And more importantly, it provides a ground floor for new authors to join Science Fiction and refine their craft.
As far as the glory days of Sci-Fi, you really aren't going to get them back. Computers, Relativity and Quantumn Mechanics aren't vague incantations that authors can wave about and conjure stories from. These items that were science fiction back in the Golden Age, are today common place. Quantumn mechanics defines the size of computer chips. Our understanding of Relativity (special and general) made the GPS system possible. Computers are so common, that much of what they run aren't considered computer applications anymore.
Television and movies have also warped the public's taste for material. Odds are, if you can think of it, there is a short story, 2 novels, 3 B-movies, an episode of Star Trek, and a feature length movie that have already explored the concept to death. I swear, Sci-Fi is more stamp collecting than imagination these days. Even when someone comes up with a new idea, the first thing critics say is "Bradberry did it better in..."
Sci-Fi has, for better or for worse, morphed into just another Genre of literature. Which I say is for the better, because it means that authors can concentrate more on story telling than worry about wowing the audience with some new gadget.
I have a confession to make. My employer has an old fashioned 'we will pay you until you die' pension. I also have pumped enough into social security that, assuming I'm not servicing some massive amount of debt, I and my wife will be quite comfortable.
As far as taxes go, up until my wife started working again I was getting nearly everything I was paying back in deductions. Kids and mortgages are great for that. (Alas none of said deductions figure into state and local taxes. Nor would the fantasy 'net' income after paying into a 401k.)
I'm not really expecting all that much out of retirement. A small house in the city. Enough dough to keep it maintained. A little pocket change to out to dinner a few nights a week. And a little aside to fly out to see the kids and grands on the holidays. All of that can be accomplished with social security and a part time job. I don't see myself as the sleep in golf playing type. I'd be dead in a year from boredom.
Besides, I'm absolutely paranoid about the Stock market. It's a money game. And every money game has a patsy. If you don't know who the patsy is, odds are you are the patsy.
You have obviously never read "The Hanging Tree" nor molled over the implications of what happens when law enforcement can make and selectively enforce rules about indecency.
The Supreme Court has already ruled that ficticious stories and simulated, animated, and otherwise made up stuff is perfectly LEGAL. The majority argument is essentially that to rule otherwise would make the government thought police.
The only legal justification for cracking down on real child porn (Again from SCOTUS case law) is the fact that real children where exploited in the production. And allowing it to be distributed, and worse, for someone else to be able to profit from it, makes the exploitation all the worse.
You will get no argument from me about how sick and depraved fiction depicting rape and child molestation is. But the same arguments could equally be applied by make just about anything the powers that be disagree with 'indecent.' That includes alternate religions, certain lifestyle choices, even stuff that everyday folks would scratch their heads and go 'huh?" about.
Believe it or not, at the beginning of the 20th century the Post Office used to open everyone's mail and screen out indecent material. Up to and including love letters, anatomy books, and art. All of these supreme court cases about indecency stem from that era, and from the efforts of everyday folks to be able to communicate with one another and not have big brother opening their mail.
This particular 30 year old is capable of doing math and comprehending compound interest. At this point most of us are in the hole for tens of thousands from college. Then we buy a house that puts us in the hole for hundreds of thousands. The interest rates on both would eat alive any interest earned in a conservative bond type investment portfolio. So you are basically proposing that instead of paying stuff off, we should dump money into what is essentially a baby boomer lottery. We pay into the stock market, they cash out, we are left holding worthless pieces of paper.
That is unless the routers on the Net are still working on the assumption that the shortest route is across the Level 3 / Cogent border. While the internet at large can be quite resilient, a sudden change like this can take days to sort themselves out.
I'm having a funny scene involving Neo and the kitchen staff at Ikea playing through my mind.
Neo: It's not the one?
Oracle: Sorry kid. You've got the right product, but you are waiting for something.
Neo: Like what?
Oracle: Like for this coupon to be valid. It's not good for another week.
Amen. Peeps, there are control freaks out there (myself included) that really DON'T want my database engine massaging the data. I just want it to store what I give it, and recall what I ask of it quickly.
Anything more sophisticated than that is handled by the program. Mostly because any of us who have been doing the for a while know that when you are tracing a problem, haveing Peter outguess Paul leads to disaster. Documenting my software is hard enough without explaining the "data gnomes" that live in the stored procedures.
And don't bother arguing with me. I've been there. I've been working with this crud since the days of DBASE and do-it-yourself hash tables in C. If that makes me a fuddy duddy... well so be it. I get my paycheck at the end of the week whether you agree with me or you don't.
Actually, I don't know why they are bothering with 802.11 and blue tooth. You have stations broadcasting at thousands of watts from fixed locations. They can be detected for hundreds of miles in every direction. Why not key off of commercial FM, AM, and Television stations?
Granted, broadcast stations in different markets do use the same signals. And in many markets many of the broadcast towers are in one or two locations. (I.E. TV hill.) But with a little creativity, and a few manually keyed bits of data (like what city you are starting in) you could put something together.
My thought is to use a quad of diversity antennaes to give a rough sense of direction, tied to a database of FCC licensed broadcast towers with Lat/Long coordinates.
Radio Geeks, what is a good design for a direction finder? Preferably solid state.
Re:Can I use this to find dna-paterniti-testing?
on
Wireless Positioning
·
· Score: 1
Not until you reactivate your Paypal account after the fradulent activity that was recorded as coming from...
And www.plazes.com is building initial database of such beacon point locations. It could have some pretty cool uses, provided that privacy concerns are adequately addressed.
Most of the applications that come to my mind require that privacy concerns haven't.
The tricks the GPS use are perfectly applicable for a terrestrial installation. The only caveat is that you will need contact with at least 4 towers for he math to work out. You are right, microseconds is too course a resolution to work out a position. You really need time in nanoseconds.
Or you just need to switch to ultrasonics. The speed of sound propagation in air is on the order of hundreds of miles per hour, instead of hundreds of thousands.
Oh really. And what part of "Windows Update" did you fail to notice on you MS Boxen?
For the record, if you know what you are doing (and fairly certain of the hardware you will use) you compile your Kernel once and are done. I have a Gentoo box that's been running on the same Kernel for well nigh 3 years!
And if you use the Kernel that came with your distro, why would you need to compile the puppy at all?
Despite numerous cases of dumping, the Bush administration sat on its hands and did nothing.
The war in Iraq has put off most of our Allies
Backing out of numerous treaties has made other countries think twice about doing business with us
Heavy handed practices by our customs agents has sparked outrage around the world
YOU must have missed the recordings of FEMA promising the sun, the moon, and 7 of the planets to the Mayor of New Orleans. And the follow up calls a few days later when nothing happened. And he follow up calls a few weeks later when critical supplies were STILL not showing up.
Sure there are less than a thousand bodies in NOLA. But that still means 960+ people died in a flood we knew was coming!
Yup, we're just a bunch of reclusive communists that refuse to nanny our citizens.
No, we are a bunch of stupid sheep who are sitting by while our collective resources are being dismantled, and replaced by "Faith Based Charities" and "For Profit Entities".
The article was a bit light on details. Perhaps someone could enlighten me as to exactly why this is better than existing log-structured filesystems, such as NetBSD's LFS.
Logs structures are suceptible to termites, carpenter ants, and various forms of rot.
The definition of a scoundral is one who, when the facts are against him but the law is on his side pounds on the Law. When the law is against him and the facts are on his side, he pounds the facts. And when the facts are against him and the law his against him, he pounds the table.
Liberals are mad because he is a Big Brother imperialist with Fascist overtones.
That and he made us an outsider in foreign relations, turned out economy into a laughing stock, and loaded Federal agencies full of cronies who happily fiddle while people are dying, getting screwed over by big business, and have their livelyhoods shipped overseas.
Just hook it up while someone is gone or not paying attention and disguise it in a plant or something like that. Imagine their surprise when the plan starts "Babbling" back to them.
I don't know why Mel dove out the window. He had just gotten back from medical leave for a nervous breakdown, and was taking a call...
I have one better. VNC to a coworker's machine, and start a Rap/Hip Hop/Death Metal play list on his/her workstation with the volume cranked all the way up. Pick a different victim for each phone call, and people will too busy playing "whack-a-mole" with whatever is blasting the din to listen in on your conversation.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as the glory days of Sci-Fi, you really aren't going to get them back. Computers, Relativity and Quantumn Mechanics aren't vague incantations that authors can wave about and conjure stories from. These items that were science fiction back in the Golden Age, are today common place. Quantumn mechanics defines the size of computer chips. Our understanding of Relativity (special and general) made the GPS system possible. Computers are so common, that much of what they run aren't considered computer applications anymore.
Television and movies have also warped the public's taste for material. Odds are, if you can think of it, there is a short story, 2 novels, 3 B-movies, an episode of Star Trek, and a feature length movie that have already explored the concept to death. I swear, Sci-Fi is more stamp collecting than imagination these days. Even when someone comes up with a new idea, the first thing critics say is "Bradberry did it better in..."
Sci-Fi has, for better or for worse, morphed into just another Genre of literature. Which I say is for the better, because it means that authors can concentrate more on story telling than worry about wowing the audience with some new gadget.
As far as taxes go, up until my wife started working again I was getting nearly everything I was paying back in deductions. Kids and mortgages are great for that. (Alas none of said deductions figure into state and local taxes. Nor would the fantasy 'net' income after paying into a 401k.)
I'm not really expecting all that much out of retirement. A small house in the city. Enough dough to keep it maintained. A little pocket change to out to dinner a few nights a week. And a little aside to fly out to see the kids and grands on the holidays. All of that can be accomplished with social security and a part time job. I don't see myself as the sleep in golf playing type. I'd be dead in a year from boredom.
Besides, I'm absolutely paranoid about the Stock market. It's a money game. And every money game has a patsy. If you don't know who the patsy is, odds are you are the patsy.
The Supreme Court has already ruled that ficticious stories and simulated, animated, and otherwise made up stuff is perfectly LEGAL. The majority argument is essentially that to rule otherwise would make the government thought police.
The only legal justification for cracking down on real child porn (Again from SCOTUS case law) is the fact that real children where exploited in the production. And allowing it to be distributed, and worse, for someone else to be able to profit from it, makes the exploitation all the worse.
You will get no argument from me about how sick and depraved fiction depicting rape and child molestation is. But the same arguments could equally be applied by make just about anything the powers that be disagree with 'indecent.' That includes alternate religions, certain lifestyle choices, even stuff that everyday folks would scratch their heads and go 'huh?" about.
Believe it or not, at the beginning of the 20th century the Post Office used to open everyone's mail and screen out indecent material. Up to and including love letters, anatomy books, and art. All of these supreme court cases about indecency stem from that era, and from the efforts of everyday folks to be able to communicate with one another and not have big brother opening their mail.
Where do I sign?
That is unless the routers on the Net are still working on the assumption that the shortest route is across the Level 3 / Cogent border. While the internet at large can be quite resilient, a sudden change like this can take days to sort themselves out.
Neo: It's not the one?
Oracle: Sorry kid. You've got the right product, but you are waiting for something.
Neo: Like what?
Oracle: Like for this coupon to be valid. It's not good for another week.
Anything more sophisticated than that is handled by the program. Mostly because any of us who have been doing the for a while know that when you are tracing a problem, haveing Peter outguess Paul leads to disaster. Documenting my software is hard enough without explaining the "data gnomes" that live in the stored procedures.
And don't bother arguing with me. I've been there. I've been working with this crud since the days of DBASE and do-it-yourself hash tables in C. If that makes me a fuddy duddy... well so be it. I get my paycheck at the end of the week whether you agree with me or you don't.
Database (n): A non-volitile cache between your application and your backup medium.
(As I curl into a fetal position thinking about re-indexing files...)
And Smaeland, your forgot Smaeland!
emerge -u world...
Sorry your profile is no longer supported...
telinit 1
mkfs /dev/hda3
Granted, broadcast stations in different markets do use the same signals. And in many markets many of the broadcast towers are in one or two locations. (I.E. TV hill.) But with a little creativity, and a few manually keyed bits of data (like what city you are starting in) you could put something together.
My thought is to use a quad of diversity antennaes to give a rough sense of direction, tied to a database of FCC licensed broadcast towers with Lat/Long coordinates.
Radio Geeks, what is a good design for a direction finder? Preferably solid state.
Not until you reactivate your Paypal account after the fradulent activity that was recorded as coming from...
Most of the applications that come to my mind require that privacy concerns haven't.
}:D
Or you just need to switch to ultrasonics. The speed of sound propagation in air is on the order of hundreds of miles per hour, instead of hundreds of thousands.
For the record, if you know what you are doing (and fairly certain of the hardware you will use) you compile your Kernel once and are done. I have a Gentoo box that's been running on the same Kernel for well nigh 3 years!
And if you use the Kernel that came with your distro, why would you need to compile the puppy at all?
Join the Non-Sequitor club. We don't make sense, who wants Pizza?
Despite numerous cases of dumping, the Bush administration sat on its hands and did nothing.
The war in Iraq has put off most of our Allies
Backing out of numerous treaties has made other countries think twice about doing business with us
Heavy handed practices by our customs agents has sparked outrage around the world
YOU must have missed the recordings of FEMA promising the sun, the moon, and 7 of the planets to the Mayor of New Orleans. And the follow up calls a few days later when nothing happened. And he follow up calls a few weeks later when critical supplies were STILL not showing up.
Sure there are less than a thousand bodies in NOLA. But that still means 960+ people died in a flood we knew was coming!
Yup, we're just a bunch of reclusive communists that refuse to nanny our citizens.
No, we are a bunch of stupid sheep who are sitting by while our collective resources are being dismantled, and replaced by "Faith Based Charities" and "For Profit Entities".
You know, F'ed is the last state I want to see my file system in.
Logs structures are suceptible to termites, carpenter ants, and various forms of rot.
The definition of a scoundral is one who, when the facts are against him but the law is on his side pounds on the Law. When the law is against him and the facts are on his side, he pounds the facts. And when the facts are against him and the law his against him, he pounds the table.
That and he made us an outsider in foreign relations, turned out economy into a laughing stock, and loaded Federal agencies full of cronies who happily fiddle while people are dying, getting screwed over by big business, and have their livelyhoods shipped overseas.
Yeah, I think that about sums it up.
I don't know why Mel dove out the window. He had just gotten back from medical leave for a nervous breakdown, and was taking a call...
So it was Kissenger who blanked out those tapes!
I have one better. VNC to a coworker's machine, and start a Rap/Hip Hop/Death Metal play list on his/her workstation with the volume cranked all the way up. Pick a different victim for each phone call, and people will too busy playing "whack-a-mole" with whatever is blasting the din to listen in on your conversation.