>This whole situation seems like a gross abuse of a recall system that relies on honesty and virtuous politicians.
"Must...control...laughter..."
"HAHAHAHAHAHA! Hahahahahaha! Ha. Ha. Oh boy, that's a good one."
Neither California's recall system nor any other democratic institution in the United States has ever relied on "honesty and virtuous politicians." Our system of checks and balances assumes that if one branch of the government gets out of line, the other two can check it. If the Republic had depended on "honesty and virtuous politicians" to run government, it would have collapsed sometime shortly after George Washington left office.
The California recall provisions are perfectly legal, perfectly constitutional, and were followed to the letter. If Gray Davis were not such a manifestly incompetent and corrupt weasel, it would have been impossible to gather the 1 million+ signatures the recall provision did. The poster evidently believes that California voters should have let their state's economy be completely destroyed rather than avail themselves of the perfectly legal recall mechanism available to remove Gray Davis from power.
Recalls are far less of a threat to the Republic than unelected judiciaries legislating from the bench, or regulatoruy agencies that issue dictates to the American public that were never passed by Congress or signed by the President. Those are the mechanisms that have most eroded representative democracy, not recall provisions.
Kang: Alright then, Technical Self-Employment For some, tiny American flags for all!
Crowd: YAAAAAAAAA!
They're Doomed, and Here are Three Reasons Why
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Build-to-Order Cars?
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
1. They're looking to go with.Net instead of Unix or another stable, secure system. Insert your own jokes here.
2. They're building a Unionized auto plant. Obviously, this guy has no idea why big automakers have constantly moved their plants from heavily-unionized northern states to right-to-work states in the sun belt. Notice what a great benefit being heavily unionized was for the steel industry...
3. He's starting a new business in California. This is the same California, mind you, where Gray Davis and the Democratic Legislature have been making it almost impossible for businesses to operate profitably in. If he was serious about lowering costs, he'd be opening his plant someplace like Nevada or Texas.
Here are few sources to read up on the current California economic crises:
One troublesome fact unvoiced in these discussions over why some companies might outsource jobs is the fact that the government of California has made it prohibatively expensive to employ people there, with the result that businesses are leaving in droves.
Take a look at this article in Fortune. With it's high taxes it's long been more extensive to do business in California than elsewhere, but Governor Gray Davis and the Democratic-controlled legislature have enacted so many costly new taxes and regulations that businesses have finally had enough.
A few tidbits from the article:
"The state has lost 289,000 manufacturing jobs since 2001."
Davis and the legislature have approved new legislation that will increase some businesses' costs per worker "by $4,000 to $5,000 a year."
"The legislature made workers' compensation more expensive by mandating a large increase in benefits. California businesses now contribute the highest premiums by far per $100 of employee wages: $5.85, vs. a national average of about $2.50. Yet instead of cutting costs, as other states have done, the legislature recently raised maximum benefits by 71%, from $490 per week in 2002 to $840 in 2005. Countrywide and Verizon both pay four to five times more in workers' comp per employee in California than in Texas."
I have a programmer friend in California that was bemoaning this very negative business atmosphere last week in reference to this article. "In 2001, Abrahamson said, South Coast Building Services paid $500,000 to insure its workers for on-the-job injuries. A year later, the company's bill more than tripled to $1.7 million. This year, the tab nearly tripled again to $4.8 million, enough to erode the firm's profits on its $33 million in revenue."
Quoth my friend "I knew it was bad, but I had NO idea it was THAT bad. 1000 employees, and $4.8 million in workmans comp. Holy fuckin' cow! No *wonder* it's so damned hard to find a job!"
During the Internet boom, the Davis administration spent money like drunken sailors rather than laying the groundwork for sustainable growth. Now it looks like they may finally have suceeded in killing the golden goose.
...to use the ASCII-animated Star Wars as an input source? That way you could combine two inexplicable Japanese obsessions into a single tarball of inscrutable geekiness! Now if there was only a way to add tentacle porn to the results...
Personally, I'm not offended by the obviously fictional framing device (lame though it may be), but it would only be fair to have references to all the interviews that these replies have been lifted from. After all, "fair use" implies that you're using the materially fairly. Not providing credit where credit is due isn't fair at all.
Also, the comment about Dick's ideas infusing The Matrix is true as far as it goes, but misses one important point. Dick was an SF writer firmly grounded in the field, and would never have made as obvious and asinine mistake as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way The Matrix's idiotic "humans as batteries" backstory does.
Finally, the "spirit voices" tap shtick is especially lame considering the very sophisticated Gnostic sources and theories Dick turned to after his mystical "pink light" experience in 1974. Dick may have been wrong in the later mystical leanings that informed works like Valis, but he was never a believer in the type of fraudulent spiritual hucksterism that continues to rip off "new age" believers even today.
Suggested reading: Philip K. Dick: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik, Time Out of Joint, and (after you've read the rest) Valis and In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis.
I actually downloaded the datasheet for the "Silicon Graphics Onyx4 Ultimate Vision Family," and found it a very curious document indeed. It has some interesting hard facts about the system (OpenGL 1.4, 8-32 graphic processor pipes on the "Extreme," up to 8 GB of graphic memory (sweet!), etc.), but what I was looking was the type and speed of the processors used. So I kept looking.
And looking.
And looking.
It's not there.
SGI's own datasheet for the Onyx4 Family doesn't tell you what processor it runs! Others in the thread have said it uses MIPS chips, but the word "MIPS" never appears in the datasheet (nor "RISC," for that matter). It tells you how many processors the system uses, but not what they are or how fast they are.
This is not just odd; for a datasheet, it's nearly unprecedented. Only three explanations for this abscence occur to me:
They have the world's most incompetent technical writers. (Very unlikely.)
They're actually ashamed of their CPU, and don't want to tell you what it is or how fast in runs. (Most likely.)
They're desperately working behind the scenes to port their software to commodity hardware (mostly likely x86, but the 970/G5 might be a smarter choice). (Unlikely, but not impossible.)
I have no idea how fast the current generation of MIPS chips are (I think the last time I saw a benchmark, they were slower than Alphas, which tells you it was back when they were still benchmarking Alphas rather than letting them die a quiet and undeserved death), but the fact that SGI isn't even willing to mention them in their datasheet doesn't give me confidence.
The four biggest problems with extensive adoption of this idea are:
1. Safety and Liability. I can just imagine a bug telling the new assembly line "cyber drone" to drill a hole 1 foot to the left when it meant one inch (shades of Nigel Tuefnel!), and the resulting explosion when he drills into the fuel tank. That, and the possibility of anyone who screws up telling his supervisor "Hey, that's what the Magic Smart Goggles told me to do!"
2. Cost. Technical writers are comparatively cheap [and easy to lay off, he noted bitterly]. Programmers are expensive. If the new Mark 2 Framistan has holes in a different places, that's five minutes of work tops to put the new information in existing manuals, but a day to write the code, debug it, and test the magic googles to make sure they're acurately pointing out the new framistan holes rather than the old ones.
3. Limited Applicability to Modern Manufacturing. A good portion of the most repetative assembly line jobs have already moved overseas. Many of the mechanical assembly jobs left don't require one worker doing the same thing 100 times, but doing 100 different things on a far more complex tool (i.e., the difference between assembling a toaster and assembling, say, an Ion Implanter). Optimizing "Enhanced Reality" for one task performed 100 times a day may be cost effective, but not for programming and training the system for hundreds of tasks.
4. The Awesome Power of Human Stupidity. Everytime they make something idiot proof, nature has shown the amzing ability to come up with a better idiot.
"Despite thousands of manhours spent honing the concept, we were unable to make it as suckey as the original. We apologize for this, as we know that the medicore acting, idiotic scripts, irritaing kid and robot, and repetitive battle scenes were integral to making Battlestar Galactica what it was, but they just set the bar too low for us to crawl under. Again, we apologize, and we'll be using all the skills Hollywood is known for to make sure the series becomes more wretched and unwatchable as time goes on, climaxing in the premier of Galactica 2005. Thank you."
Maybe if they kept the theme music and threw every other "classic" element away...
For a counter example, take Bruce Sterling. I'm in the same writing workshop as Bruce, and he's written the occasional piece for my SF critical magazine, so I know both him and his work pretty well. As long as I've known him, he's been married to Nancy Sterling, and for some 15 or so of those years he's been father to Amy (and to Laura for about five). If anything, Bruce's work has generally gotten better over the years, with both Holy Fire and Distraction being among his best novels. Not to mention winning Hugos for "Bicycle Repairman" in 1997 and "Taklamakan" in 1999.
Actually, I think the opposite may be true for science fiction writers: They need a spouse to support them in their early years! (And if there are any beautiful, single women out there who would like to support my science fiction writing career, please write me at the address below.;-))
The Reagan years increased the deficit from ~$1000 billion to ~$4000 billion.
1, Your figures are demonstrable incorrect. By deficit I assume you mean "the National Debt," otherwise your figures are an order of magnitude too large. The National Debt in 1981 was $997.9 billion; in 1989 it was $2857.4 billion, not $4000 billion. (Source: The World Almanac and Book of Facts: 1999, p. 110.)
2. Go upthread and read my comments on the cumulative effect of baseline budgeting procedures. Almost every increase made by Congress gets passed down (and actually slightly increased for inflation and population growth) in each year of budget outlays. The cumulative effect is much larger than merely adding up the differences year to year.
3. I never said the difference was enough to erase the National Debt (though holding the line from Reagan's initial FY82 budget with only increases for inflation certainly would have by now), only the federal Budget Deficit by the end of Reagan's term.
1. You comments display a fundamental misunderstanding of how federal government budgeting works. Once an appropriation for a Fiscal Year has been passed, budget rules stipulate that those spending levels, plus increases for inflation, plus population increase, beceoms the baseline for next year's budget. Thus each amount that Congress increases spending each year has a cumulative effect by raising the baseline each year. And keep in mind that liberals and the press screamed bloody murder anytime Reagan tried to actually cut spending (see Stockman's The Triumph of Politics for how hard Washington's poltical elites fight against budget cutting, and how budgeting rules rig the system in favor of higher spending); just imagine what they would have said if Reagan tried to "change the ground rules" of baseline budgeting. Taking out those cumulative increases, and it would indeed have erased the budget deficit. Could Reagan have vetoed those budgets? Yes, and he should have, but the political and media firestorm for doing so ("Ronald Reagan is killing our babies!" said Senator Kennedy today) would have dwarfed Monicagate. Just look at the fallout from the brief closure of some federal offices during the Gingrich-Clinton budget showdown.
2. The Carter figures are misleading because they are not inflation-adjusted dollars. After 1982, inflation was a very minor factor in increasing budgets and revenues, but during the hyperinflation of the Carter years they were a major factor. Subtract the rate of inflation from the Carter revenue increases and you're left with very little. (I would calculate the exact figure, but my Almanac doesn't go back that far, and I don't have a copy of Statistical Abstract of the United States handy.)
the name of the man who invented modern deficit spending in America...Ronald Reagan's pro-spending, pro-big-government
You are demonstrably mistaken. It was not Ronald Reagan but Congress that was "pro-spending," and "pro-big-government." From Fiscal Year 1981 through Fiscal Year 1981, only once did the Reagan administration propose more spending than Congress approved; for the other years, Congress spent more money than Reagan proposed. Here are the actual figures Reagan proposed, and the actual amount Congress authorized (in billions of dollars, 1981 included as a baseline):
FY1981 Reagan: $655.2 Congress: $678.2
FY1982 Reagan: $695.3 Congress: $745.8
FY1983 Reagan: $773.3 Congress: $808.4
FY1984 Reagan: $862.5 Congress: $851.8
FY1985 Reagan: $940.3 Congress: $946.4
FY1986 Reagan: $873.7 Congress: $990.3
FY1987 Reagan: $994.0 Congress: $1003.9
FY1988 Reagan: $1024.3 Congress: $1064.1
FY1989 Reagan: $1094.2 Congress: $1144.2
Note that the Democratic party controlled the House all eight years of Reagan's presidency, and the Senate the last two. Had it not been for excessive spending by Congress (which also increased the amount of "locked in" spending for each successive budget), the budget deficit would have disappeared by the end of Reagan's term.
Source: Edwin S. Rubenstein, The Right Data, P. 235.
(Posted this before, but evidently no one saw it...)
He convinced Congress to increase spending and lower taxes.
On the issue of Reagan convincing Congress to increase spending you are demonstrably mistaken.
From Fiscal Year 1981 through Fiscal Year 1981, only once did the Reagan administration propose more spending than Congress approved; for the other eight years, Congress spent more money than Reagan proposed. Here are the actual figures Reagan proposed, and the actual amount Congress authorized (in billions of dollars):
FY1981 Reagan: $655.2 Congress: $678.2
FY1982 Reagan: $695.3 Congress: $745.8
FY1983 Reagan: $773.3 Congress: $808.4
FY1984 Reagan: $862.5 Congress: $851.8
FY1985 Reagan: $940.3 Congress: $946.4
FY1986 Reagan: $873.7 Congress: $990.3
FY1987 Reagan: $994.0 Congress: $1003.9
FY1988 Reagan: $1024.3 Congress: $1064.1
FY1989 Reagan: $1094.2 Congress: $1144.2
Note that the Democratic party controlled the House all eight years of Reagan's presidency, and the Senate the last two. Had it not been for excessive spending by Congress (which also increased the amount of "locked in" spending for each successive budget), the budget deficit would have disappeared by the end of Reagan's term.
Source: Edwin S. Rubenstein, The Right Data, P. 235.
Summary: It not only beats up the P4 and Xeon, it takes their lunch money as well.
n âoeSPEC rateâ tests, the dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 completed the set of floating-point calculations 95 percent faster than the Pentium 4 â" based system and 42 percent faster than the dual Xeon-based workstation. Integer performance was also far superior to the Pentium 4 â" based system and 3 percent faster than the dual Xeon-based system.
It did even better at DNA matching: "Testing BLAST with common searches using a word size of more than 11, the Power Mac G5 far outperformed the Pentium 4-based system and the dual Xeon-based system, and nearly five times faster at the long word length of 40."
People should keep these rates in perspective with comparison to how much a writer makes off book publishing: A 12% royalty on paperback sales is much higher than normal, and 12% for a hardback is toward the high end of normal. 12% would be a more than respectible rate for a beginning-to-midlist author. (Stephen King and other bestsellers, of course, can get considerably more.) Also, a beginning writer usual gets between $3000-$5000 dollars as an advance on royalties (granted, the ways to screw writers after the advance have been given are far less numerous than in the recording industry...). Usually, there will be escalator clauses that bring higher rates after X number of books have been sold. Anyway, these are ballpark numbers for the science fiction field. Source: The SFWA Handbook, 1990, p. 62-69. (Note: Since 1990, if anything, rates have gotten worse, especially for midlist writers.) I am given to understand that advances in the Romance genre can be as low as $1000 for all rights (i.e., no royalties).
While it is true that recording (and other artists) get screwed by media companies in many ways, the 12% discussed is not at all out of line with current reality in other fields.
Have they taken out that clause that states "By opening the shrinkwrap on this Microsoft product, you agree to assign to Microsoft, in perpetuity, your immortal soul. You also agree that Microsoft may sell, sublicense, or reassign your soul to any third party, including but not limited to individuals, other corporations, government entities, demons, spirits and other supernatural beings, God and/or Satan, and any other powers or dominions, at Microsoft's sole discretion."?
Man, I always hated that clause, but at least they took out the bit about your firstborn child...
The article mentioned that the battle with Shelob was one of the two fights requiring a lot of CGI, which is...interesting. And reminded me of two things:
1. At my next-to-last job, we had a server named Shelob, complete with a little name sticker on the outside. Now, instead of outside the server, Shelob's going to be inside it.;-)
2. When I talked to Sauron (aka Sala Baker after he accepted the Hugo for The Fellowship of the Rings at last year's worldcon, I asked about Shelob and he assured me that Shelob was going to be "really cool."
3. Of course, I didn't realize at that point that Shelob had been pushed back into The Return of the King; if it hadn't, 2002 would have been a banner year for giant spider films, since Eight Legged Freaks also came out that year. I understand why they moved the scene, but it makes me think that The Return of the King will probably show very little, if any, of the scourging of the Shire. Which is something of a shame, because I rather like John Clute's theory that the scourging of the Shire represents a diminished recapitulation of Sauron's fall, in the same way Sauron's own fall is a diminished recapitulation of Morgoth's. Oh well...
Random thoughts on Bhutan, TV, and Freedom
on
Cable TV Ruins Bhutan
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· Score: 5, Insightful
A few random thoughts on the subject:
Don't trust everything you read in a newspaper. Ever read an article on computers/Linux/etc. in a newspaper, and notice all the errors in it? Well, just about every article in a news paper is riddled with the same kind of errors, but since it's not in an area you have particular expertise in, you don't notice it.
Especially don't take anything at face value that fits so neatly into the ideological orientation of the paper in question. In this case, The Guardian is well known for it's leftist slant, and things that slide smoothly into its ideological reality filter (Western Culture Bad! Cultural Imperialism Bad! Consumerism Bad!) should be especially suspect. (Likewise, a news source tends to be at it's most trustworthy when it publishes a story sharply at odds with its natural idiological inclinations, such as The Guardian recent story about how the Baghdad Museum looting story was a complete crock.
Be especially suspicious of any story that was compiled by "fly in" reporters new to the scene. Especially when they don't speak the local language. I'm willing to bet good money that the two reporters named are not permanately assigned to Bhutan. There's just no way for us to know that Bhutan was really the idyllic, crime-free paradise the reporters claim it was before the advent of The One Eyed Idiot God. The reporters could be mistaken, could be lied to by people with their own agenda (be they politicians, police officers, religious officials, etc.), or could simply be taken the facts that only fit their story's arc. There are any number of ways in which this story could be spun to make things appear worse than they really are, any number of contributing causes that go unmentioned, etc.
However, for the moment, let us suppose that everything this article suggests about TV ruining Bhutan are true. Some posters seem to suggest that letting TV be introduced was therefore a bad idea. Are you really willing to advocate freedom for yourself, but not for others? If so, it's an example of "compassion as contempt" writ large. It also suggests that the Bhutanese aren't worthy of even the freedom you enjoy. "Oh sure, I can be trusted with peer-to-peer file sharing, motor vehicles, and alcoholic beverages, but the Bhutanese can't be trusted with TV." Short of actually advocating violence against them, that's about the most racist, arrogent, paternalitsic, ethnocentric attitude possible. "We must save others from our culture." It's like saying that we have to remove liquor stores from around indian reservations and black inner city neighborhoods because they can't be trusted with the freedom to decide for themselves. It's to suggest that people with a different ethnicity or skin color will never be considered adults. "I am the Great White Father, and I have decided that you should be denied freedom for your own good." It's racist. It's insulting. And it's wrong.
Freedom comes with costs. It means having to make up your own damn mind. It means making mistakes. Either the Bhutanese are a free people, or else they're exhibits at a little ethnic zoo, never to stray beyond the confines of What's Good For Them.
I say let them make their mistakes, let them figure it out themselves, and let them enjoy the same measure of freedom every other nation in the world enjoys. (And hopefully a lot more than that enjoyed by North Korea, Cuba, Syria, etc.) Freedom has a price, but it's a price worth paying.
Slashdot Mirror
>This whole situation seems like a gross abuse of a recall system that relies on honesty and virtuous politicians.
"Must...control...laughter..."
"HAHAHAHAHAHA! Hahahahahaha! Ha. Ha. Oh boy, that's a good one."
Neither California's recall system nor any other democratic institution in the United States has ever relied on "honesty and virtuous politicians." Our system of checks and balances assumes that if one branch of the government gets out of line, the other two can check it. If the Republic had depended on "honesty and virtuous politicians" to run government, it would have collapsed sometime shortly after George Washington left office.
The California recall provisions are perfectly legal, perfectly constitutional, and were followed to the letter. If Gray Davis were not such a manifestly incompetent and corrupt weasel, it would have been impossible to gather the 1 million+ signatures the recall provision did. The poster evidently believes that California voters should have let their state's economy be completely destroyed rather than avail themselves of the perfectly legal recall mechanism available to remove Gray Davis from power.
Recalls are far less of a threat to the Republic than unelected judiciaries legislating from the bench, or regulatoruy agencies that issue dictates to the American public that were never passed by Congress or signed by the President. Those are the mechanisms that have most eroded representative democracy, not recall provisions.
Kang: Technical Self-Employment for all!
Crowd: BOOOO!
Kang: Technical Self-Employment for none!
Crowd: BOOOO!
Kang: Alright then, Technical Self-Employment For some, tiny American flags for all!
Crowd: YAAAAAAAAA!
1. They're looking to go with .Net instead of Unix or another stable, secure system. Insert your own jokes here.
/ 0,15114,465792,00.html
- 9999_1n13workers.html
e ral_issues/hot_issues_in_congress/legal_reform/tre vor_law_group.html
2. They're building a Unionized auto plant. Obviously, this guy has no idea why big automakers have constantly moved their plants from heavily-unionized northern states to right-to-work states in the sun belt. Notice what a great benefit being heavily unionized was for the steel industry...
3. He's starting a new business in California. This is the same California, mind you, where Gray Davis and the Democratic Legislature have been making it almost impossible for businesses to operate profitably in. If he was serious about lowering costs, he'd be opening his plant someplace like Nevada or Texas.
Here are few sources to read up on the current California economic crises:
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/investing/articles
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20030713
http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/legislative_issues/fed
http://www.americandaily.com/item/1853
So, in short, BuyMusic.com has only one viable business plan: get bought out by Microsoft! They'd fit right in...
Take a look at this article in Fortune . With it's high taxes it's long been more extensive to do business in California than elsewhere, but Governor Gray Davis and the Democratic-controlled legislature have enacted so many costly new taxes and regulations that businesses have finally had enough.
A few tidbits from the article:
I have a programmer friend in California that was bemoaning this very negative business atmosphere last week in reference to this article. "In 2001, Abrahamson said, South Coast Building Services paid $500,000 to insure its workers for on-the-job injuries. A year later, the company's bill more than tripled to $1.7 million. This year, the tab nearly tripled again to $4.8 million, enough to erode the firm's profits on its $33 million in revenue."
Quoth my friend "I knew it was bad, but I had NO idea it was THAT bad. 1000 employees, and $4.8 million in workmans comp. Holy fuckin' cow! No *wonder* it's so damned hard to find a job!"
During the Internet boom, the Davis administration spent money like drunken sailors rather than laying the groundwork for sustainable growth. Now it looks like they may finally have suceeded in killing the golden goose.
...to use the ASCII-animated Star Wars as an input source? That way you could combine two inexplicable Japanese obsessions into a single tarball of inscrutable geekiness! Now if there was only a way to add tentacle porn to the results...
Personally, I'm not offended by the obviously fictional framing device (lame though it may be), but it would only be fair to have references to all the interviews that these replies have been lifted from. After all, "fair use" implies that you're using the materially fairly. Not providing credit where credit is due isn't fair at all.
Also, the comment about Dick's ideas infusing The Matrix is true as far as it goes, but misses one important point. Dick was an SF writer firmly grounded in the field, and would never have made as obvious and asinine mistake as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way The Matrix's idiotic "humans as batteries" backstory does.
Finally, the "spirit voices" tap shtick is especially lame considering the very sophisticated Gnostic sources and theories Dick turned to after his mystical "pink light" experience in 1974. Dick may have been wrong in the later mystical leanings that informed works like Valis, but he was never a believer in the type of fraudulent spiritual hucksterism that continues to rip off "new age" believers even today.
Suggested reading: Philip K. Dick: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik, Time Out of Joint, and (after you've read the rest) Valis and In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis.
And looking.
And looking.
It's not there.
SGI's own datasheet for the Onyx4 Family doesn't tell you what processor it runs! Others in the thread have said it uses MIPS chips, but the word "MIPS" never appears in the datasheet (nor "RISC," for that matter). It tells you how many processors the system uses, but not what they are or how fast they are.
This is not just odd; for a datasheet, it's nearly unprecedented. Only three explanations for this abscence occur to me:
I have no idea how fast the current generation of MIPS chips are (I think the last time I saw a benchmark, they were slower than Alphas, which tells you it was back when they were still benchmarking Alphas rather than letting them die a quiet and undeserved death), but the fact that SGI isn't even willing to mention them in their datasheet doesn't give me confidence.
You know he's never going to be able to beat Al Sharpton for the nomination...
The four biggest problems with extensive adoption of this idea are:
1. Safety and Liability. I can just imagine a bug telling the new assembly line "cyber drone" to drill a hole 1 foot to the left when it meant one inch (shades of Nigel Tuefnel!), and the resulting explosion when he drills into the fuel tank. That, and the possibility of anyone who screws up telling his supervisor "Hey, that's what the Magic Smart Goggles told me to do!"
2. Cost. Technical writers are comparatively cheap [and easy to lay off, he noted bitterly]. Programmers are expensive. If the new Mark 2 Framistan has holes in a different places, that's five minutes of work tops to put the new information in existing manuals, but a day to write the code, debug it, and test the magic googles to make sure they're acurately pointing out the new framistan holes rather than the old ones.
3. Limited Applicability to Modern Manufacturing. A good portion of the most repetative assembly line jobs have already moved overseas. Many of the mechanical assembly jobs left don't require one worker doing the same thing 100 times, but doing 100 different things on a far more complex tool (i.e., the difference between assembling a toaster and assembling, say, an Ion Implanter). Optimizing "Enhanced Reality" for one task performed 100 times a day may be cost effective, but not for programming and training the system for hundreds of tasks.
4. The Awesome Power of Human Stupidity. Everytime they make something idiot proof, nature has shown the amzing ability to come up with a better idiot.
"Despite thousands of manhours spent honing the concept, we were unable to make it as suckey as the original. We apologize for this, as we know that the medicore acting, idiotic scripts, irritaing kid and robot, and repetitive battle scenes were integral to making Battlestar Galactica what it was, but they just set the bar too low for us to crawl under. Again, we apologize, and we'll be using all the skills Hollywood is known for to make sure the series becomes more wretched and unwatchable as time goes on, climaxing in the premier of Galactica 2005. Thank you."
Maybe if they kept the theme music and threw every other "classic" element away...
For a counter example, take Bruce Sterling. I'm in the same writing workshop as Bruce, and he's written the occasional piece for my SF critical magazine, so I know both him and his work pretty well. As long as I've known him, he's been married to Nancy Sterling, and for some 15 or so of those years he's been father to Amy (and to Laura for about five). If anything, Bruce's work has generally gotten better over the years, with both Holy Fire and Distraction being among his best novels. Not to mention winning Hugos for "Bicycle Repairman" in 1997 and "Taklamakan" in 1999.
;-))
Actually, I think the opposite may be true for science fiction writers: They need a spouse to support them in their early years! (And if there are any beautiful, single women out there who would like to support my science fiction writing career, please write me at the address below.
1, Your figures are demonstrable incorrect. By deficit I assume you mean "the National Debt," otherwise your figures are an order of magnitude too large. The National Debt in 1981 was $997.9 billion; in 1989 it was $2857.4 billion, not $4000 billion. (Source: The World Almanac and Book of Facts: 1999, p. 110.)
2. Go upthread and read my comments on the cumulative effect of baseline budgeting procedures. Almost every increase made by Congress gets passed down (and actually slightly increased for inflation and population growth) in each year of budget outlays. The cumulative effect is much larger than merely adding up the differences year to year.
3. I never said the difference was enough to erase the National Debt (though holding the line from Reagan's initial FY82 budget with only increases for inflation certainly would have by now), only the federal Budget Deficit by the end of Reagan's term.
1. You comments display a fundamental misunderstanding of how federal government budgeting works. Once an appropriation for a Fiscal Year has been passed, budget rules stipulate that those spending levels, plus increases for inflation, plus population increase, beceoms the baseline for next year's budget. Thus each amount that Congress increases spending each year has a cumulative effect by raising the baseline each year. And keep in mind that liberals and the press screamed bloody murder anytime Reagan tried to actually cut spending (see Stockman's The Triumph of Politics for how hard Washington's poltical elites fight against budget cutting, and how budgeting rules rig the system in favor of higher spending); just imagine what they would have said if Reagan tried to "change the ground rules" of baseline budgeting. Taking out those cumulative increases, and it would indeed have erased the budget deficit. Could Reagan have vetoed those budgets? Yes, and he should have, but the political and media firestorm for doing so ("Ronald Reagan is killing our babies!" said Senator Kennedy today) would have dwarfed Monicagate. Just look at the fallout from the brief closure of some federal offices during the Gingrich-Clinton budget showdown.
2. The Carter figures are misleading because they are not inflation-adjusted dollars. After 1982, inflation was a very minor factor in increasing budgets and revenues, but during the hyperinflation of the Carter years they were a major factor. Subtract the rate of inflation from the Carter revenue increases and you're left with very little. (I would calculate the exact figure, but my Almanac doesn't go back that far, and I don't have a copy of Statistical Abstract of the United States handy.)
You are demonstrably mistaken. It was not Ronald Reagan but Congress that was "pro-spending," and "pro-big-government." From Fiscal Year 1981 through Fiscal Year 1981, only once did the Reagan administration propose more spending than Congress approved; for the other years, Congress spent more money than Reagan proposed. Here are the actual figures Reagan proposed, and the actual amount Congress authorized (in billions of dollars, 1981 included as a baseline):
FY1981 Reagan: $655.2 Congress: $678.2
FY1982 Reagan: $695.3 Congress: $745.8
FY1983 Reagan: $773.3 Congress: $808.4
FY1984 Reagan: $862.5 Congress: $851.8
FY1985 Reagan: $940.3 Congress: $946.4
FY1986 Reagan: $873.7 Congress: $990.3
FY1987 Reagan: $994.0 Congress: $1003.9
FY1988 Reagan: $1024.3 Congress: $1064.1
FY1989 Reagan: $1094.2 Congress: $1144.2
Note that the Democratic party controlled the House all eight years of Reagan's presidency, and the Senate the last two. Had it not been for excessive spending by Congress (which also increased the amount of "locked in" spending for each successive budget), the budget deficit would have disappeared by the end of Reagan's term.
Source: Edwin S. Rubenstein, The Right Data, P. 235.
(Posted this before, but evidently no one saw it...)
On the issue of Reagan convincing Congress to increase spending you are demonstrably mistaken.
From Fiscal Year 1981 through Fiscal Year 1981, only once did the Reagan administration propose more spending than Congress approved; for the other eight years, Congress spent more money than Reagan proposed. Here are the actual figures Reagan proposed, and the actual amount Congress authorized (in billions of dollars):
FY1981 Reagan: $655.2 Congress: $678.2
FY1982 Reagan: $695.3 Congress: $745.8
FY1983 Reagan: $773.3 Congress: $808.4
FY1984 Reagan: $862.5 Congress: $851.8
FY1985 Reagan: $940.3 Congress: $946.4
FY1986 Reagan: $873.7 Congress: $990.3
FY1987 Reagan: $994.0 Congress: $1003.9
FY1988 Reagan: $1024.3 Congress: $1064.1
FY1989 Reagan: $1094.2 Congress: $1144.2
Note that the Democratic party controlled the House all eight years of Reagan's presidency, and the Senate the last two. Had it not been for excessive spending by Congress (which also increased the amount of "locked in" spending for each successive budget), the budget deficit would have disappeared by the end of Reagan's term.
Source: Edwin S. Rubenstein, The Right Data, P. 235.
Is it just me, or does the Anemone Hermit Crab shown in the second picture on this page look rather like an immature form of the Alien Face Hugger? Obviously H. R. Giger is a Tasmanian marine biologist in his spare time...
Summary: It not only beats up the P4 and Xeon, it takes their lunch money as well.
It did even better at DNA matching: "Testing BLAST with common searches using a word size of more than 11, the Power Mac G5 far outperformed the Pentium 4-based system and the dual Xeon-based system, and nearly five times faster at the long word length of 40."
People should keep these rates in perspective with comparison to how much a writer makes off book publishing: A 12% royalty on paperback sales is much higher than normal, and 12% for a hardback is toward the high end of normal. 12% would be a more than respectible rate for a beginning-to-midlist author. (Stephen King and other bestsellers, of course, can get considerably more.) Also, a beginning writer usual gets between $3000-$5000 dollars as an advance on royalties (granted, the ways to screw writers after the advance have been given are far less numerous than in the recording industry...). Usually, there will be escalator clauses that bring higher rates after X number of books have been sold. Anyway, these are ballpark numbers for the science fiction field. Source: The SFWA Handbook, 1990, p. 62-69. (Note: Since 1990, if anything, rates have gotten worse, especially for midlist writers.) I am given to understand that advances in the Romance genre can be as low as $1000 for all rights (i.e., no royalties).
While it is true that recording (and other artists) get screwed by media companies in many ways, the 12% discussed is not at all out of line with current reality in other fields.
Now all of their money will be going into paying for extra bandwidth...
"Please be patient and try again in a few moments.
GarageGames.com is currently experiencing an extremely high volume of traffic. Your patience is greatly appreciated.
--GarageGames"
Have they taken out that clause that states "By opening the shrinkwrap on this Microsoft product, you agree to assign to Microsoft, in perpetuity, your immortal soul. You also agree that Microsoft may sell, sublicense, or reassign your soul to any third party, including but not limited to individuals, other corporations, government entities, demons, spirits and other supernatural beings, God and/or Satan, and any other powers or dominions, at Microsoft's sole discretion."?
Man, I always hated that clause, but at least they took out the bit about your firstborn child...
If it sucked, shouldn't the code name have been Monica instead of Ginger?
The article mentioned that the battle with Shelob was one of the two fights requiring a lot of CGI, which is...interesting. And reminded me of two things:
;-)
1. At my next-to-last job, we had a server named Shelob, complete with a little name sticker on the outside. Now, instead of outside the server, Shelob's going to be inside it.
2. When I talked to Sauron (aka Sala Baker after he accepted the Hugo for The Fellowship of the Rings at last year's worldcon, I asked about Shelob and he assured me that Shelob was going to be "really cool."
3. Of course, I didn't realize at that point that Shelob had been pushed back into The Return of the King; if it hadn't, 2002 would have been a banner year for giant spider films, since Eight Legged Freaks also came out that year. I understand why they moved the scene, but it makes me think that The Return of the King will probably show very little, if any, of the scourging of the Shire. Which is something of a shame, because I rather like John Clute's theory that the scourging of the Shire represents a diminished recapitulation of Sauron's fall, in the same way Sauron's own fall is a diminished recapitulation of Morgoth's. Oh well...
I say let them make their mistakes, let them figure it out themselves, and let them enjoy the same measure of freedom every other nation in the world enjoys. (And hopefully a lot more than that enjoyed by North Korea, Cuba, Syria, etc.) Freedom has a price, but it's a price worth paying.
Assuming, of course, that they can find my fingers at the crash site.
(Actually, I don't own a cell phone...)