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Neal Stephenson's The Confusion Released
Jon Lasser writes "Neal Stephenson's 'The Confusion', second volume of his Baroque Cycle is released today. I received an advance copy and have a book review up here. The hypertext site for the trilogy is here. The short review: if you liked 'Quicksilver', this one is better; if you didn't, don't bother."
Stop reading about trash sci-fi and do your job.
Sincerely,
Your Boss.
hi mom!
snowcrash?
At today's Presidential News Conference
Cheers,
K. Trout
I must be out of the loop here, but can someone explain to me why this is front page news?
- 04.11.2004: White House Releases President Bush's Personal Copy of Declassified Daily Intelligence Briefing for August 6th, 2001:
It's funny cause it's true."I know the American people will agree I did the right thing, when after reading that ridiculously vague memo filled with specific references to an al Qaeda attack, I promptly skipped town for thirty fun-filled days of golf, jogging, and naps!"
P
free ipod and free gmail!
does stuff blow up?
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
...does he run Lunix?
If you agree with any of this, feel free to repost it in the future.
* If "Linux" just refers to the kernel and not the operating system, how can "FreeBSD" refer to the operating system (userland tools, standard libraries, etc.) and not just the kernel? Face it, "GNU/Linux" looks and sounds ridiculous.
* If you expect companies to follow the copyright of the GPL, you should support the RIAA going after infringers of its copyright. If not, you're a hypocrite.
* There is absolutely nothing wrong with a company being upset that its product is being pirated freely over online networks. Try getting a real job sometime and see what it feels like when your work is everywhere, and you start worrying that your days are numbered. Does John Carmack want you to "sample" his new game via the "free advertising" happening on eMule?
* OSDN-owned Slashdot thinks its niche opinion represents the majority of the world. This is a result of people visiting every day and buying into the groupthink. Nobody outside of Slashdot knows or cares about "Linux," "RIAA", "M$," or anything else Slashdotters think is such a huge issue in today's society. Go to a mall or coffee shop sometime and see what people actually talk about.
* Speaking of OSDN--it's a Linux company...that owns a "tech news" site...that posts news stories negative toward competitors like Microsoft. If a Windows company or even Microsoft itself owned a "tech news" site and posted anti-Linux articles all the time, everyone would be up in arms. But with OSDN, it's a-okay.
* Slashbots think people don't like the music coming out these days, which is the cause of the piracy. Never mind that if people didn't like the music they wouldn't be pirating it, most Slashbots--again, this goes back to the niche opinion thing--don't realize that most people these days love the music coming out and want to hear all of it. Probing around, you discover that Slashdot is made up of nerds and fogies who listen to things like The Who and Blind Guardian and techno--not what mainstream society enjoys.
* Any company ending in "AA" is evil. Especially if it doesn't want you distributing its works without paying for it. Somehow, this mindset is supposed to make sense.
* The inevitable result of all this is a world in which nothing can be profitable because people simply pirate free copies. Is that really what Slashbots want? OSS and free-ness in general reminds me of the hippie era of the 60s--idealistic socialism that only exists because of the surrounding capitalism around it that provides the environment for it to exist. We all know what happened to that idea.
* Slashdot editors are abusive. We all remember The Post. It's amusing the editors never mention the issue. The worst editor is michael, who will mod you down, insult you for your post count, and post unprofessional color commentary along with the article. This is the same bizarre person who cybersquatted Censorware for years--even as Slashdot posted articles negative toward cybersquatting! Michael played it off like he was some sort of stalking victim, which made it all the more bizarre.
* The moderation system is broken. If you mod someone as "Overrated," you can't be metamodded. People abuse this all the time to gang up and knock you down into oblivion.
* Somehow, user-ran executables are always a "New Microsoft Hole" (actual article headline). Meanwhile, LinuxSecurity posts weekly security advisories for all the Linux distributions. You never, ever, EVER see any of these mentioned on Slashdot--bizarre things like arbitrary code execution via MPlayer.
* Microsoft is supposed to be some sort of non-innovative rip-off artist. Meanwhile, the same people posting those comments do it through KDE with taskbars, sidepanels, start menus, similar print dialogs, and an integrated web/filesystem browser. Effectively ripping people off then criticizing those who came up with the ideas in the first place.
* Linux is "ready for the desktop." This is the year
Newton was gay?!?? wAATTT??
Just like Trinity.
Except for the part about being true.
I'm completely off-topic, but I'm gonna get this out there in this thread anyway: the notion of a presidential vacation is a fucking joke. The president is on vacation right now; he's was at his ranch yesterday. What did he do? He got up before sunrise for about half a dozen of his regular daily briefings. He met with senior staff over breakfast. He made about a hundred phone calls. And, oh yeah, he spent half the day with the president of Egypt.
And that's a day off.
I think it's about time we put the whole "presidential vacation" meme to bed.
I write in my journal
Sounds like you have some kind of sexual insecurity.
I enjoyed reading about Turing's sexuality in Crypto*, what a shame that in real life he was hurt professionaly by his sexual orientation
Gay rights are an important issue, don't pretend like it's not. Are you also of the opinion that there is no race problem in the world? SHould we not talk about it? I say, talk about it as much as possible.
Maybe you should take some social science classes, put down the sci-fi and go outside.
Neal Stephenson is a Debian user. See for yourself. I once saw a quote that he liked Debian because of the huge number of bugs in the database. (He liked that Debian is open - not that it has a huge number of bugs ;-))
Anyone remember that song? From the rave in Blade.
Confusion by New 0rder. Best. Rave. Ever.
True story.
More heterosexuals do that than homosexuals, troll.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I don't care what you do. It has nothing to do with homosexuality. Plenty of queers don't do it at all. Plenty of straights do.
If you consider this a moral issue, and want to divide things up based upon sexuality, lesbians are probably the only ones with a moral high ground.
IHBT. IHL. HAND.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.