Yes, and I'm surprised that after the success of The Matrix that no one has tried to adapt any more of the prominent works of cyber* SF to cinema.
There's a whole list of good candidates, which would only suffer the same obstacles to the translation as any other genre: too many plot threads, too long, they'd just screw it up, etc.
Personally, I thought Islands in the Net would make an excellent translation to the big screen. It's not as flashy-FX-laden as other stories, but offers plenty of opportunities to work in cyber [ghod I hate that term] elements in a plot that otherwise could have a lot of appeal to the non-SF fan.
The same way you spin in your desk chair and stop perfectly to grab that can of Jolt from the shelf behind you. The axis of rotation runs thru your center of gravity. If the ship and the pilot share the same CG, then snappy rotations don't put any stress on the pilot.
Now translations, of course, are a different story...
It gets worse than that. I've worked as a systems engineer for 10 years on NASA contracts, and lately, the "faster, better, cheaper" has exacerbated what I have always considered to be the worst problem in the aerospace industry: underbidding.
When NASA issues a request for proposal (RFP), the bidders have a good idea of what the proposed cost should be in order to have a competitive proposal.
In the old days, programs were "cost plus fixed fee" (CPFF). In other words, whatever the cost of the project in the end, the customer (NASA) would pick up the cost, and the contractor would get an additional fee on top of that (gotta make a profit, of course). But there were a lot of abuses of CPFF proposals, so there are few left (mostly DOE nowadays - check out the Savannah River operating contract). I never had the leisure of working on such a program, but I have heard some "war stories" from the older engineers, and some of the abuses were astonishing.
So nowadays, programs are fixed cost. The original idea was to force the contractor to agree to a fixed payment for the program, and that price would have to include any profit that the contractor hoped to make. That lead to problems not with overbidding, as one might think, but to "no bids" and failed contracts due to cost overruns. So it was tweaked and the current policy is a fixed price contract, plus performance awards based on the programmatic, technical, and financial performance of the contractor. The cost of performing the work is agreed upon, and then NASA establishes another amount as a "carrot" to induce the contractor to perform well. If NASA doesn't like the contract performance, they can withhold part (or all) of the carrot.
It works pretty well for NASA, so far, so they haven't changed it in the past 6 years or so... but on the contractor end, it leads to two things: underbidding on contracts to insure some profit, and overworking the engineers to maintain performance.
The underbidding almost always comes in the labor category. In the task estimation process of the proposal, one "chunks" the project into small tasks like "design dunselhickey firmware," "design dunselhickey electronics," "design dunselhickey mechanical and packaging," "integrate and test dunselhickey," where the dunselhickey is an attitude control subsystem, or a sensor instrument, or something. (And I'm ignoring the contractor/subcontractor/vendor hierarchy to keep this somewhat short.) For even the simpler systems like Deep Space 2, these task estimates are huge efforts, and whole forests are sacrificed to them. Anyway, the point is that the contractor management knows ahead of time how much they want to quote for cost, so if the estimators (the engineers) don't come up with a small enough number, the managers (accountants, lawyers, and engineers with 30-year-old training) take a chainsaw to the estimate to trim it down to their target cost. When it comes time to perform the contract, the engineers find that there's not anywhere near enough money budgeted to perform the labor that needs to be done.
Which leads to the next problem: overworked engineers. The contractor who wins the project faces a dilemma as work begins to fall behind schedule. Contingency was never a part of the budget, so any delays or technical problems, even in the early phases, directly impact the bottom line/delivery date. And in almost every contract, there are several areas where the budgeted money to perform the work is grossly inadequate. In order to avoid cost overruns and keep their performance award, management puts more and more demand on the engineers to take shortcuts and work overtime. Unpaid overtime, of course. Which leads to fatigue and the resulting errors and oversights, as tesserae described. And of course, they're always the engineers' fault. (As I like to say, "parts are derated; engineers are berated.")
Faster, Better, Cheaper has only made this problem worse. There's less money budgeted for any given doowidget, but more performance demands. The leadership is out of touch with the technical demands of the performance requirements, and promise more for less. The technology only does what we tell it to do; if we take shortcuts in design and testing, we don't know what we're telling it to do. Engineers want to do things right, and know they can do things right the first time, but the available time (e.g. money) has been shrinking steadily.
But at times like this, when I'm feeling most cynical, I can still take solace in the fact that I'm not working in a competitive commercial environment (like application software) where the situation is even worse. When I see that Win2000 shipped with 64,000 "issues," I know exactly what's going on... the politics and jargon may be a bit different, but it's still management's fault for promising more than they can deliver.
(especially since that's the one all the hacking/.ers will stuff)
But even I plan on voting for Salon in the magazine category. Honestly, it's better than most print magazines. And frequently, Slashdot articles point to Salon features. So there you go
The rip-off artists basically shot themselves in the foot by: a) not doing their research on trade dress law, and b) mouthing off to the press.
That touches on the part that really annoys me about this case. I think, deep down, it's at the root of everyone's disturbance with these computer makers' choices:
Daewoo and E-Machines made the decision to invest in legal expenses rather than in a creative effort.
In the end, the courts discerned this, and shut them down. It's not just a victory for Apple, it's a victory for Creativity in the marketplace.
I have always felt that this subject was the kind of issue with wide enough interest to outrage the average voter if the PTO went too far in extending "ownership" of any kind. I mean, the average Joe Sixpack (and Joe Six-figure, for that matter) doesn't care who gets a patent for 'windowing' dates or selling books on the internet, but when you tell him that Perkin-Elmer patented his genes, he's gonna sit up and pay attention.
And maybe these genome reserchers understood that...
The only way Verisign can possibly justify paying that is to find new ways to monopolize something.
Isn't it clear to everyone that with control over commercial domains and secure transactions this merged entity plans to be positioned to control all of electronic commerce? "Sure," they're thinking, "there are other domain registrars and other trasaction vetters, but their names are so obscure they don't count."
Imagine if the Post Office, Federal Express, Airborne, and UPS combined with Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express to decide who they would allow to conduct business and who they wouldn't. If you wanted to open a mail-order business, you'd only have two options: pay the POFEAUPSVMDAE consortium for the privilege of doing business, or go farm potatoes.
Fortunately, the proposed Verisign/NetSol chimera wouldn't have it locked down as tight as the analogy above does, but as Animats astutely inferred, they wouldn't pay 21 Gigadollars if they didn't see a sure thing. Let's just hope they don't go Guido on us and impose some sort of "protection" fee on either the secure transactions or domain name regsitrations.
I'm not the first one to observe that this is a SF short story disguised as a predictive editorial in a financial mag. It's a mistake to read this as an editorial disguised as fiction, though it seems to me to be presented that way.
Those of us who read Bruce's work frequently know that he's got a bunch of futures in his head, and he's not revealing which one he's betting on. In fact, since he revealed this one, I'd be willing to wager it's not the one he's wagering on.
I find it interesting how he's borrowed from several of his recent novels, all of which I've enjoyed immensely. From Distraction (my latest favorite) we have the technologically-inclined economic nomads ('technomads?'), i.e. Okies with Cellphones. And he alludes to the social problems that come with life extension technology, as he depicted brilliantly in Holy Fire. I'm sure there's more but I read most of his other fiction so long ago that plots and titles become blurred.
As an engineer who studies complex systems, however, I have to willfully suspend disbelief in this premis that "you can't repeal the business cycle." My regard for this statement, simply put, is that the business cycle is an emergent process of an artificial system, so by altering the system you can indeed "repeal" any cycle you like. You just have to understand what you've created, and where you've let chaos creep in. By using that verb, Bruce skillfuly makes you infer that it's a natural law, unviolable, predestined.
But the unrepealable business cycle is a very good premise for a work of speculative fiction, and I think he could have milked it for more than just a couple thousand words... and he may yet. O
When used in Ohm's Law, as in E=IR, then E represents Electrical Potential, measured in Volts.
When used in Fields and Waves (EE313 iirc) then E, as in "the loop integral of E dl equals 0," is often written in script or boldface, and represents Electric Field strength, in Volts/meter.
And E as in E=MC^2 has already been covered in a prior reply. I think most applications are in Megajoules, though.
Anyway, none of those really apply to the original comment, which was concerned about heat. The applicable law here is named after, erm... Watt, I believe: P=IE. When it comes to resistive heating, applying ohm's law lets us express that as P = I^2 * R. Deriving the units for P is left as an exercise for the student.
I bet What the researchers probably said was "significantly improve processor speed." This is an important point to make because anyone in the semiconductor industry knows that electron lithography is SLOW Well, the P in PREVAIL stands for Projection, and this comment describes how the e-beam isn't scanned, but an electron wavefront, analagous to an optical projection system. So the speed of wafer processing would indeed be increased over that of a focused electron beam. And this would be practically mandatory if you wanted to place 10^10 transistors per die.
Of course, with feature sizes this small, processor speeds would be improved, too. So both interpretations are valid. But I believe they indeed said what they meant.
The Internet Junkbuster does a fantastic job of filtering out banner ads, and can be used to filter cookies as well.
Yes, Junkbusters are great for my NT and Unix machines at work and in the lab. But at home, where I do all the surfing I prefer to keep secret, I run Macintosh. They don't offer anything for that platform.
First some background: In 1988 I was out of work for a whole year, and defaulted on a credit card issued to me in college. So a "writeoff" (whatever that means) appeared on my credit report. The bank never contacted me for the 10 years since the writeoff. I've spent those 10 years rebuilding my credit to the point where I'm considered a "good boy" now, but I've never approached the bank offering to pay the $500 I owed them. And now the same bank is sending me pre-approved credit card applications. I assume that legally, I'm still responsible for the debt, but they have to ask me for it at least once...
OK, now the scam: In the past two years, not one, not two, but three collection agencies have continually sent me mail, claiming to represent the bank that issued the defaulted-upon card. Each of them offers me a chance to "clear my debt" at a deep discount. Granted, the amount of the debt is pretty small, I am willing to pay it, but I have severe doubts as to the credibility of these agencies. At least two of them are scams, and so I haven't acknowledged any of them, for fear of confirming my entry in a scammer's database. When I checked in 1998, none of the three agencies had websites. (maybe I should try again)
My first question, once I realized what was happening, was "How did these people get my name and SSN?" Then I learned how credit agencies will sell your data to just about anyone who can pay the price.
Every one of these letters reads the same: first, I have a short period (10-14 days) in which to reply to get the good deal. Threatening language follows, with vague threats to my credit rating should i fail to respond. The postmark on the letter is typically later than the date on the letter by a significant fraction of the offering period. Next, about three weeks later, comes another letter, stating how I lost my chance, and the entire balance is now due, and making more vehement but still nonspecific threats to my credit rating. Then comes another letter or two, saying that they are going to take action against my credit report. Then silence for a few months, and the cycle repeats.
All three "collectors" use the exact same tactic. It's like they bought the same "collection agency in a box" software kit.
I talked to my lawyer about this and she told me to not do anything until something appears on my credit reports. Only the collector who legitimately owns the debt may report to the credit agency. And even that I can contest, since it is the same debt already reported 10 years ago. So now I collect my credit reports annually (and struggle to read them - damn are they arcane).
But the bottom line is that the credit agencies practically promote this kind of scam by selling the data to people who have no right to it. I wonder how many people have been burned by it?
... in a manner. I first discovered Illuminati BBS shortly after it came back up after the raid: a backup copy on a kludged-together PC with one unreliable modem that wouldn't hang up half the times callers disconnected. But it was still one of the greatest BBSes ever. [nostalgic sigh] In fact, I used the same handle there as I do here.
Anywho, Steve's earliest explanations of the raid, and why it targeted SJG, went roughly as follows:
- BellSouth document stolen by LoD, posted on a BBS
- Document propagated across BBS space
- Document wound up on Loyd's BBS
- SJG raided since (a)Loyd had ties to LoD, and (b)Loyd was also Illuminati BBS sysop
- SS found drafts for a "handbook of computer crime" and used that as an excuse to confiscate everything, even laser printers
Loyd was indeed "the Mentor," but beyond his association with the LoD, I didn't know anything. I did not specifically see or hear of the document being on Illuminati BBS, but I wouldn't be surprised - it could have found its way there in any number of ways. That information was never stated by Steve, or Loyd, or SJG. Also, if I recall correctly, Loyd's own BBS at his home was siezed, too.
SJG did later sue the Feds for (among other things) prior restraint, siezing the book before it was published. If Steve is now implying that they were raided because of the book, then that's indeed a misrepresentation. Good marketing, though.
P.S. Since others are claiming their credit, my own 15 microseconds of fame were for the Slightly Off White Box (the existance of which the government firmly denies fnord).
I've experienced this quite a bit, myself, running 4.7 under NT 4.0, it usually happens after a lot of heavy browsing with lots of windows open.
Quit Navigator and launch the Task Manager. You will see that there is still a "Netscape" task running. Don't ask me why. Kill it and relaunch Navigator.
Voila.
Now if I could just figure out why Netscape 4.7 regularly goes psycho and loads carp from the cache that isn't even related to the page I asked it to load... the only solution I've found to that is to reboot. I'm beginning to think 4.7 is less stable than 4.5 was.
Keep your keyboard as low as you can; tilt it back a little bit if you can, so your wrists are straight. Curl your fingers like a pianist is trained to do. Keep your mousepad as close to your body as you can. Do NOT reach past the keyboard to grab the mouse.
I used to have terrible RSI problems until my employer wized up and installed ergonomic office furniture for anyone who asked for it. Not funky chairs and articulated desks. Just a keyboard tray that fits under the desk surface and a proper chair with lumbar support.
The keyboard tray is wonderful. It's wide enough for me to keep my mousepad there, too. Once I moved the keyboard and mousepad to hover an inch or so above my lap, my wrists steadily improved to the point where I only hurt when I touch-type all day long.
This isn't flamebait, it's a flame. (And probably not a very good one, at that.) Yes, it is inflammatory, but it is also on-topic, putatively insightful, hopefully interesting, yet probably still not worth my fellow Slashdotters' time. But that's what a real flame is, Jon. Take a real look at an e-community and then tell us about it - not the other way around.
It's no wonder you're received with so much hostility here, Jon, when your masturbatory "feature article" is nothing but a gangrenously priapic way for you to retaliate against the email equivalent of a knock-and-run doorbell prank. It can't be anything else because it's shallow, uninsightful, ignores a whole culture of millions of netizens, and seems to be pulled right out of your pud.
A real flame isn't just "FOAD." You're confusing depersonalized hooliganism with a merciless, accurate personal attack designed to elicit a visceral response from the target. Have you ever even heard of Usenet, Jon? Plaintext is so cold and impersonal, the Flame evolved as a means to get someone's attention, to stretch out their virtual sphincter, and most of all, to make them THINK. And of course, given that Usenet is the fertile compost heap of the internet that it is, the Flame grew into an art form. But then you were unaware of that, weren't you? The word 'Usenet' doesn't even appear in your article.
In fact, you didn't consult any other sources at all to prepare your story. You didn't interview someone else who had been viciously flamed. You didn't talk to other journalists about their inbox contents. You didn't hunt down a virtuoso flamethrower from alt.flame. You just sat down with a jar of vaseline and 2.5 minutes later issued forth a "feature article." So that's what they call it these days.
If you had consulted anyone with real experience writing flames, you would have learned that the first rule of flameage is entertain. Presumably, someone else somewhere is going to read the message. Typically, flames are posted in public forums to score the flamethrower a few clique points with the eleets in the forum. And although these eleet wankers probably have a lot going against them, at least they're not stupid. A good flame must make use of the devices found in quality literature and journalism: metaphor, symbolism, humor, imagery, theme... even dialogue. And it must be written well, preferably well beyond a high-school achievement level, with a few $20 words and $40 compound sentances here and there.
As for discouraging free speech - what kind of interspecies pornographic fantasy was distracting you when you wrote that? Flameage is free speech. The only kind of speech that flames discourage is idiotic speech. If a statement in a public forum elicits a flame, then it deserved it. If not, then someone will stand up for the original statement. And if a simple flame discourages an individual from spewing forth future verbage, then it's doing it's job, making the person think before posting.
Flame Off.
Simply put, Jon, flames are the medium of self-regulation in an environment where the S/N ratio is so low it hurts. High-beta negative feedback. It's perfectly suited for electronic communities... hell, the flame evolved here, what else did you expect? Chip and Dale?
Not open hostility. Just derision, mockery, and ridicule for someone who promulgates "creation science" and it's circular "evidence" for pre-ordained conclusions, and then turns around and criticizes science for being mostly "junk."
Scientists are human, so yes, you will find many examples of quackery, and many examples of closed-minded intolerance of other opinons that you can point at as anecdotal evidence to support your predetermined conclusions. But as a group, scientists do not confuse opinion with fact, and few of us claim to know "absolute truth," despite your accusations. In fact, it is the religious community that claims to have a monopoly on the truth, but in your typical intellectualy dishonest mode of argument, scientists are the ones accused of such hubris.
I refuse to tolerate your intolerance. That's what I mean by "go away." If you are willing to ask questions without first formulating the answers, then you are welcome to stay and debate.
In other words, faith is not evidence. So go away.
The reason junk science is so prevalent today is because we (the United States) have failed to adequately educate our population in the area of science so that they can effectively sort out the bullshit from the real science. When your average citizen has no clue about how their bodies function, or how their TV works, or what happens during a solar eclipse, it's no wonder snake oil salesmen are so successful. I kid you not, just yesterday I saw a TV commercial for a pill advertised to increase a woman's bra size...
And people like you and your colleagues are one of the biggest reasons why our citizens are so susceptible to people selling bad science. At every turn you oppose the teaching of any scientific fact that doesn't agree with your precious world view. The Jihad against the theory of natural selection is just the worst example, but across the board, Christian's intolerance of any disagreement with their dogma has stifled the science education of the average person to the point where they can't reliably sort out the wheat from the chaff when it comes to scientific claims.
And then you turn around and point at the resulting niches and cracks where pseudoscience has gained footholds and you use that to support your claim that science in general is unreliable and deceitful. THAT is the ultimate deceit. Those crackpots might just as well be your direct agents for all the mileage you get out of them.
Go away already and let us educate our people so that they can function in a modern society. God knows they can't even program their VCRs, and before long they will have to be able to program their refrigerators just to be able to eat.
Please, do not blame True Christians for their over-sight and corruption of Scripture.
Oh yeah, right. Blame Aristotle and Ptolemy for the catholic church's mistreatment of people like Galileo and Copernicus. How much more evasive and hypocritical can you get??
"Please don't blame us for being small minded and intent on torturing and killing to defend our precious world view from the influence of curiosity, rationalism, and other evils. It's not our fault that we are so repressed we'd rather murder than see the spread of enlightenment. It's the fault of those mischievous Greeks who came up with the pagan ideas that we adopted centuries ago when we stopped thinking for ourselves."
there has yet to be a single instance of a Biblical event being 'debunked' by science
If you go back and look, PFactor did not use the word "debunked," he used the word "questioned," and you're already harassing him for pointing out how religions have historically harassed scientists and other freethinkers. You're exhibiting the same knee-jerk defense of an irrational position as the Roman Catholic Church. Congratulations for illustrating PFactor's point so well.
If you're considering the acquisition of a robotic domestic servant, first consider this cautionary tale, courtesy of Electric Sheep, a "damn fine" SF webzine from New Zealand.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a whole list of good candidates, which would only suffer the same obstacles to the translation as any other genre: too many plot threads, too long, they'd just screw it up, etc.
Personally, I thought Islands in the Net would make an excellent translation to the big screen. It's not as flashy-FX-laden as other stories, but offers plenty of opportunities to work in cyber [ghod I hate that term] elements in a plot that otherwise could have a lot of appeal to the non-SF fan.
OK, so it's just me. [shrug]
That's the History Erasor Button!
Now translations, of course, are a different story...
When NASA issues a request for proposal (RFP), the bidders have a good idea of what the proposed cost should be in order to have a competitive proposal.
In the old days, programs were "cost plus fixed fee" (CPFF). In other words, whatever the cost of the project in the end, the customer (NASA) would pick up the cost, and the contractor would get an additional fee on top of that (gotta make a profit, of course). But there were a lot of abuses of CPFF proposals, so there are few left (mostly DOE nowadays - check out the Savannah River operating contract). I never had the leisure of working on such a program, but I have heard some "war stories" from the older engineers, and some of the abuses were astonishing.
So nowadays, programs are fixed cost. The original idea was to force the contractor to agree to a fixed payment for the program, and that price would have to include any profit that the contractor hoped to make. That lead to problems not with overbidding, as one might think, but to "no bids" and failed contracts due to cost overruns. So it was tweaked and the current policy is a fixed price contract, plus performance awards based on the programmatic, technical, and financial performance of the contractor. The cost of performing the work is agreed upon, and then NASA establishes another amount as a "carrot" to induce the contractor to perform well. If NASA doesn't like the contract performance, they can withhold part (or all) of the carrot.
It works pretty well for NASA, so far, so they haven't changed it in the past 6 years or so... but on the contractor end, it leads to two things: underbidding on contracts to insure some profit, and overworking the engineers to maintain performance.
The underbidding almost always comes in the labor category. In the task estimation process of the proposal, one "chunks" the project into small tasks like "design dunselhickey firmware," "design dunselhickey electronics," "design dunselhickey mechanical and packaging," "integrate and test dunselhickey," where the dunselhickey is an attitude control subsystem, or a sensor instrument, or something. (And I'm ignoring the contractor/subcontractor/vendor hierarchy to keep this somewhat short.) For even the simpler systems like Deep Space 2, these task estimates are huge efforts, and whole forests are sacrificed to them. Anyway, the point is that the contractor management knows ahead of time how much they want to quote for cost, so if the estimators (the engineers) don't come up with a small enough number, the managers (accountants, lawyers, and engineers with 30-year-old training) take a chainsaw to the estimate to trim it down to their target cost. When it comes time to perform the contract, the engineers find that there's not anywhere near enough money budgeted to perform the labor that needs to be done.
Which leads to the next problem: overworked engineers. The contractor who wins the project faces a dilemma as work begins to fall behind schedule. Contingency was never a part of the budget, so any delays or technical problems, even in the early phases, directly impact the bottom line/delivery date. And in almost every contract, there are several areas where the budgeted money to perform the work is grossly inadequate. In order to avoid cost overruns and keep their performance award, management puts more and more demand on the engineers to take shortcuts and work overtime. Unpaid overtime, of course. Which leads to fatigue and the resulting errors and oversights, as tesserae described. And of course, they're always the engineers' fault. (As I like to say, "parts are derated; engineers are berated.")
Faster, Better, Cheaper has only made this problem worse. There's less money budgeted for any given doowidget, but more performance demands. The leadership is out of touch with the technical demands of the performance requirements, and promise more for less. The technology only does what we tell it to do; if we take shortcuts in design and testing, we don't know what we're telling it to do. Engineers want to do things right, and know they can do things right the first time, but the available time (e.g. money) has been shrinking steadily.
But at times like this, when I'm feeling most cynical, I can still take solace in the fact that I'm not working in a competitive commercial environment (like application software) where the situation is even worse. When I see that Win2000 shipped with 64,000 "issues," I know exactly what's going on... the politics and jargon may be a bit different, but it's still management's fault for promising more than they can deliver.
Well, /. will win the community award, easy.
(especially since that's the one all the hacking /.ers will stuff)
But even I plan on voting for Salon in the magazine category. Honestly, it's better than most print magazines. And frequently, Slashdot articles point to Salon features. So there you go
Mark me down for off-topic if you like, but there are already too many people who post without reading up on the issue at hand...
That touches on the part that really annoys me about this case. I think, deep down, it's at the root of everyone's disturbance with these computer makers' choices:
Daewoo and E-Machines made the decision to invest in legal expenses rather than in a creative effort.
In the end, the courts discerned this, and shut them down. It's not just a victory for Apple, it's a victory for Creativity in the marketplace.
And maybe these genome reserchers understood that...
Isn't it clear to everyone that with control over commercial domains and secure transactions this merged entity plans to be positioned to control all of electronic commerce? "Sure," they're thinking, "there are other domain registrars and other trasaction vetters, but their names are so obscure they don't count."
Imagine if the Post Office, Federal Express, Airborne, and UPS combined with Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express to decide who they would allow to conduct business and who they wouldn't. If you wanted to open a mail-order business, you'd only have two options: pay the POFEAUPSVMDAE consortium for the privilege of doing business, or go farm potatoes.
Fortunately, the proposed Verisign/NetSol chimera wouldn't have it locked down as tight as the analogy above does, but as Animats astutely inferred, they wouldn't pay 21 Gigadollars if they didn't see a sure thing. Let's just hope they don't go Guido on us and impose some sort of "protection" fee on either the secure transactions or domain name regsitrations.
Those of us who read Bruce's work frequently know that he's got a bunch of futures in his head, and he's not revealing which one he's betting on. In fact, since he revealed this one, I'd be willing to wager it's not the one he's wagering on.
I find it interesting how he's borrowed from several of his recent novels, all of which I've enjoyed immensely. From Distraction (my latest favorite) we have the technologically-inclined economic nomads ('technomads?'), i.e. Okies with Cellphones. And he alludes to the social problems that come with life extension technology, as he depicted brilliantly in Holy Fire. I'm sure there's more but I read most of his other fiction so long ago that plots and titles become blurred.
As an engineer who studies complex systems, however, I have to willfully suspend disbelief in this premis that "you can't repeal the business cycle." My regard for this statement, simply put, is that the business cycle is an emergent process of an artificial system, so by altering the system you can indeed "repeal" any cycle you like. You just have to understand what you've created, and where you've let chaos creep in. By using that verb, Bruce skillfuly makes you infer that it's a natural law, unviolable, predestined.
But the unrepealable business cycle is a very good premise for a work of speculative fiction, and I think he could have milked it for more than just a couple thousand words... and he may yet. O
When used in Fields and Waves (EE313 iirc) then E, as in "the loop integral of E dl equals 0," is often written in script or boldface, and represents Electric Field strength, in Volts/meter.
And E as in E=MC^2 has already been covered in a prior reply. I think most applications are in Megajoules, though.
Anyway, none of those really apply to the original comment, which was concerned about heat. The applicable law here is named after, erm... Watt, I believe: P=IE. When it comes to resistive heating, applying ohm's law lets us express that as P = I^2 * R. Deriving the units for P is left as an exercise for the student.
Of course, with feature sizes this small, processor speeds would be improved, too. So both interpretations are valid. But I believe they indeed said what they meant.
Yes, Junkbusters are great for my NT and Unix machines at work and in the lab. But at home, where I do all the surfing I prefer to keep secret, I run Macintosh. They don't offer anything for that platform.
Any recommendations, perhaps?
OK, now the scam: In the past two years, not one, not two, but three collection agencies have continually sent me mail, claiming to represent the bank that issued the defaulted-upon card. Each of them offers me a chance to "clear my debt" at a deep discount. Granted, the amount of the debt is pretty small, I am willing to pay it, but I have severe doubts as to the credibility of these agencies. At least two of them are scams, and so I haven't acknowledged any of them, for fear of confirming my entry in a scammer's database. When I checked in 1998, none of the three agencies had websites. (maybe I should try again)
My first question, once I realized what was happening, was "How did these people get my name and SSN?" Then I learned how credit agencies will sell your data to just about anyone who can pay the price.
Every one of these letters reads the same: first, I have a short period (10-14 days) in which to reply to get the good deal. Threatening language follows, with vague threats to my credit rating should i fail to respond. The postmark on the letter is typically later than the date on the letter by a significant fraction of the offering period. Next, about three weeks later, comes another letter, stating how I lost my chance, and the entire balance is now due, and making more vehement but still nonspecific threats to my credit rating. Then comes another letter or two, saying that they are going to take action against my credit report. Then silence for a few months, and the cycle repeats.
All three "collectors" use the exact same tactic. It's like they bought the same "collection agency in a box" software kit.
I talked to my lawyer about this and she told me to not do anything until something appears on my credit reports. Only the collector who legitimately owns the debt may report to the credit agency. And even that I can contest, since it is the same debt already reported 10 years ago. So now I collect my credit reports annually (and struggle to read them - damn are they arcane).
But the bottom line is that the credit agencies practically promote this kind of scam by selling the data to people who have no right to it. I wonder how many people have been burned by it?
Anywho, Steve's earliest explanations of the raid, and why it targeted SJG, went roughly as follows:
- BellSouth document stolen by LoD, posted on a BBS
- Document propagated across BBS space
- Document wound up on Loyd's BBS
- SJG raided since (a)Loyd had ties to LoD, and (b)Loyd was also Illuminati BBS sysop
- SS found drafts for a "handbook of computer crime" and used that as an excuse to confiscate everything, even laser printers
Loyd was indeed "the Mentor," but beyond his association with the LoD, I didn't know anything. I did not specifically see or hear of the document being on Illuminati BBS, but I wouldn't be surprised - it could have found its way there in any number of ways. That information was never stated by Steve, or Loyd, or SJG. Also, if I recall correctly, Loyd's own BBS at his home was siezed, too.
SJG did later sue the Feds for (among other things) prior restraint, siezing the book before it was published. If Steve is now implying that they were raided because of the book, then that's indeed a misrepresentation. Good marketing, though.
P.S. Since others are claiming their credit, my own 15 microseconds of fame were for the Slightly Off White Box (the existance of which the government firmly denies fnord).
Right now it appears to be slashdotted. I guess the prospect of reading "Wuthering Heights" was too much for most slashdotters to pass up.
Me, I just wanted to have sex with a horse.
Quit Navigator and launch the Task Manager. You will see that there is still a "Netscape" task running. Don't ask me why. Kill it and relaunch Navigator.
Voila.
Now if I could just figure out why Netscape 4.7 regularly goes psycho and loads carp from the cache that isn't even related to the page I asked it to load... the only solution I've found to that is to reboot. I'm beginning to think 4.7 is less stable than 4.5 was.
Keep your keyboard as low as you can; tilt it back a little bit if you can, so your wrists are straight. Curl your fingers like a pianist is trained to do. Keep your mousepad as close to your body as you can. Do NOT reach past the keyboard to grab the mouse.
I used to have terrible RSI problems until my employer wized up and installed ergonomic office furniture for anyone who asked for it. Not funky chairs and articulated desks. Just a keyboard tray that fits under the desk surface and a proper chair with lumbar support.
The keyboard tray is wonderful. It's wide enough for me to keep my mousepad there, too. Once I moved the keyboard and mousepad to hover an inch or so above my lap, my wrists steadily improved to the point where I only hurt when I touch-type all day long.
I know, RTFJF, but it's /.ed so I can't check today...
It's no wonder you're received with so much hostility here, Jon, when your masturbatory "feature article" is nothing but a gangrenously priapic way for you to retaliate against the email equivalent of a knock-and-run doorbell prank. It can't be anything else because it's shallow, uninsightful, ignores a whole culture of millions of netizens, and seems to be pulled right out of your pud.
A real flame isn't just "FOAD." You're confusing depersonalized hooliganism with a merciless, accurate personal attack designed to elicit a visceral response from the target. Have you ever even heard of Usenet, Jon? Plaintext is so cold and impersonal, the Flame evolved as a means to get someone's attention, to stretch out their virtual sphincter, and most of all, to make them THINK. And of course, given that Usenet is the fertile compost heap of the internet that it is, the Flame grew into an art form. But then you were unaware of that, weren't you? The word 'Usenet' doesn't even appear in your article.
In fact, you didn't consult any other sources at all to prepare your story. You didn't interview someone else who had been viciously flamed. You didn't talk to other journalists about their inbox contents. You didn't hunt down a virtuoso flamethrower from alt.flame. You just sat down with a jar of vaseline and 2.5 minutes later issued forth a "feature article." So that's what they call it these days.
If you had consulted anyone with real experience writing flames, you would have learned that the first rule of flameage is entertain. Presumably, someone else somewhere is going to read the message. Typically, flames are posted in public forums to score the flamethrower a few clique points with the eleets in the forum. And although these eleet wankers probably have a lot going against them, at least they're not stupid. A good flame must make use of the devices found in quality literature and journalism: metaphor, symbolism, humor, imagery, theme... even dialogue. And it must be written well, preferably well beyond a high-school achievement level, with a few $20 words and $40 compound sentances here and there.
As for discouraging free speech - what kind of interspecies pornographic fantasy was distracting you when you wrote that? Flameage is free speech. The only kind of speech that flames discourage is idiotic speech. If a statement in a public forum elicits a flame, then it deserved it. If not, then someone will stand up for the original statement. And if a simple flame discourages an individual from spewing forth future verbage, then it's doing it's job, making the person think before posting.
Flame Off.
Simply put, Jon, flames are the medium of self-regulation in an environment where the S/N ratio is so low it hurts. High-beta negative feedback. It's perfectly suited for electronic communities... hell, the flame evolved here, what else did you expect? Chip and Dale?
Scientists are human, so yes, you will find many examples of quackery, and many examples of closed-minded intolerance of other opinons that you can point at as anecdotal evidence to support your predetermined conclusions. But as a group, scientists do not confuse opinion with fact, and few of us claim to know "absolute truth," despite your accusations. In fact, it is the religious community that claims to have a monopoly on the truth, but in your typical intellectualy dishonest mode of argument, scientists are the ones accused of such hubris.
I refuse to tolerate your intolerance. That's what I mean by "go away." If you are willing to ask questions without first formulating the answers, then you are welcome to stay and debate.
In other words, faith is not evidence. So go away.
And people like you and your colleagues are one of the biggest reasons why our citizens are so susceptible to people selling bad science. At every turn you oppose the teaching of any scientific fact that doesn't agree with your precious world view. The Jihad against the theory of natural selection is just the worst example, but across the board, Christian's intolerance of any disagreement with their dogma has stifled the science education of the average person to the point where they can't reliably sort out the wheat from the chaff when it comes to scientific claims.
And then you turn around and point at the resulting niches and cracks where pseudoscience has gained footholds and you use that to support your claim that science in general is unreliable and deceitful. THAT is the ultimate deceit. Those crackpots might just as well be your direct agents for all the mileage you get out of them.
Go away already and let us educate our people so that they can function in a modern society. God knows they can't even program their VCRs, and before long they will have to be able to program their refrigerators just to be able to eat.
Oh yeah, right. Blame Aristotle and Ptolemy for the catholic church's mistreatment of people like Galileo and Copernicus. How much more evasive and hypocritical can you get??
"Please don't blame us for being small minded and intent on torturing and killing to defend our precious world view from the influence of curiosity, rationalism, and other evils. It's not our fault that we are so repressed we'd rather murder than see the spread of enlightenment. It's the fault of those mischievous Greeks who came up with the pagan ideas that we adopted centuries ago when we stopped thinking for ourselves."
And then there's this:
It is a mistake to do do.
My God... talk about retentive!
If you go back and look, PFactor did not use the word "debunked," he used the word "questioned," and you're already harassing him for pointing out how religions have historically harassed scientists and other freethinkers. You're exhibiting the same knee-jerk defense of an irrational position as the Roman Catholic Church. Congratulations for illustrating PFactor's point so well.
If you're considering the acquisition of a robotic domestic servant, first consider this cautionary tale, courtesy of Electric Sheep, a "damn fine" SF webzine from New Zealand.