The problem with Night's Dawn and Peter Hamilton's other trilogy is that he seems to get lost about halfway through after an excellent start, can't work out how to end the story (ie there is no way for his characters to 'win'), and so he resorts to a Deus Ex Machina to save them and the story.
After reading Reality Dysfunction, the first of the series, I was completely blown away and thought it was quite possibly one of the best sci-fi books I have ever read. I am currently disappointed though and struggling through the second book as it does seem like he is rambling through inane filler with a few teasers of the only interesting plot points just to keep you reading. I will eventually finish it, but I am thoroughly disappointed with the second book.
It is a shame too because IMHO the first book set it up to be a series rivaling that of Dune.
I suggest you read the book The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.
It goes into detail about how globalization takes a tolerable socialist cesspool for the population and turns it into a horribly miserable crony capitalist cesspool for the starving and unemployed population. It goes into detail about how they claim the investment and jobs will create wealth and rise the nation out of poverty, however they open the doors for foreign competition, infrastructure is built to the sole benefit of the foreign corporations, subsidies are forced to be removed for local industries making them unable to compete and laying off huge swaths of the workforce, and then corporations hire some of them back for pennies on the dollar while paying little taxes.
It is not like this is a big secret though that people are just figuring out. It is just that the people who know this are powerless to stop it from happening. Governments that are non-compliant with free market reforms are generally punished on the currency exchange by large investors and they are not subject to international aid and loans from the IMF and World Bank. Governments quickly become insolvent and buckle at the international pressure to open borders and then that is how it all happens in a nutshell.
I highly suggest picking up the book, you will look at the world in a much different light.
If Brazil is a "dark horse", why does it attract so many investments? Why are so many foreign companies coming to Brazil and why did so many others came to Brazil decades ago?
Yes, we have corruption problems. So does Italy, Greece and a lot of so-called "first world countries".
We have poverty, but it's nothing like Somalia or Vietnam. We still have a long way to go until we catch up to american standards, where the poor are few enough to hide in the ghettos.
So, if you want to know more, just read about it.
Brazil is getting so much investment and attention lately for a very simple geographical reason.
It is within timezones that make communication easier and more suitable to the American business day. Off-shoring of software development and IT to India has been a logistical nightmare and on top of that the best talent in India is commanding more and more money. The payoffs for offshoring to India are becoming smaller and smaller and the logistical problems are a leading cause for IT project failures associated with it.
Brazil is easier to communicate with (corporations get preference on the international network), they have a large population of well educated IT professionals and cost of living is low so they are somewhat more affordable than equivalently skilled American talent.
I own a grey and have been closely monitoring and researching them for awhile now. Some challenge that they are merely simple birds with amusing mimic capabilities however what is discounted is their highly intelligent behavior developed from their unique evolutionary situations.
In the wild monkeys try to steal thier eggs so they learn combinations of shrieking tailored to scare a particular monkey away. I see this behavior with my grey telling my dog to "get down" or "leave it" when he starts sniffing around his cage.
They spend a lot of time around watering holes foraging and such. they are able to locate threats from reflections in the water and indicate they can identify their own reflection. Dogs do not have this cognitive ability.
Further they are experts at cracking complicated nuts making them incredible puzzle solvers. I have given strange nuts and other puzzles to my bird before and noticed him slowly unravelling and breaking it down. They love to tear things apart. Mine has even figured out how to open his lock and roam free around the house.
I disagree that uniforms are a bad idea and yes I work in IT. I was also a member of the armed forces for a time in my life and as a service member I wore a uniform as well.
Would you compare a soldier to a fast-food worker because they both wear a uniform?
When you and your group that you work with everyday wear uniforms it can sometimes reinforce that you feel a member of something, a part of something bigger than yourself all working towards a common goal. If you have pride in yourself and your workplace and what you and your peers do for a living then a uniform should not bother you, in fact it would bring you all closer together.
On the other hand if the company has consistently treated you with disrespect and you aren't particularly happy with what you are doing and where you are at then I can understand how it can be construed as demeaning.
I got a funny one, how about KOTR II (Knights of the Old Republic II). There was this interesting glitch, the whole game!
In their rush to get it to shelves before Christmas they whipped up some terrible inconclusive ending and didn't bother to QA test the thing.
One bug in particular involved a mini-boss killing my wookie and having it lie on the ground screaming for a long period of time. The body never went away and everytime I went near it he screamed again.
Granted what the other driver did was incredibly dangerous and he put the lives of you and your nephew in danger, however you were also being reckless in that you got out of your car to escalate the situation.
It is not your place to play traffic enforcer and by doing that you put yourself in further danger of getting into a fight with a potentially deranged and dangerous individual. Not to mention the fact that there was a kid in the car whom you were responsible for.
If there is one thing that I know from personal experience that there are CRAZY people on the roads everyday, some of them wouldn't think twice to shoot you dead where you stand just for yelling at them.
Figures this double click plugin problem would go away, especially after I had spent my precious development time implementing the stupid external JavaScript workaround on every applet in my companies software.
Then I had to document it, explain it to the non-technical retards in QA and Product Support, and get the blessing from change management to include it in the latest service pack.
As a software developer, I have learned that without little side projects to distract you from the mind numbing development process developed by managers, that we would all go completely crazy.
Management-driven software development is what drives developers to extend their free time and more importantly their imagination and talent to open-source projects and freeware.
I was amazed at what I accomplished on one slow month. I made a Java version of that old Gorilla's game written in QBasic...... just to prove that I COULD!
You are a loser. You can't even spell "collage dropout" right. If there is one thing I can't stand it is when pretentious dropout snobs start complaining about nobody hiring them because they don't have a degree. The rest of us software engineers had to suffer through that bull before we could get a job and so should you.
What just because you think your smart you don't have to play by the rules?
Granted I learned almost NOTHING during my 4 years in school but I played by the rules and got that piece of paper, which is why I am in the game, and your still living with your mom because you believe her when she says you are the smartest boy in the world and that your @$$ is special and different from everyone elses.
They are probably worried about people file sharing books, much like how music is shared now.
Think about public libraries...
What if a public library purchases digital copies of the latest Harry Potter book and decides to distribute it to library members?
With an endless distribution chain the library could lend out infinite copies, eliminating the need to wait 4 months till you get a copy, a common deterrent of getting popular books from the library, and instead buying it from Barnes and Noble.
Music is already easy enough to distribute "illegally", so simple text would be hundreds of times easier. How hard would it be then to obtain e-Book files and figure out how to crack them? Within months of coming out, there will already be software that allows you to rip e-Books and publish content in existing file formats to e-Book format to be easily read from your e-Book.
This is what publishers fear about the technology.
I worked at a company that sounds EXACTLY like the one you are griping about. I was also working at a nameless company where I was brought on as the "computer guy" with the thought that I would some day relinquish the computer duties of the Chief Engineer.
Turns out that the guy was a control freak and everything had to be done exactly his way (the obscenely wrong way). I was never allowed to spend ANY money to fix ANY problems.
Their server closet was a converted bathroom with fans blowing DIRECTLY from the dusty dirty machine shop INTO the server closet. Not to mention that every time the sewer backed up, the drain in the floor would spew raw sewage onto the servers, which would manually require cleaning afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with Night's Dawn and Peter Hamilton's other trilogy is that he seems to get lost about halfway through after an excellent start, can't work out how to end the story (ie there is no way for his characters to 'win'), and so he resorts to a Deus Ex Machina to save them and the story.
After reading Reality Dysfunction, the first of the series, I was completely blown away and thought it was quite possibly one of the best sci-fi books I have ever read. I am currently disappointed though and struggling through the second book as it does seem like he is rambling through inane filler with a few teasers of the only interesting plot points just to keep you reading. I will eventually finish it, but I am thoroughly disappointed with the second book. It is a shame too because IMHO the first book set it up to be a series rivaling that of Dune.
I suggest you read the book The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. It goes into detail about how globalization takes a tolerable socialist cesspool for the population and turns it into a horribly miserable crony capitalist cesspool for the starving and unemployed population. It goes into detail about how they claim the investment and jobs will create wealth and rise the nation out of poverty, however they open the doors for foreign competition, infrastructure is built to the sole benefit of the foreign corporations, subsidies are forced to be removed for local industries making them unable to compete and laying off huge swaths of the workforce, and then corporations hire some of them back for pennies on the dollar while paying little taxes. It is not like this is a big secret though that people are just figuring out. It is just that the people who know this are powerless to stop it from happening. Governments that are non-compliant with free market reforms are generally punished on the currency exchange by large investors and they are not subject to international aid and loans from the IMF and World Bank. Governments quickly become insolvent and buckle at the international pressure to open borders and then that is how it all happens in a nutshell. I highly suggest picking up the book, you will look at the world in a much different light.
All right, mod this flamebait! Whatever!
If Brazil is a "dark horse", why does it attract so many investments? Why are so many foreign companies coming to Brazil and why did so many others came to Brazil decades ago?
Yes, we have corruption problems. So does Italy, Greece and a lot of so-called "first world countries".
We have poverty, but it's nothing like Somalia or Vietnam. We still have a long way to go until we catch up to american standards, where the poor are few enough to hide in the ghettos.
So, if you want to know more, just read about it.
Brazil is getting so much investment and attention lately for a very simple geographical reason. It is within timezones that make communication easier and more suitable to the American business day. Off-shoring of software development and IT to India has been a logistical nightmare and on top of that the best talent in India is commanding more and more money. The payoffs for offshoring to India are becoming smaller and smaller and the logistical problems are a leading cause for IT project failures associated with it. Brazil is easier to communicate with (corporations get preference on the international network), they have a large population of well educated IT professionals and cost of living is low so they are somewhat more affordable than equivalently skilled American talent.
I own a grey and have been closely monitoring and researching them for awhile now. Some challenge that they are merely simple birds with amusing mimic capabilities however what is discounted is their highly intelligent behavior developed from their unique evolutionary situations. In the wild monkeys try to steal thier eggs so they learn combinations of shrieking tailored to scare a particular monkey away. I see this behavior with my grey telling my dog to "get down" or "leave it" when he starts sniffing around his cage. They spend a lot of time around watering holes foraging and such. they are able to locate threats from reflections in the water and indicate they can identify their own reflection. Dogs do not have this cognitive ability. Further they are experts at cracking complicated nuts making them incredible puzzle solvers. I have given strange nuts and other puzzles to my bird before and noticed him slowly unravelling and breaking it down. They love to tear things apart. Mine has even figured out how to open his lock and roam free around the house.
I disagree that uniforms are a bad idea and yes I work in IT. I was also a member of the armed forces for a time in my life and as a service member I wore a uniform as well. Would you compare a soldier to a fast-food worker because they both wear a uniform? When you and your group that you work with everyday wear uniforms it can sometimes reinforce that you feel a member of something, a part of something bigger than yourself all working towards a common goal. If you have pride in yourself and your workplace and what you and your peers do for a living then a uniform should not bother you, in fact it would bring you all closer together. On the other hand if the company has consistently treated you with disrespect and you aren't particularly happy with what you are doing and where you are at then I can understand how it can be construed as demeaning.
I got a funny one, how about KOTR II (Knights of the Old Republic II). There was this interesting glitch, the whole game!
In their rush to get it to shelves before Christmas they whipped up some terrible inconclusive ending and didn't bother to QA test the thing.
One bug in particular involved a mini-boss killing my wookie and having it lie on the ground screaming for a long period of time. The body never went away and everytime I went near it he screamed again.
This nasty virus has caused me to be up working overtime for the past two weeks.
Well one hint to finding the assholes who wrote this virus is the fact that the virus willingly ignores computers originating within the Ukraine.
That narrows it down to about 80 million people. ;-)
1) RTFA
2) Create yet another flying car that has been done and failed countless times before.
3) ????
4) Profit!
In my opinion you were both being reckless.
Granted what the other driver did was incredibly dangerous and he put the lives of you and your nephew in danger, however you were also being reckless in that you got out of your car to escalate the situation.
It is not your place to play traffic enforcer and by doing that you put yourself in further danger of getting into a fight with a potentially deranged and dangerous individual. Not to mention the fact that there was a kid in the car whom you were responsible for.
If there is one thing that I know from personal experience that there are CRAZY people on the roads everyday, some of them wouldn't think twice to shoot you dead where you stand just for yelling at them.
Figures this double click plugin problem would go away, especially after I had spent my precious development time implementing the stupid external JavaScript workaround on every applet in my companies software.
Then I had to document it, explain it to the non-technical retards in QA and Product Support, and get the blessing from change management to include it in the latest service pack.
All for nothing.
As a software developer, I have learned that without little side projects to distract you from the mind numbing development process developed by managers, that we would all go completely crazy.
... just to prove that I COULD!
Management-driven software development is what drives developers to extend their free time and more importantly their imagination and talent to open-source projects and freeware.
I was amazed at what I accomplished on one slow month. I made a Java version of that old Gorilla's game written in QBasic...
You are a loser. You can't even spell "collage dropout" right. If there is one thing I can't stand it is when pretentious dropout snobs start complaining about nobody hiring them because they don't have a degree. The rest of us software engineers had to suffer through that bull before we could get a job and so should you.
What just because you think your smart you don't have to play by the rules?
Granted I learned almost NOTHING during my 4 years in school but I played by the rules and got that piece of paper, which is why I am in the game, and your still living with your mom because you believe her when she says you are the smartest boy in the world and that your @$$ is special and different from everyone elses.
They are probably worried about people file sharing books, much like how music is shared now.
Think about public libraries...
What if a public library purchases digital copies of the latest Harry Potter book and decides to distribute it to library members?
With an endless distribution chain the library could lend out infinite copies, eliminating the need to wait 4 months till you get a copy, a common deterrent of getting popular books from the library, and instead buying it from Barnes and Noble.
Music is already easy enough to distribute "illegally", so simple text would be hundreds of times easier. How hard would it be then to obtain e-Book files and figure out how to crack them? Within months of coming out, there will already be software that allows you to rip e-Books and publish content in existing file formats to e-Book format to be easily read from your e-Book.
This is what publishers fear about the technology.
Sort of reminds me of that cheesy 80's movie churned out by our government propogandists to boost patriotism during the end of the cold war.
Ya know the one...
Where Russians invaded the United States and brilliantly decided to start in Idaho or Colorado or some other north western insignificant state. @_@
I worked at a company that sounds EXACTLY like the one you are griping about. I was also working at a nameless company where I was brought on as the "computer guy" with the thought that I would some day relinquish the computer duties of the Chief Engineer.
Turns out that the guy was a control freak and everything had to be done exactly his way (the obscenely wrong way). I was never allowed to spend ANY money to fix ANY problems.
Their server closet was a converted bathroom with fans blowing DIRECTLY from the dusty dirty machine shop INTO the server closet. Not to mention that every time the sewer backed up, the drain in the floor would spew raw sewage onto the servers, which would manually require cleaning afterwards.
HA! I also only lasted 18 months!