It wasn't that big a deal at the time generally, nor even across my narrow communities of gamers, computer user's groups (remember them?), or video game geeks. Yet all I hear today is about how awesome it was. To whom?
-Puzzled.
Beat me to the punch. It was not awesome, and I honestly think most people who are saying it was awesome are really saying "It was awesome to a lot of [undefined vague general] people, even though it wasn't really awesome to me, but since I don't want to buck the [non-existent] crowd, I too will define it as awesome."
I was 7 when the original Tron movie came out. I was at the time your average kid with a home (TI-99-4A) computer. I read Byte magazine; I programmed a little basic. I was in short exactly the sort of nerd for whom Tron was supposedly created. All of the premises of Tron then were laughable, the plot was trite and boring, and even the graphics weren't anything to write home about (because the technology WAS too new). It was so completely out of the bounds of anything possible (and it was making false and stupid statements about things which we DID know about), that even as a seven year old, I couldn't enjoy the movie. I don't know who actually liked tron. I think maybe it was the gamer/stoner crowd more than the geek/nerd crowd. In any case given the above description of the first movie, I can say that the second movie definitely fully lived up to the first.
Actually, after re-reading your hard "scifi" definition again, I would have to say that it is almost as far off as your other definitions, but in the opposite direction. My personal definition (and that of most reviewers and aficionados) would probably be closer to "Hard sci-fi examines the potential future results of unlikely but theoretically possible events using ONLY known and accepted scientific principles and processes" I would say that any breach of scientific law, no matter how it was explained would push the work from hard science fiction into science fiction. In general hard science fiction tends to focus on the sociopolitical implications of the use or lack of use of a particular technology or technologies, rather than on potential future "discoveries". YMMV
Just because you have personal definitions which you can articulate well, does not mean the rest of the world has to use them as well. You are both linguistically and historically inaccurate in your definitions. Just a few points...
1. SciFi as a term has historically been used almost exclusively to describe science fantasy (Movies, Pulp Magazines, etc. which claim a science cause for some plot devices but which are fundamentally not in line with any known scientific principles). Lovers of Science Fiction have often complained when the term SciFi was applied to "Hard" or "Semi-hard" science fiction, because they didn't want "real" science fiction associated with "scifi".
2. Science Fiction tends to differ from sci-fi, not in the "number of breaches" that are allowed (Your artificial decision that it must be exactly two is so laughable that it's hard to even address this point with a straight face), but in that (and this is not a definition but merely anecdotal evidence) it is A) Fully internally consistent (where many [perhaps even most] sci-fi works are not) and B) It takes the time to give a plausible (not realistic not necessarily extrapolated from known science; but plausible in the context of the work) explanation for any and all differences from science as we know it. This explanation may be cursory ("The principles which enabled the creation of the first star drive were now a common gradeschool subject") and sidereal to the primary plot, or it may be extensive and integral to the plot.
3. You are right on the money with your definition of Hard Science Fiction (There's no such thing as hard "SciFi" as per my historical note above) but it's still your definition not "THE" definition and I could probably give one that is a better fit.
Again I am not claiming to be definitive, but if my thoughts above were taken as definitive they would be both more precise and more accurate than your ludicrous personal definitions.
Actually, the analogy would be that she had the keys for the filing cabinet in a file in the cabinet (Entirely plausible if not probable), then threw out that folder to make space (also plausible if the secretaries I've known are any measure), and finally closed and locked the cabinet and wondered why she couldn't open it.
.oO{I posted a sign that said No Solicitation, No Newspapers, No Flyers - Violators will be shot.
They kept coming.
I stayed home from work on the day the papers were delivered one week. Waited just inside the front door with the shotgun. When pimply-faced jerk showed up, I shoved the shotgun in his face and told him the next time he set foot on my property I was going to shoot first.
They stopped coming.}
The above is a description of a deep-seated fantasy and has not been nor ever will be acted upon by the author of this post... Unless you're the one who keeps delivering the stupid things to my door, in which case, I'm totally serious.
Who can say what PROD01 does when that server may eventually be re-purposed to something other than what it is currently used for; this is a normal and natural evolution of server function in the sysadmin world, but it is still useful to have a tag which sticks to that particular piece of hardware, regardless of where it moves, thus the arbitrary but consistent naming schema.
It helps to have a human-readable/remember-able name for the server instead of a collection of gibberish which, though it may translate eventually into some useful information, is so hard to remember that it takes longer than just looking it up on the chart of server names on the wall. The names must be arbitrary because the server must be able to be repurposed, but the names must be consistent or they do not offer any mnemonic assistance.
We name servers for one group out of one arbitrary category (say mythical monsters) and servers for another group out of another (say SF authors). This allows the name to communicate some information directly (info which is unlikely to change even if the server's role is changed within that group). While all other information can quickly be found on the wiki or a printed out chart, which actually happens faster than deciphering that at13g3d12 is the 12th dev server for group 3 in the at&t datacenter rack 13. (It really is faster to look it up than to decode even that simple of an encoded name.) Finally, for an individual dev working on several projects it is much easier to remember that the billing project is on mothra while the reporting project is on grendel than it is to remember that one is on at13g3d3 and one is on at13g3d4.
My company actually switched from an arbitrary but consistent naming convention to a strictly encoded naming convention and quickly switched back when the loss of efficiency and productivity was actually measurable.
The difference, is that while the total_annual_cost variable should and will never hold anything other than the "total annual cost", HappyZippers may eventually be re-purposed to something other than what it is currently used for; this is a normal and natural evolution of server function in the sysadmin world, but it is useful to have a tag which sticks to that particular piece of hardware, regardless of where it moves.
And for the same reason that we name the variable total_annual_cost instead of c113, it helps to have a human-readable/remember-able name for the server instead of a collection of gibberish which, though it may translate eventually into some useful information, is so hard to remember that it takes longer than just looking it up on the chart of server names on the wall. The names must be arbitrary because the server must be able to be repurposed, but the names must be consistent or they do not offer any mnemonic assistance.
We name servers for one group out of one arbitrary category (say mythical monsters) and servers for another group out of another (say SF authors). This allows the name to communicate some information directly (info which is unlikely to change even if the server's role is changed within that group). While all other information can quickly be found on the wiki or a printed out chart, which actually happens faster than deciphering that at13g3d12 is the 12th dev server for group 3 in the at&t datacenter rack 13. (It really is faster to look it up than to decode even that simple of an encoded name.) Finally, for an individual dev working on several projects it is much easier to remember that the billing project is on mothra while the reporting project is on grendel than it is to remember that one is on at13g3d3 and one is on at13g3d4.
My company actually switched from an arbitrary but consistent naming convention to a strictly encoded naming convention and quickly switched back when the loss of efficiency and productivity was actually measurable.
To me (and IANAL as will be obvious), the VA court seems to have gotten it completely wrong not just with respect to the technological questions but with respect to the basic question of what freedom of speech entails.
Since when did the right to "free speech" include the implicit right to free anonymous speech? Sure you have the right to speak your mind, especial as part of the political process, and certainly you should be able to do so through any reasonable medium to which you have access, and certainly methods which are intrinsically anonymous are not excluded from this right, but that you should be able to do so in such a way that no one knows who is responsible for the speech via a communication medium which is intrinsically not anonymous is almost certainly not the intention of the founding fathers or advantageous to a healthy democracy.
If I choose to shout my political views down main street, I must be allowed to do so (within limits), but that doesn't mean that I can't be required to take off the Halloween mask (unless the mask is intrinsic to the message, and even then in some cases).
I'm sure there will be a hundred responses with case law that presumes to bring anonymous speech within the protection of the first amendment, so let me forestall such responses by saying that regardless of the relevant case-law, from the perspective of a healthy democracy in the 21st century, I think that freedom to speak anonymously should not in fact be considered a right even if it in law currently is considered so. The only valid argument I can see for anonymous speech is that an antagonistic government can know its enemies if anonymous speech is not protected; but a government that chooses to ignore the rights of the people to be free from government censure for political speech will just as quickly ignore their right to anonymous speech regardless of what the constitution or case law may say
.oO{Hey, that sounds about like what we've got right now anyway}
Certainly legality and morality are separate domains; but nevertheless, the law arises out of an attempt to declare what is moral (attempting to newspeak this into a "pragmatic" argument about societal stability doesn't change that fact). The fact that there is often a severe discrepancy between what you and I find to be moral and what the law declares as moral doesn't change that fact.
The reduction I made was designed to point toward a commonality which is indicative of purpose rather than to suggest that somehow all law must therefore be moral by your or my or any objective standard (other than the standard of the law itself). Whether you believe in an objective standard of morality (in the religious sense) or believe in some theory of moral relativity, it still boggles the mind that you can truly believe that the law is anything other than an attempt by shared consensus to declare that which is moral and to enforce behavior according to that code of moral conduct. Again the fact that it is by both your and my standards a failed attempt to declare this moral code doesn't change what it is.
To use your specific counter-examples, I agree that one's body should be one's own and that the state should have no right to legislate it (again depending on the question of moral relativity vs moral absolutism, we might say does not have the right). This does not change the fact that by making it illegal to ingest certain substances or to (to take the example further) kill oneself, the state is infact declaring that such activity is immoral (whether they or correct or not).
Agreed about the namecalling... It was silly and uncalled for.
"it is not the province of the State to declare what is moral"
You sir, are a moron. If one looks at the canon of US law and reduces it to just those things that a majority of the population agrees are good and just laws, you will find that almost all of them very much revolve around declaring what is moral.
Yes. It must be for a web site. --- I think I'll use their service to start a website which offers unlimited web-based hosting for only $5 bucks a month.
Ah, but what if their way is better and you're just too much of a prima donna to see it?
Seriously though, I agree. Unless you're really wanting to hire a computer scientist for some type of semi-pure research project (in which case you'll have much better fitness indicators than antisocial behavior), you're best off avoiding the nerd and finding a good geek.
Re:Laughing? A less happy feeling
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You sir, are an pompous ass without a clue-.
I challenge you to find a linguist (Your high-school English teacher who barely graduated college is not a linguist and is most certainly not an authority on language of any kind [except, of course, to her browbeaten high-school students]) who does not agree that a language is 'defined' by usage. Prescriptive definitions arise out of usage, and as the language evolves they quickly become obsolete. Thus while they may serve as useful references for both learning and for identifying universally acknowledged common usages, they most certainly should not be used as authorities for the proscription of usages. Even French, which attempts to be prescriptive [or rather, which the government of one of the nations which speaks it attempts to prescribe] so as to preserve its identity, is de facto if not de jure defined by usage. It is a primary linguistic principle proven by both repeatable experimentation and extensive observation.
See for instance the definitions of gay, nice, ironic etc. from the OED for just a few examples of words whose meanings have evolved significantly over time.
How about this. I'm shopping with an online merchant who has told me: "Sometimes you're going to get a different price on the final bill than the price advertised when you added the item to your cart." This same merchant is also one that has in the past given me free merchandise as part of a promotion. I see a DVD advertised for buy one get one free. I add it to my cart. Some time later (5 minutes, 5 hours, who cares), I go to checkout. I look at my order carefully. I notice that I have received both DVD's for free! I think "Man ThisCo is one cool company. That's an awesome promotion. I'm gonna do a lot more shopping here in the future." My final total is $26 bucks or so for the book I ordered plus the shipping and handling. I think to myself, "I'm sure glad they had both those DVD's for free in that awesome promotion or I'd need to put them back cause this is all I can afford." I click submit. ThisCo ships me the items. I'm offline for a few days. I receive my order. I open my dvd and give the second to my Mom who also opens hers. I get back online. I see a notice that I must return one of the dvd's "unopened" or be charged. I don't have that money. I don't have an unopened dvd. I operated with ThisCo in good faith, knowing that they DO occasionally give away items for free. You're telling me that ThisCo nevertheless has the right to take the money I don't have from my credit card account WITHOUT my explicit authorization? I might be willing to return one of the opened DVD's because I appreciate the bind that the company is in, but having acted in good faith, I would be madder than a hornet if they tried to forcibly take money from my CC, and you can bet your ass I'd charge it back. And with a printed receipt from the online purchase, plus a packing slip that came with my order, all supporting the fact that ThisCo made the deal I say they made, you can bet any CC company I do business with would support me.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't that big a deal at the time generally, nor even across my narrow communities of gamers, computer user's groups (remember them?), or video game geeks. Yet all I hear today is about how awesome it was. To whom?
-Puzzled.
Beat me to the punch. It was not awesome, and I honestly think most people who are saying it was awesome are really saying "It was awesome to a lot of [undefined vague general] people, even though it wasn't really awesome to me, but since I don't want to buck the [non-existent] crowd, I too will define it as awesome."
I was 7 when the original Tron movie came out. I was at the time your average kid with a home (TI-99-4A) computer. I read Byte magazine; I programmed a little basic. I was in short exactly the sort of nerd for whom Tron was supposedly created. All of the premises of Tron then were laughable, the plot was trite and boring, and even the graphics weren't anything to write home about (because the technology WAS too new). It was so completely out of the bounds of anything possible (and it was making false and stupid statements about things which we DID know about), that even as a seven year old, I couldn't enjoy the movie. I don't know who actually liked tron. I think maybe it was the gamer/stoner crowd more than the geek/nerd crowd. In any case given the above description of the first movie, I can say that the second movie definitely fully lived up to the first.
Actually, after re-reading your hard "scifi" definition again, I would have to say that it is almost as far off as your other definitions, but in the opposite direction. My personal definition (and that of most reviewers and aficionados) would probably be closer to "Hard sci-fi examines the potential future results of unlikely but theoretically possible events using ONLY known and accepted scientific principles and processes" I would say that any breach of scientific law, no matter how it was explained would push the work from hard science fiction into science fiction. In general hard science fiction tends to focus on the sociopolitical implications of the use or lack of use of a particular technology or technologies, rather than on potential future "discoveries". YMMV
1. SciFi as a term has historically been used almost exclusively to describe science fantasy (Movies, Pulp Magazines, etc. which claim a science cause for some plot devices but which are fundamentally not in line with any known scientific principles). Lovers of Science Fiction have often complained when the term SciFi was applied to "Hard" or "Semi-hard" science fiction, because they didn't want "real" science fiction associated with "scifi".
2. Science Fiction tends to differ from sci-fi, not in the "number of breaches" that are allowed (Your artificial decision that it must be exactly two is so laughable that it's hard to even address this point with a straight face), but in that (and this is not a definition but merely anecdotal evidence) it is A) Fully internally consistent (where many [perhaps even most] sci-fi works are not) and B) It takes the time to give a plausible (not realistic not necessarily extrapolated from known science; but plausible in the context of the work) explanation for any and all differences from science as we know it. This explanation may be cursory ("The principles which enabled the creation of the first star drive were now a common gradeschool subject") and sidereal to the primary plot, or it may be extensive and integral to the plot.
3. You are right on the money with your definition of Hard Science Fiction (There's no such thing as hard "SciFi" as per my historical note above) but it's still your definition not "THE" definition and I could probably give one that is a better fit.
Again I am not claiming to be definitive, but if my thoughts above were taken as definitive they would be both more precise and more accurate than your ludicrous personal definitions.
Of course it still breaks down when you ask what would have happened if she had left the keys in the folder and closed and locked it.
Actually, the analogy would be that she had the keys for the filing cabinet in a file in the cabinet (Entirely plausible if not probable), then threw out that folder to make space (also plausible if the secretaries I've known are any measure), and finally closed and locked the cabinet and wondered why she couldn't open it.
.oO{I posted a sign that said No Solicitation, No Newspapers, No Flyers - Violators will be shot.
They kept coming.
I stayed home from work on the day the papers were delivered one week. Waited just inside the front door with the shotgun. When pimply-faced jerk showed up, I shoved the shotgun in his face and told him the next time he set foot on my property I was going to shoot first.
They stopped coming.}
The above is a description of a deep-seated fantasy and has not been nor ever will be acted upon by the author of this post... Unless you're the one who keeps delivering the stupid things to my door, in which case, I'm totally serious.
It helps to have a human-readable/remember-able name for the server instead of a collection of gibberish which, though it may translate eventually into some useful information, is so hard to remember that it takes longer than just looking it up on the chart of server names on the wall. The names must be arbitrary because the server must be able to be repurposed, but the names must be consistent or they do not offer any mnemonic assistance.
We name servers for one group out of one arbitrary category (say mythical monsters) and servers for another group out of another (say SF authors). This allows the name to communicate some information directly (info which is unlikely to change even if the server's role is changed within that group). While all other information can quickly be found on the wiki or a printed out chart, which actually happens faster than deciphering that at13g3d12 is the 12th dev server for group 3 in the at&t datacenter rack 13. (It really is faster to look it up than to decode even that simple of an encoded name.) Finally, for an individual dev working on several projects it is much easier to remember that the billing project is on mothra while the reporting project is on grendel than it is to remember that one is on at13g3d3 and one is on at13g3d4.
My company actually switched from an arbitrary but consistent naming convention to a strictly encoded naming convention and quickly switched back when the loss of efficiency and productivity was actually measurable.
And for the same reason that we name the variable total_annual_cost instead of c113, it helps to have a human-readable/remember-able name for the server instead of a collection of gibberish which, though it may translate eventually into some useful information, is so hard to remember that it takes longer than just looking it up on the chart of server names on the wall. The names must be arbitrary because the server must be able to be repurposed, but the names must be consistent or they do not offer any mnemonic assistance.
We name servers for one group out of one arbitrary category (say mythical monsters) and servers for another group out of another (say SF authors). This allows the name to communicate some information directly (info which is unlikely to change even if the server's role is changed within that group). While all other information can quickly be found on the wiki or a printed out chart, which actually happens faster than deciphering that at13g3d12 is the 12th dev server for group 3 in the at&t datacenter rack 13. (It really is faster to look it up than to decode even that simple of an encoded name.) Finally, for an individual dev working on several projects it is much easier to remember that the billing project is on mothra while the reporting project is on grendel than it is to remember that one is on at13g3d3 and one is on at13g3d4.
My company actually switched from an arbitrary but consistent naming convention to a strictly encoded naming convention and quickly switched back when the loss of efficiency and productivity was actually measurable.
To me (and IANAL as will be obvious), the VA court seems to have gotten it completely wrong not just with respect to the technological questions but with respect to the basic question of what freedom of speech entails.
Since when did the right to "free speech" include the implicit right to free anonymous speech? Sure you have the right to speak your mind, especial as part of the political process, and certainly you should be able to do so through any reasonable medium to which you have access, and certainly methods which are intrinsically anonymous are not excluded from this right, but that you should be able to do so in such a way that no one knows who is responsible for the speech via a communication medium which is intrinsically not anonymous is almost certainly not the intention of the founding fathers or advantageous to a healthy democracy.
If I choose to shout my political views down main street, I must be allowed to do so (within limits), but that doesn't mean that I can't be required to take off the Halloween mask (unless the mask is intrinsic to the message, and even then in some cases).
I'm sure there will be a hundred responses with case law that presumes to bring anonymous speech within the protection of the first amendment, so let me forestall such responses by saying that regardless of the relevant case-law, from the perspective of a healthy democracy in the 21st century, I think that freedom to speak anonymously should not in fact be considered a right even if it in law currently is considered so. The only valid argument I can see for anonymous speech is that an antagonistic government can know its enemies if anonymous speech is not protected; but a government that chooses to ignore the rights of the people to be free from government censure for political speech will just as quickly ignore their right to anonymous speech regardless of what the constitution or case law may say
.oO{Hey, that sounds about like what we've got right now anyway}
The reduction I made was designed to point toward a commonality which is indicative of purpose rather than to suggest that somehow all law must therefore be moral by your or my or any objective standard (other than the standard of the law itself). Whether you believe in an objective standard of morality (in the religious sense) or believe in some theory of moral relativity, it still boggles the mind that you can truly believe that the law is anything other than an attempt by shared consensus to declare that which is moral and to enforce behavior according to that code of moral conduct. Again the fact that it is by both your and my standards a failed attempt to declare this moral code doesn't change what it is.
To use your specific counter-examples, I agree that one's body should be one's own and that the state should have no right to legislate it (again depending on the question of moral relativity vs moral absolutism, we might say does not have the right). This does not change the fact that by making it illegal to ingest certain substances or to (to take the example further) kill oneself, the state is infact declaring that such activity is immoral (whether they or correct or not).
Agreed about the namecalling... It was silly and uncalled for.
"it is not the province of the State to declare what is moral"
You sir, are a moron. If one looks at the canon of US law and reduces it to just those things that a majority of the population agrees are good and just laws, you will find that almost all of them very much revolve around declaring what is moral.
Yes. It must be for a web site. --- I think I'll use their service to start a website which offers unlimited web-based hosting for only $5 bucks a month.
Seriously though, I agree. Unless you're really wanting to hire a computer scientist for some type of semi-pure research project (in which case you'll have much better fitness indicators than antisocial behavior), you're best off avoiding the nerd and finding a good geek.
You sir, are an pompous ass without a clue-.
I challenge you to find a linguist (Your high-school English teacher who barely graduated college is not a linguist and is most certainly not an authority on language of any kind [except, of course, to her browbeaten high-school students]) who does not agree that a language is 'defined' by usage. Prescriptive definitions arise out of usage, and as the language evolves they quickly become obsolete. Thus while they may serve as useful references for both learning and for identifying universally acknowledged common usages, they most certainly should not be used as authorities for the proscription of usages. Even French, which attempts to be prescriptive [or rather, which the government of one of the nations which speaks it attempts to prescribe] so as to preserve its identity, is de facto if not de jure defined by usage. It is a primary linguistic principle proven by both repeatable experimentation and extensive observation.
See for instance the definitions of gay, nice, ironic etc. from the OED for just a few examples of words whose meanings have evolved significantly over time.
A quick google search would have revealed to you plenty of authorities on the subject.
How about the following two:
The University of Massachusetts at Amherst is hardely "some other dude on SlashDot or GeoCities or IBoughtAnOfficialLookingDomain.org"
The Law Review at Chicago Kent points out (albeit indirectly) the invalidity of your claim specifically with respect to the law
How about this. I'm shopping with an online merchant who has told me: "Sometimes you're going to get a different price on the final bill than the price advertised when you added the item to your cart." This same merchant is also one that has in the past given me free merchandise as part of a promotion. I see a DVD advertised for buy one get one free. I add it to my cart. Some time later (5 minutes, 5 hours, who cares), I go to checkout. I look at my order carefully. I notice that I have received both DVD's for free! I think "Man ThisCo is one cool company. That's an awesome promotion. I'm gonna do a lot more shopping here in the future." My final total is $26 bucks or so for the book I ordered plus the shipping and handling. I think to myself, "I'm sure glad they had both those DVD's for free in that awesome promotion or I'd need to put them back cause this is all I can afford." I click submit. ThisCo ships me the items. I'm offline for a few days. I receive my order. I open my dvd and give the second to my Mom who also opens hers. I get back online. I see a notice that I must return one of the dvd's "unopened" or be charged. I don't have that money. I don't have an unopened dvd. I operated with ThisCo in good faith, knowing that they DO occasionally give away items for free. You're telling me that ThisCo nevertheless has the right to take the money I don't have from my credit card account WITHOUT my explicit authorization? I might be willing to return one of the opened DVD's because I appreciate the bind that the company is in, but having acted in good faith, I would be madder than a hornet if they tried to forcibly take money from my CC, and you can bet your ass I'd charge it back. And with a printed receipt from the online purchase, plus a packing slip that came with my order, all supporting the fact that ThisCo made the deal I say they made, you can bet any CC company I do business with would support me.