Re:At last, Iain M Banks gets a bit of recognition
on
2005 Hugo Nominations
·
· Score: 1
True'ish, although The Algebraist does differ significantly in that AIs are outlawed by his humanoid civilization and FTL is mainly by wormhole.
Whilst the Algebraist is still very good, and would be a worthy Hugo winner, my feeling is that Banks may be reaching the end of his personal well of good fiction. If you're a Banks fan then I'd strongly recommend reading his first non-fiction work "Raw Spirit", which is, loosly, about Malt Whisky. It probably helps that I'm a malt fan myself and live in Scotland so know the territory, but I'd defy anyone not to find it a truly enjoyable book.
The Algebraist isn't a culture novel, which seems to have revitalized him somewhat and IMHO is the best thing he's done since Excession.
I saw Iain recently at Stirling University doing a reading and question/answer session. Among other things he was quite strong on The Bridge being his best novel overall, and Use of Weapons his best SF. Also said the The Algebraist was his first book produced without the aid of his long-term editor and in retrospect his thought it was a bit over-long, although I can't say I thought so when reading it.
If only someone would make Iain M Banks book "Use of Weapons" into a movie. Apparently it was optioned a few years back, but so far hasn't made it into pre-production.
Have to agree about giving it some time for Sta Trek. Would probably work - aka the new Dr.Who about to premier.
Show me an OS alternative to Access and I'll use it. Unfortunatly there is *nothing* that comes anywhere close. I'm aware there are a few OS attempts at producing something, but they are all at sub Access 2 level. The fact is that ignoring the rather abortive Access 2000, from Access 97 onwards it has been a superb product for quickly creating reasonably complex bespoke business solutions, especially when providing a front-end to a SQL Server database.
Personally my implementations of choice - and I do this as an independent developer/consultant to SMEs for a living - are Access/SQL Server for inhouse database systems, Borland Delphi anything else not web-based, and PHP/Postgres (and only MySQL if I can't get Postgres) for web development. I do keep these under review and my toolkit has spanned most languages/systems at one time or another, but the above three combinations are for my money the fastest, cost-effective, and reliable solutions for each class of applications.
Bit of a generalization this, but embryonic cells do not express the cell markers found on the surface of adult cells, so they are not rejected by the animal they are transplanted into. This is one of the main reasons they are so promising to work with.
Personally I find both fine, and as I work with two machines (one for delphi/c/net coding, the other for email/office/graphics) I use a thumb ball on one and finger on the other. I went through a phase a few years go when using mice where I was starting to get significant RSI symptoms - but since switching to trackerballs I've never had any problems.
I've also equipped all the family computers with them too - mainly logotech ones, but a few microsoft too. All opticals with those nifty red patterned balls.
Obviously your mileage varies. Personally I find a trackerball (I use either the optical logitech or microsoft ones - no rubbish) are far superior to mice for FPS. Much, much faster response and far more accurate.
I do wish the slashdot editors would consider moving ahead rapidly with their use of english. This article is extremely badly written. Possibly the editor's duel core brain is not communication between the two hemispheres?
Physicists regularly seem to have problems with evolution, primarily I guess because it's not a mechanism that comes into physics much. As such there arguments against always seem to fall into the old hookum of 'the chances of this set of molecules assembling into this pattern are billions to one, ipso facto evolution is impossible'. Which of course completely misses the point about how natural selection works.
Actually no real biological scientist argues about if evolution occurs nowdays, although there is a lot of argument about how it occurs in detail - which you'd expect because life is complex. Possibly a good book here is Gould's 'The Panda's Thumb'. It's twenty years old now but still an interesting and worthwhile read, especially in light of the current 'intelligent design' hookum - the title essay argues that one of the most compelling arguments for Evolution by Natural Selection is that no 'intelligent' being would ever make the choices that nature has been blindly forced to make - as the bizzare construction of the panda's thumb so nicely illustrates.
But we'd also need to restructure society pretty drastically too. I remember seeing, but don't have a reference to unfortunatly, and article that demosntrated that your chance of being involved in a fatal accident is about 90% by the time your 350.
They're not 'processed' at all. All they did was take a greyscale image and derive a heightfield from it, then render it using guessed at 'Titan-like' atmosphere parameters. Terragen is a great piece of software, but they could just as easily have rendered your back garden pond with similar results or rendered the Titan data and made it look like the south pacific. In fact one of the most effective uses I've seen made of Terragen is to render Martian data as a Terraformed surface.
Hardly, interesting article in the Herald on Sunday (http://www.theherald.co.uk/) yesterday by Joanna Blythman under the byline that "Word is now getting out that the USA considers visitors from outside it's borders as enemy combatants" and discussing the increasing reluctance of Europeans, even nordic white ones, to travel to the USA because of all the hassle involved with all your new 'Security' measures.
But Monsantos behaviour is far worse than this. Monsanto has a history of sueing farmers who accidently grow their seed through no fault of their own. For instance you have a farm and you've never purchased anything from Monsanto, but your neighbour has and some of his seed blows from his field onto yours. If the seed germinates Monsanto will sue you.
Monsanto are actually Evil. Almost always saying such things is hyperbole and way over the top, but in Monsantos case it really is. Only other company that has comes close is recent years is Union Carbide for their behaviour at Bhopal.
In place editing isn't hard - you just need to set up the appropriate Javascript to replace the page text. Our tGedit product does it - see www.geomantics.net for a demo. We have cold fusion and PHP versions
I think your friend was probably getting confused with the Dundee Courier's reporting of the sinking of the Titanic, the front page headline for which was famously
During the mid-80s I was working in a lab in the UK as a graduate student alongside an indian postdoc in her late 20s, who had come over when she was 12 to a (very good) boarding school on a scholarship. She was highly naturalized, very egalaterian, engaged to a red-haired hebridean Scot, nominally athiest, and politically leftward leaning (including being an active member of the labour party). Her family were also Brahmin - although she didn't flaunt it and I knew her a long time before it was mentioned in casual conversation.
Anyway one day she casually remarked to me that another postdoc had been chatting her up, but 'with the surname like that' he didn't stand a chance. I was quite shocked to realize she was refering to caste.
This is nothing new. See if you can find a copy EP Thompson's essay "The Making of the English Working Class" in which he talks in some depth about Saint Monday. To cut a long and elegent essay very short the thesis is that the current 5 day a week regular hours work pattern is not at all 'natural' as humans tend to work episodically for deadlines if left to their own devices. Instead the 'working week' was imposed on us, with a great deal of trouble, in the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries so as to make labour meet the raquirements of capitalism.
BT, together with their mobile subgroup O2 really are the worst company in the UK. I was ripped off by O2 on a mobile telephone bill to the tune of several hundred pounds and I know many others who have similar tales of woe. We also have an ISDN from BT themselves the service on which is truly dreadful.
Of all the corporates I've ever dealt with in the UK BT are by far and away the worst, and that includes the various rail companies. No other company comes close for their attitude of not giving a toss about their customers, indeed they are the only corporate I know which actively seems to go out of their way to treat their customers with contempt.
The Catholic church tends to be rather progressive on these things: one of the benefits of having a corporate memory measured in centuries I guess. Having got their fingers burnt rather badly over Galileo and they have been rather careful to stay on the right side of scientific progress ever since.
Under European healthcare systems the ideal is that treatment is available at the point of need irrespective of the ability to pay. Sometimes people do die because it's a complex system with high demand and we don't always get the delivery right.
Under American healthcare the best medicine in the world is available to you at the point of need provided you have the money to pay for it. Sometimes people die because they are poor and can't afford to pay.
The first is civilized, the second is barbarism. Their is little difference in moral terms between cutting someone head off because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and condemming someone to die because they happen to have fallen ill and cannot afford to pay for treatment.
Slashdot Mirror
True'ish, although The Algebraist does differ significantly in that AIs are outlawed by his humanoid civilization and FTL is mainly by wormhole.
Whilst the Algebraist is still very good, and would be a worthy Hugo winner, my feeling is that Banks may be reaching the end of his personal well of good fiction. If you're a Banks fan then I'd strongly recommend reading his first non-fiction work "Raw Spirit", which is, loosly, about Malt Whisky. It probably helps that I'm a malt fan myself and live in Scotland so know the territory, but I'd defy anyone not to find it a truly enjoyable book.
The Algebraist isn't a culture novel, which seems to have revitalized him somewhat and IMHO is the best thing he's done since Excession.
I saw Iain recently at Stirling University doing a reading and question/answer session. Among other things he was quite strong on The Bridge being his best novel overall, and Use of Weapons his best SF. Also said the The Algebraist was his first book produced without the aid of his long-term editor and in retrospect his thought it was a bit over-long, although I can't say I thought so when reading it.
If only someone would make Iain M Banks book "Use of Weapons" into a movie. Apparently it was optioned a few years back, but so far hasn't made it into pre-production.
Have to agree about giving it some time for Sta Trek. Would probably work - aka the new Dr.Who about to premier.
Show me an OS alternative to Access and I'll use it. Unfortunatly there is *nothing* that comes anywhere close. I'm aware there are a few OS attempts at producing something, but they are all at sub Access 2 level. The fact is that ignoring the rather abortive Access 2000, from Access 97 onwards it has been a superb product for quickly creating reasonably complex bespoke business solutions, especially when providing a front-end to a SQL Server database.
Personally my implementations of choice - and I do this as an independent developer/consultant to SMEs for a living - are Access/SQL Server for inhouse database systems, Borland Delphi anything else not web-based, and PHP/Postgres (and only MySQL if I can't get Postgres) for web development. I do keep these under review and my toolkit has spanned most languages/systems at one time or another, but the above three combinations are for my money the fastest, cost-effective, and reliable solutions for each class of applications.
Why is this even a story? Surely the suprise would be if the BBC hadn't leaked it?
Bit of a generalization this, but embryonic cells do not express the cell markers found on the surface of adult cells, so they are not rejected by the animal they are transplanted into. This is one of the main reasons they are so promising to work with.
Personally I find both fine, and as I work with two machines (one for delphi/c/net coding, the other for email/office/graphics) I use a thumb ball on one and finger on the other. I went through a phase a few years go when using mice where I was starting to get significant RSI symptoms - but since switching to trackerballs I've never had any problems.
I've also equipped all the family computers with them too - mainly logotech ones, but a few microsoft too. All opticals with those nifty red patterned balls.
Obviously your mileage varies. Personally I find a trackerball (I use either the optical logitech or microsoft ones - no rubbish) are far superior to mice for FPS. Much, much faster response and far more accurate.
precisely
I do wish the slashdot editors would consider moving ahead rapidly with their use of english. This article is extremely badly written. Possibly the editor's duel core brain is not communication between the two hemispheres?
Physicists regularly seem to have problems with evolution, primarily I guess because it's not a mechanism that comes into physics much. As such there arguments against always seem to fall into the old hookum of 'the chances of this set of molecules assembling into this pattern are billions to one, ipso facto evolution is impossible'. Which of course completely misses the point about how natural selection works.
Actually no real biological scientist argues about if evolution occurs nowdays, although there is a lot of argument about how it occurs in detail - which you'd expect because life is complex. Possibly a good book here is Gould's 'The Panda's Thumb'. It's twenty years old now but still an interesting and worthwhile read, especially in light of the current 'intelligent design' hookum - the title essay argues that one of the most compelling arguments for Evolution by Natural Selection is that no 'intelligent' being would ever make the choices that nature has been blindly forced to make - as the bizzare construction of the panda's thumb so nicely illustrates.
But we'd also need to restructure society pretty drastically too. I remember seeing, but don't have a reference to unfortunatly, and article that demosntrated that your chance of being involved in a fatal accident is about 90% by the time your 350.
They're not 'processed' at all. All they did was take a greyscale image and derive a heightfield from it, then render it using guessed at 'Titan-like' atmosphere parameters. Terragen is a great piece of software, but they could just as easily have rendered your back garden pond with similar results or rendered the Titan data and made it look like the south pacific. In fact one of the most effective uses I've seen made of Terragen is to render Martian data as a Terraformed surface.
Hardly, interesting article in the Herald on Sunday (http://www.theherald.co.uk/) yesterday by Joanna Blythman under the byline that "Word is now getting out that the USA considers visitors from outside it's borders as enemy combatants" and discussing the increasing reluctance of Europeans, even nordic white ones, to travel to the USA because of all the hassle involved with all your new 'Security' measures.
But Monsantos behaviour is far worse than this. Monsanto has a history of sueing farmers who accidently grow their seed through no fault of their own. For instance you have a farm and you've never purchased anything from Monsanto, but your neighbour has and some of his seed blows from his field onto yours. If the seed germinates Monsanto will sue you.
Monsanto are actually Evil. Almost always saying such things is hyperbole and way over the top, but in Monsantos case it really is. Only other company that has comes close is recent years is Union Carbide for their behaviour at Bhopal.
email me using the email address on www.geomantics.com and we'll discuss
It's not *quite* so drastic as that. If all the ice melts we get a sea level rise of about 70 metres - 250-odd foot for you americans :-)
I did some renders for the effects on England some time back - http://www.geomantics.com/sealevel/
In place editing isn't hard - you just need to set up the appropriate Javascript to replace the page text. Our tGedit product does it - see www.geomantics.net for a demo. We have cold fusion and PHP versions
Ditto, I've had a public email address on my company website since 1997, and the amount of porn spam I get must only be about 10% of total spam.
The majority is viagra and other pharmacy stuff.
I think your friend was probably getting confused with the Dundee Courier's reporting of the sinking of the Titanic, the front page headline for which was famously
"Dundee Man drowns in Shipping Disaster"
During the mid-80s I was working in a lab in the UK as a graduate student alongside an indian postdoc in her late 20s, who had come over when she was 12 to a (very good) boarding school on a scholarship. She was highly naturalized, very egalaterian, engaged to a red-haired hebridean Scot, nominally athiest, and politically leftward leaning (including being an active member of the labour party). Her family were also Brahmin - although she didn't flaunt it and I knew her a long time before it was mentioned in casual conversation.
Anyway one day she casually remarked to me that another postdoc had been chatting her up, but 'with the surname like that' he didn't stand a chance. I was quite shocked to realize she was refering to caste.
This is nothing new. See if you can find a copy EP Thompson's essay "The Making of the English Working Class" in which he talks in some depth about Saint Monday. To cut a long and elegent essay very short the thesis is that the current 5 day a week regular hours work pattern is not at all 'natural' as humans tend to work episodically for deadlines if left to their own devices. Instead the 'working week' was imposed on us, with a great deal of trouble, in the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries so as to make labour meet the raquirements of capitalism.
BT, together with their mobile subgroup O2 really are the worst company in the UK. I was ripped off by O2 on a mobile telephone bill to the tune of several hundred pounds and I know many others who have similar tales of woe. We also have an ISDN from BT themselves the service on which is truly dreadful.
Of all the corporates I've ever dealt with in the UK BT are by far and away the worst, and that includes the various rail companies. No other company comes close for their attitude of not giving a toss about their customers, indeed they are the only corporate I know which actively seems to go out of their way to treat their customers with contempt.
Avoid.
The Catholic church tends to be rather progressive on these things: one of the benefits of having a corporate memory measured in centuries I guess.
Having got their fingers burnt rather badly over Galileo and they have been rather careful to stay on the right side of scientific progress ever since.
Under European healthcare systems the ideal is that treatment is available at the point of need irrespective of the ability to pay. Sometimes people do die because it's a complex system with high demand and we don't always get the delivery right.
Under American healthcare the best medicine in the world is available to you at the point of need provided you have the money to pay for it. Sometimes people die because they are poor and can't afford to pay.
The first is civilized, the second is barbarism. Their is little difference in moral terms between cutting someone head off because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and condemming someone to die because they happen to have fallen ill and cannot afford to pay for treatment.