen [amazon]
• Kushiel's Avatar [amazon] (due out in April 2003)

Some people would probably call them trash, but I also like the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter novels (and the other stories in the same world) by Laurell K. Hamilton. I think the best description of the world would be a R-rated Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Its a fun read. A good fan site can be found here: http://www.laurellkhamilton.org/

According to Robert Foster, the Uruk-hai were bred by Sauron in Mordor, not by Saruman (as was shown in Peter Jackson's movie).

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky - ISBN 0375714499.

This is the 2002 edition - the book was initially published in 1988, and its model seems to have held up incredibly well.

Also, I have a personal favorite for microfiction online, now that Michael Swanwick is writing a story for every element in the periodic table.

Probably should thow in the cluster of urban fantasy writers such as Charles DeLint, Will Shetterly, Emma Bull and Jan Siegel.

It Gaiman in many ways seems to be pulling into novel format a theology that seems to be at the core of a lot of British fantasy including many of the DC vertigo line which is that god exists, he is a major wanker, but fortunately he is not the only game in town. Probably the best books in this genre is the His Dark Materials trilogy.

And of course Ursula le Guin is still out there publishing the good stuff. One of the problems with fantasy is that for every author like le Guin who asks a different question every novel you have at least five hacks like Lackey and Salvatore.

I know because aletheiometer never lies. See p.69, The Subtle Knife.

Read "The Truth Machine". It basically follows the idea that technology will eventually become so powerful and in so many people's hands that it will be simple to destroy all life. So they have to come up with a solution, which ends up being a perfect lie detector test. With a perfect lie detector, they could just ask someone "are you planning on hurting people with your experiments" and find out. Quite a good book in either case.

Truth Machine Website

(Andy)"Ever tried to quit AOL? They just won't let you. It's like the Roach Motel, they check in, but they don't check out. I'm wasting away the final years of my life on hold."

(Jerry) "So who invented hold anyway?!? That's one person who's going to hell. It's a battle of wills, just like the staring game we played when we were kids. After an hour and a half on hold I'm thinking, just a few more minutes, I know he's about ready to cave, there's no way I'm giving up now!"

(Dave) "The call center, I swear I am not making this up, is actually manned by CIA 'Pain Specialists' who are studying the average time a person will stay on hold before giving up. This is going directly into their Pain Threshold Database for future use in IRS audits."

Except Katz takes himself seriously. Oh, and he's not funny.

Having read (and absolutely adored, and would recommend without hesitation, although the so-called "satisfying conclusion" will drive you mad) all three books, "The Golden Compass" is quite a good title for the first one. In fact, I would say it was a much better title, because Philip Pullman decided to title the other two books after the important magical objects that are introduced in them, creating a nice parallelism.

Did I mention that I loved these books? I told both my English teachers in high school to read them, used Philip Pullman's Carnagie medal acceptance speech in my collage admissions essay, recommended them again to my advisor freshman year, put them on display when I worked at the public library....

Meghan

Frowning on an act would indicate some remedial conscience or morals, and as we see everyday corporations have NONE.

While you and I may believe that, evidently others do not.

We allow corporations to donate soft money, thereby influencing the political process, probably more so than the votes. We even allow them to give favors to candidates and politicians. They have property rights, can invent, can author creative works, can be exempted from laws, can buy other laws, can be sued, and can even sue for wrongs done to it! In the meantime, we also award companies for being "good corporate citizens"!

For something that only exists on paper, and that has no morals, ethics, conscience, spirit or life...corporations sure do have a lot of corporate rights. As if a they were "...endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...".

There is an interesting, short story posted on the Gentoo Linux site.

No, there's a short article posted on the Gentoo Linux site. A ``short story'' is a form of fiction. (Not that anyone at Slashdot cares, but some of us can't help tilting at windmills.)

--Jim

They probably make $$$ sending spam, then turn around and make $$$ blocking it, just like the phone companies charging a fee for caller-id, then charging a fee for caller-id-blocking.

Hmm... Sneetches, anyone?

The best "general" cookbook I've found is How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.

I'm losing faith in the venerable Minimalist. His Tandori Chicken recipe in The Minimalist Cooks Dinner calls for juice a whole lime and some corriander. Only thing is he only tells you where to put half the lime juice and never tells you what to do with the corriander. So much for one recipe a week equaling perfection.

He still comes up with some of the best fast and simple meals though.

Since originally reading here and here, the possibility of Douglas' last works coming to print, I've been checking periodically. On Jan. 9th a hit came up on Amazon for Salmon of Doubt - Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time. A quick check of Harmony Books seems to confirm it's due out in May, one year after the death of Douglas Noel Adams. There's at least cover artwork, as oppose to the last time, back in the mid-90's, or so, when I saw listing of this same book.

Speculation has been that Salmon and other bits have been harvested from DNA's computer hard drive. As much as Douglas, a tough critic of his own work, may not have wanted other eyes to see work he deemed unfit to publish, it's coming. I'll probably buy the book. Perhaps a pint of bitter, with a pleasantly nutty taste and some Dire Straits will help cope with the mixed feelings.