Desk Attendent: Can I have your passport and body fluid sample please...
Phileas Fogg: (Grumble)
Attendent: I'm sorry Mr. Fogg, you seem to be on our don't fly list.
Phileas Fogg: How on Earth? I just landed here!
Attendent: I'm sorry Mr. Fogg, the authorities should be here in a minute or two to hopelessly delay you...
Phileas Fogg: (Muttering to himself) Sure, take the airplane Phileas, it'll be faster than the train, he said. NO, I've got to see Boston. Couldn't be content to cut through Canada, Noooooo...
Jules Verne, by far. He was a Science Fiction writer back before science fiction was even a Genre.
He predicted nuclear submarines, including most of technologies (like CO2 scrubbers) that are used in them. Granted, he was a little off on the battering ram type of attack.
He predicted man would go to the moon atop a specially designed cannon shell. Okay, we didn't end up using a cannon, but all of our modern rockets decended from ICBMs. The Apollo lander was a glorified bomb payload atop a specially designed ballistic missile.
Well, that's because the signal attenuation is horrible beyond a few million light-years. And that's assuming you have your quanta properly entangled.
You also have the fact that a lot of telco providers are piggybacked on the same ancible. Essentially between here and Tau Ceti is one giant broadcast storm. Granted My provider has been running a few parallel feeds, but trying to pull pages from Sol III across AUNET is painful at peak times.
There are some day's I've contemplating sending transmissions by radio, they might get there quicker.
Don't mix science fiction and pulp fiction. True science fiction uses fancy devises to tell a story about people. Pulp use people to tell a story about fancy devices.
What made Asimov's stuff great (IMHO) was not that it was about robots, it was about how robots affect people. The entire Foundation series was ALL about people (granted there were a lot of really cool devices.)
Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 was so compelling because of the interaction between the crew of the Discovery and the ship (embodied as HAL). Lem Stanislaw's Solaris has humans trying to understand a completely foriegn intelligence. Even Heinlein's Starship Troopers was more a book about humans in war than about the technology they battled with. And while we all thought the Simulator was cool in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, the story was really about Ender Wiggins and his experiences growing up as a genious.
Ancible networks are very bandwidth constrained, and troubles arise when two sides of the conversation are in different frames of reference.
My nearest CO is Epsilon Centari, and the bill per month is enough to choke a horse. But hey, Andorian porn cannot be described, it has to be experienced.
Fulchester has actually isolated a new element that may be of interest:
The heaviest element known to science was recently discovered by researchers at the University of Fulchester. The element, tentatively named Administratium, has no protons or electrons and thus has an atomic number of 0. However, it does have 1 neutron, 125 assistant neutrons, 75 vice neutrons and 111 assistant vice neutrons. This gives it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by a force that involves the continuous exchange of meson-like particles called morons.
Since it has no electrons, Administratium is inert. However, it can be detected chemically as it impedes every reaction it comes in contact with. According to the discoverers, a minute amount of Administratium caused one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than one second. Administratium has a normal half-life of approximately three years, at which time it does not actually decay but instead undergoes a reorganisation in which assistant neutrons, vice neutrons and assistant vice neutrons exchange places. Some studies have shown that the atomic mass actually increases after each reorganisation.
Research at other laboratories indicates that Administratium occurs naturally in the atmosphere. It tends to concentrate at certain points such as government agencies, large corporations and universities and can usually be found in the newest, best appointed and best maintained buildings.
Scientists point out that Administratium is known to be toxic at any level of concentration and can easily destroy any productive reaction where it is allowed to accumulate. Attempts are being made to determine how Administratium can be controlled to prevent irreversible damage, but results to date are not promising.
Based on an unoriginal earwig forwarded by Sue Sinclair.
Kind or like a project I had up on Auxons (machines that can build copies of themselves.) It's a great Idea, now where do you get the capital outlay, engineering knowhow, and government permits.
We still haven't gotten a human out of this planet's orbit. The expendibles required for a space journey increase geometrically with the distance (or rather duration) of the journey. A moon colony is doable, arguably more doable than a space station, you can use local material. A mars colony is fantasy barring some radical new technology that provides abundant power in a small package, that doesn't require a large fuel tank. Okay, a conventional nuclear reactor would do it. Hey wait a minute...
You see, in the 60's the idea was to get to the Moon. Today it's to exercise technology. Then technology was a means to and end. Today, technology IS the end.
Think about it, we've had perfectly working mainframes since the 70's. Dumb terminals ran over conventional phone lines. We replaced a 5 million dollar centrally managed machine with 50 million dollars of desktop PC's that are paperwieghts at the end of 3 years, and require a complete rewiring of every office, home, and school.
Now that we have a PC on every desk, we are dumbing them down to basic dumb terminals again, served by million dollar centrally managed machines. Don't believe me? What are you reading this on...
I swear the whole reason no one has invented a time machine has been to allow humanity to at least ATTEMPT to do something before it is pronounced to be wrong.
Reporter: Mr. Newton, we have just come back from the future and discovered that your Physics will be found out to be wrong on 300 years time by a patent clerk in Germany. What do you have to say to your life's work being plundered by the huns? After all Plato's work was much simpler and it lasted 2000 years.
Blame NASA all you want. It's congress the writes the checks. And congress has been shortchanging NASA since the 70's. You want to know why the Shuttle is a camel? All of the budget cuts during the design process.
Now tell me, when was the last time you heard of the Air Force having to scrap a major design feature from its next bomber? The Navy having to skip designing lifeboats into it's next destroyer? People bitch about the utter lack of safety features on the shuttle, but they fail to realize they were present but the budget as provided by congress didn't allow for them.
Nasa already DID consult the compact car makers. If you ever looked into the design of the Shuttle's engines, you would see it's the engine from the Saturn V with a supercharger, performance tailpipe, nitrous, and chrome heads.
No, really. They took a disposable high-performance engine, tried to make it re-usable while boosting the performace 40%. They have to be taken apart and rebuilt almost every launch.
Of course Education and Health insurance ARE big ticket items in America. (Says the man who gets a hunk of paycheck taken out for health insurace and owes more for student loans than most people owe on their car.)
Given my druthers, I'd rather pay it in taxes. At least I wouldn't feel so ripped off by the interest rate.
Tech support by phone can often be outsourced, but tech support for a corporation's employees requires someone who can physically reach the machine.
The push to return to the mainframe to get us back to dumb terminals is in my head then.
Face it folks, it doesn't matter how good a job you do anymore. You will eventually be replaced by someone in another country who will work for a fraction of your salary, a monopolistic contract firm, or (eventually) a robot/andriod/AI.
And I should add that 2/3 of the american economy is consumer spending. Pray tell how on earth are consumers going to spend anything if there are no decent paying jobs to be had?
As much as I hate the current regime, there is nothing that leads me to that conclusion. Not even for a minute.
That said, if evidence WERE found the undeniably placed the orchestration of the entire 9/11 attack at the feet of the White House, I believe congress would hold a little "Tribunal" action of its own.
Article 1, Section 3 of the Constitution:
...
The Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments. When sitting for that purpose, they shall be on oath or affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two thirds of the members present.
Judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States: but the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.
Basically congress can throw them out of office. Once out of office, they can be tried for any related crimes.
As far as the populice goes, you would see the same sort of reaction as happened during Nixon's downfall. Shock. Dogged following the events of the trial while it's going on. Grumblings afterward. Dinner party conversations for the next decade, and finally utterly forgetting what happened.
These people can generate their own funds, possibly by selling some of the valuable information they collect to various marketing organizations. With the death of investigative reporting, who is going to catch them this time?
Fark or the Drudge report I suppose, followed by Slashdot (Twice). I think the informant will pick a codename similar to the 70s era "Deep Throat". Try to find Deep Throat on the internet. The first 400000 links are porn. I suspect he/she will be "Penis Enlargement." Indeed, they are sending coded messages to everyone in America.
... And he says "black projects don't exist" point blank when I have friends who work on them, and have interviewed for them myself...
Man, you can't say anything on the Internet these days. You say the sky is blue and someone in Tunesia is quick to point out that where he lives it is mostly pink from the dust kicked up by the desert. You say 2+2=4 and some smart ass will say that answer is really 11 in base 3.
How am I supposed to combat first hand fact with my ill-concieved simplistic notions of the world?
Slashdot Mirror
And people look at me like I'm wearing a tin-foil cap.
Now all we need is an ANY key.
Most network admins are too portly and would sheer CAT-5 cable. Better to use Fiber-Optic cable. It has a higher tensile strength.
That's right up there with William Gibson's scheme to hack the bank and steal a penny from randomly selected accounts.
He predicted nuclear submarines, including most of technologies (like CO2 scrubbers) that are used in them. Granted, he was a little off on the battering ram type of attack.
He predicted man would go to the moon atop a specially designed cannon shell. Okay, we didn't end up using a cannon, but all of our modern rockets decended from ICBMs. The Apollo lander was a glorified bomb payload atop a specially designed ballistic missile.
Well, that's because the signal attenuation is horrible beyond a few million light-years. And that's assuming you have your quanta properly entangled.
You also have the fact that a lot of telco providers are piggybacked on the same ancible. Essentially between here and Tau Ceti is one giant broadcast storm. Granted My provider has been running a few parallel feeds, but trying to pull pages from Sol III across AUNET is painful at peak times.
There are some day's I've contemplating sending transmissions by radio, they might get there quicker.
What made Asimov's stuff great (IMHO) was not that it was about robots, it was about how robots affect people. The entire Foundation series was ALL about people (granted there were a lot of really cool devices.)
Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 was so compelling because of the interaction between the crew of the Discovery and the ship (embodied as HAL). Lem Stanislaw's Solaris has humans trying to understand a completely foriegn intelligence. Even Heinlein's Starship Troopers was more a book about humans in war than about the technology they battled with. And while we all thought the Simulator was cool in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, the story was really about Ender Wiggins and his experiences growing up as a genious.
My nearest CO is Epsilon Centari, and the bill per month is enough to choke a horse. But hey, Andorian porn cannot be described, it has to be experienced.
You're just snippy about having taken the blue pill aren't you?
We still haven't gotten a human out of this planet's orbit. The expendibles required for a space journey increase geometrically with the distance (or rather duration) of the journey. A moon colony is doable, arguably more doable than a space station, you can use local material. A mars colony is fantasy barring some radical new technology that provides abundant power in a small package, that doesn't require a large fuel tank. Okay, a conventional nuclear reactor would do it. Hey wait a minute...
Of course there is something to be said for the fact the dreamers suck at doing and doers suck at dreaming.
Perish the thought.
A web browser (read that a fancy terminal emulator) displaying content remotely from a central server (i.e. slashdot.org)
Think about it, we've had perfectly working mainframes since the 70's. Dumb terminals ran over conventional phone lines. We replaced a 5 million dollar centrally managed machine with 50 million dollars of desktop PC's that are paperwieghts at the end of 3 years, and require a complete rewiring of every office, home, and school.
Now that we have a PC on every desk, we are dumbing them down to basic dumb terminals again, served by million dollar centrally managed machines. Don't believe me? What are you reading this on...
I swear the whole reason no one has invented a time machine has been to allow humanity to at least ATTEMPT to do something before it is pronounced to be wrong.
That would require a few billionairs to (gasp) take a risk with their money.
Now tell me, when was the last time you heard of the Air Force having to scrap a major design feature from its next bomber? The Navy having to skip designing lifeboats into it's next destroyer? People bitch about the utter lack of safety features on the shuttle, but they fail to realize they were present but the budget as provided by congress didn't allow for them.
No, really. They took a disposable high-performance engine, tried to make it re-usable while boosting the performace 40%. They have to be taken apart and rebuilt almost every launch.
Of course Education and Health insurance ARE big ticket items in America. (Says the man who gets a hunk of paycheck taken out for health insurace and owes more for student loans than most people owe on their car.)
Given my druthers, I'd rather pay it in taxes. At least I wouldn't feel so ripped off by the interest rate.
The push to return to the mainframe to get us back to dumb terminals is in my head then.
Face it folks, it doesn't matter how good a job you do anymore. You will eventually be replaced by someone in another country who will work for a fraction of your salary, a monopolistic contract firm, or (eventually) a robot/andriod/AI.
And I should add that 2/3 of the american economy is consumer spending. Pray tell how on earth are consumers going to spend anything if there are no decent paying jobs to be had?
That said, if evidence WERE found the undeniably placed the orchestration of the entire 9/11 attack at the feet of the White House, I believe congress would hold a little "Tribunal" action of its own.
Article 1, Section 3 of the Constitution:
Basically congress can throw them out of office. Once out of office, they can be tried for any related crimes.
As far as the populice goes, you would see the same sort of reaction as happened during Nixon's downfall. Shock. Dogged following the events of the trial while it's going on. Grumblings afterward. Dinner party conversations for the next decade, and finally utterly forgetting what happened.
Fark or the Drudge report I suppose, followed by Slashdot (Twice). I think the informant will pick a codename similar to the 70s era "Deep Throat". Try to find Deep Throat on the internet. The first 400000 links are porn. I suspect he/she will be "Penis Enlargement." Indeed, they are sending coded messages to everyone in America.
Man, you can't say anything on the Internet these days. You say the sky is blue and someone in Tunesia is quick to point out that where he lives it is mostly pink from the dust kicked up by the desert. You say 2+2=4 and some smart ass will say that answer is really 11 in base 3.
How am I supposed to combat first hand fact with my ill-concieved simplistic notions of the world?