No doubt, Harlan could flame the flesh from the bones of just about anybody back in the day, I wonder if he's just getting old? I fondly remember his diatribes about "fans" who stalk and berate authors and what Harlan did to the guy who signed him up for every single Franklin Mint Collector's Plate that he could find... but all caps? Oooh, scary. Come on Harlan, you wrote "From Alabamy, With Hate" after you marched for civil rights in the 60's, and you flamed God brilliantly in "Deathbird" (I'm edging into Christianity and I think that's still one of the best things I've ever read), and you fall back on all caps? Why not some 30 page thesis on how if copyright infringement continues we'll all be eating our children to survive? Why not a novella about the death throes of a civilization drowning in mediocrity because all the artists are shoveling shit to pay the power bill?
(I vividly remember when the first hardbound Dieties and Demigods appeared.. droool).
I have fond memories of that as well. Mmmm...what was the name of that Finnish goddess of pain again? It was like pr0n, except you could buy it and act all superior and intellectual. "The artwork is just a faithful representation of the source material's earthy vitality.":)
Quincy was the master villian....
on
C.S.I.
·
· Score: 1
One of my roomates had this theory that Quincy was actually the serial killer who killed all the people on the show, did the autopsies and framed someone to take the blame. Watching the reruns, there were several episodes where this seemed likely:)
'Press Enter' is a great, great story (as is 'Persistance of Vision', mentioned by another poster), but I got the impression that the Asian hacker chick was killed (gruesomely) by bad guys who made it look like a suicide. The significance of the flashing patterns was related to the narrators epilepsy, not to hypnosis.
Probably in 'The Dinosaur Heresies' by Ken Bakke (a great book, guarenteed to bring the 8-year-old in all of us). He did buckets of analysis on pedator-prey ratios and other ecology-type stuff and concluded that dinosaurs were in a moderately rapid decline before the comet hit. Another of his main points was that smaller, less mobile critters seemed to survive better than big, wide ranging critters in general, just the the opposite of what you expect if massive, sudden climate changes were the killer. He leaned more towards new infectious diseases encountered by the dinos as the moved from landmass to landmass over newly created landbridges as the killer. I'm hardly qualified to argue with him, but one thing I got from my BS in biology and 3 years of grad school was that very few things happen for only one reason, so if the dinos are running around gettings exposed to new pathogens while trying to avoid lots of geological activity and the effects of a big-ass comet strike, it's retty hard to point a finger and say 'This is the killer'.
Is it just me or does a lot of the stuff in the ZZZ archive sound like supervillian supplies - superfast ships, mesicopters, exoskeletons, laser freezing guns, personal robotic assistants, microsubmarines, smart dust, etc., etc.
Maybe we should send in 007 and/or the JLA to check it out? Or better yet The Authority:)
Well, when I was the asst. admin at work, if someone would poke their head in my office and say 'Are you in here?', I'd often answer 'Nobody's here!', or some such witticism. (since the regular admin quit, I just grumble:) It seemed natural to continue to be 'nobody' on/., but it was taken, so I stuck the 69 on since that's when I was born. On deja, I often go by 'alshaddai', which I picked up from Robert Anton Wilson's excellent overview of conspiracy theories, 'Everything is Under Control'.
Well, this is a pretty ignorant comment, at least with regards to Africa don't you think? You've probably been told a million times to 'put a helmet on your soldier', if you grew up in the USA, but is this true for sub-Saharan Africa?
Let's see, throw out all the times you heard that in school, because you're too poor to go to school.
Throw out all the times you read that someplace because even if you could read well (and it's hard to learn to read without a school), you probably don't have anything to read except maybe a Bible/Koran - no magazines, newspapers, etc. Nothing with new info.
Throw out all the times you saw a 'Safe Sex' PSA or news story, or an after school special on tv, because you're too poor to have a tv, and so's everyone else in your village.
You can probably throw out 99% of the times you heard something about AIDS from the radio too, because you're too poor to own a radio, but somebody in the village probably does.
Throw out all the crap we USAians heard from the government about HIV, because the corrupt general who runs your country doesn't want to admit that anything is going wrong because some other corrupt general might start another revolution and depose/kill him before he finishes looting the treasury.
Throw out all the times you got a speech from a parent or other adult about condoms because they are getting their info from the same places you are - nowhere.
Throw in some speeches about how condoms are make you a bad person, or a girly-man, or that they're unnecessary because 'we' are cleaner than 'they' are, so it's okay.
That was my first thought too... But then I realized that they could also show replays of say, Tony Siragusa and Ray Lewis putting the Malacci Crunch on Kerry Collins (or Michael Strahan and Jesse Armstead on Trent Dilfer) and that would be even more Matrix-like. 'Whoa, look at that whiplash!'
I'd still rather have a Raiders-Vikings match-up that the Stupor Bowl that we'll probably have to endure...
Re:But who gets to teach history? And about genera
on
'Thirteen Days'
·
· Score: 1
(IIRC, LeMay was the model for the general plotting a military coup in the film Seven Days in May, much as Henry Kissinger was the model for the title character of Dr. Strangelove.
I'm pretty sure Dr. Edward Teller was Strangelove's inspiration - scientist with a German accent, thinks a bout nuclear war a lot, heck I think Teller had even lost a leg to diabetes. Was Henry K. even a well known figure at the time Dr. Strangelove was made?
Look, I never said that the pharms didn't need patents or profits. They do. It just pushes my buttons when people/companies act like they don't owe others squat and really they're standing on the shoulders of giants. Or least others of regular size.
If the feds and non-profits account for such a small percent of the cost of the research, and if private industry is so much more efficient, why don't the pharms just doi their own basic research? Wouldn't they come out ahead?
The R&D that created every new "miracle drug" was funded by the investors and bond holders of private companies.
And the basic reasearch that this applied research was based upon was most likely funded by grants from the NSF, NIH or any of several other TLAs in the US government. And if it wasn't funded by the government, lots of non-profit organizations (the American Heart Association, American Lung Association, American Cancer Society, etc.) fork over grants to university rearchers for doing work on the organizations organ/disease of choice. I certainly don't think that pharm companies should be replaced by the Feds, but it would be nice if people would stop acting like they worked in a vacuum and generated their profits purely de novo, instead of using public domain data to base their IP on.
Do you suppose that the government would use our tax dollars with anywhere near the efficiency that publicly held corporations would? How would the research priorities be set? Would we postpone research on cures for more widespread ailments so that we could focus on "celebrity diseaeses" whose cures would further someone's political career?
It's funny that you offer this up as a pro-pharm arguement, after your sample 'wonder drugs' - Claritin, Flonase and Viagra - cure such life-threatening issues as hay fever and impotence, not cancer or heart disease. I have prescriptions for Claritin and Flonase (and Aerobid-M and Albuterol and Accolate), and my quality of life has improved since I started taking them. But I'd rather have more and better anti-cancer meds for my mom and grandparents so they'd still have the uteruses, kidney and section of colon that they were born with and I'd live with my runny nose and sinus headaches, okay?
Of course, if I needed that Viagra prescription...
We (meaning my wife occasionally and me frequently) use the reel mower we bought last spring for our dinky lawn and you're right about the bennies. But you forgot that the neighbors will almost never borrow it, and nobody will want to borrow it twice. They'll either hate it or get their own. Besides, you don't have to start the the thing - I've done my whole front lawn in the time it's taken my neighbors to get their gas mowers running for more than a minute. Plus the looks you get from people driving by are interesting.
And everybody knows that Harlan Ellison would be nothing if it weren't for the genius Gene Roddenberry mentoring him...
Have you ever read any of Ellison's fiction? You know: 'Deathbird', 'I have no mouth and I must scream', 'Just adrift off the Isles of Langerhans?', '"Repent Harlequin", said the Ticktockman', any of those ring a bell? How can you say Ellison would be nothing without Roddenberry? If you think Ellison's writing is bad, that's one thing, or if he bugs you as a person (Ellison certainly wouldn't be tops on my list of people to go on a long camping trip with), that's another, but saying he'd be nothing without Roddenberry sounds like a total fanboy who hasn't read anything but ST novelizations.
If you don't pay taxes, go home... NO one on welfare should be allowed to vote.
What about people who pay sales/property/inheritance taxes but not income taxes? Does that count? Or is that not not enough for you? Everybody pays taxes. Corps always rationalize their huge property tax breaks and the financial incentives they get from states because they lead to indirect taxes, surely actual human beings should get the benefit of any direct taxes they pay?
What if I only pay $0.01 in income taxes? Should my vote be worth less than yours? Since professional athletes pay more taxes than you (most likely), should Latrell Sprewell's and Dan Wilkinson's votes be worth more than yours? How about Britney Spears? Let's see, that's one guy who tried to strangle his boss, a 300+ lb. college dropout who punched a pregenant woman, and a airheaded popstar who probably make ~200-300 times (conservative estimate) what you do, and therefore get ~200-300 times as many votes as you do.
Too true, but everyone has quoted W as saying 'There ought to be limits to freedom' and he did try to shut down satirical websites, which hardly makes him Freedom-of-Speech Man. The drug war issue (and crime-related issues in general) are issues that have turned into an arms race between the major parties, because nobody wants to be seen as soft on crime. ('I'll see your asset-forfeiture laws, and raise you by mandatory minimums!') My point was that you should just vote your conscience. Whoever is elected will do something to piss you off, so why kick yourself for voting for someone when you thought there was a better (or less bad) choice? I did wander a wee bit in my post though, didn't I?
You say that freedom is your big issue, but you voted for a candidate who you disagree with about freedom of speech applying to the Internet, abortion rights and the war on drugs? The Prez will appoint the Supreme Court judges that will make decisions regarding the Constitutionality of any of these things, and perhaps more importantly, will also appoint the Federal judges that future Supreme Court justices are almost invariably drawn from (this is the real Reagan legacy, btw). Also, Inet censorship and the Drug War have lots of popular bipartisan support and therefore are incredibly likely to generate new laws and create strict enforcement of the old ones (unless your Daddy's the guv). Meanwhile, the guy you were trying to keep out because he is a 'statist', wants to do stuff that Big Corporate Interests will hate, and therefore have a slim chance of happening, similar to Clinton's healthcare agenda back in the day.
When I'm feeling cynical, I have a hard time telling a difference between the statists and the corporatists, 'cuz either way the citizens are screwed. However, I can vote and maybe affect the state, but with corporations, especially big ones, I don't even have that little influence.
You should have voted your conscience - it's the Right Thing To Do (tm), and if W wins and does things you don't like, you'll be kicking yourself for the next four years.
The EC acts a buffer for disparites in the population sizes of the states, making each state closer to equal in 'size' for the purpose of electing a prez. Think of it like the World Series or the NBA playoffs, as opposed to the NFL playoffs. When you've got a best of seven series like the NBA/World Series (where the teams play until one team has won 4 games) you're more likely to get the actually better team, as opposed to the lucky team, such as the Titans beating the Bills last year on the last play of the game. If the election was on a pure popular majority, you could just say 'No taxes for Texas, Cali, New Yawk, Florida, screw the rest of the country!' and win. This is obviously an exaggeration, but you get the picture.
People say that their votes don't matter now because the only way one vote makes a difference is if your candidate loses your state by one vote, but in a pure popular vote election, they would only matter if your candidate loses by one vote out of the whole country. A popular vote election would actually dilute the importance of voting, not increase it.
China alone would be more than a match for the U.S.
Well, yes and no. The US probably couldn't invade and take over ther PRC, but if worse came to worst, the US could go nuke and destroy them, and the PRC certainly could not invade the US. Loads of PLA troops would have to somehow get to the US, past SSNs, carrier battle groups, and the USAF, without any log-range air support etc. of their own. Not too likely. Now, if the PRC really wanted to get Taiwan back, it would be hard/impossible to stop them, and we could never liberate the peasants and install our own regime miltarily. It more comes down to how interventionist you want your foreign policy to be.
Slashdot Mirror
No doubt, Harlan could flame the flesh from the bones of just about anybody back in the day, I wonder if he's just getting old? I fondly remember his diatribes about "fans" who stalk and berate authors and what Harlan did to the guy who signed him up for every single Franklin Mint Collector's Plate that he could find... but all caps? Oooh, scary.
Come on Harlan, you wrote "From Alabamy, With Hate" after you marched for civil rights in the 60's, and you flamed God brilliantly in "Deathbird" (I'm edging into Christianity and I think that's still one of the best things I've ever read), and you fall back on all caps? Why not some 30 page thesis on how if copyright infringement continues we'll all be eating our children to survive? Why not a novella about the death throes of a civilization drowning in mediocrity because all the artists are shoveling shit to pay the power bill?
(I vividly remember when the first hardbound Dieties and Demigods appeared.. droool).
I have fond memories of that as well. Mmmm...what was the name of that Finnish goddess of pain again? It was like pr0n, except you could buy it and act all superior and intellectual. "The artwork is just a faithful representation of the source material's earthy vitality.":)
One of my roomates had this theory that Quincy was actually the serial killer who killed all the people on the show, did the autopsies and framed someone to take the blame. Watching the reruns, there were several episodes where this seemed likely:)
'Press Enter' is a great, great story (as is 'Persistance of Vision', mentioned by another poster), but I got the impression that the Asian hacker chick was killed (gruesomely) by bad guys who made it look like a suicide. The significance of the flashing patterns was related to the narrators epilepsy, not to hypnosis.
Probably in 'The Dinosaur Heresies' by Ken Bakke (a great book, guarenteed to bring the 8-year-old in all of us). He did buckets of analysis on pedator-prey ratios and other ecology-type stuff and concluded that dinosaurs were in a moderately rapid decline before the comet hit. Another of his main points was that smaller, less mobile critters seemed to survive better than big, wide ranging critters in general, just the the opposite of what you expect if massive, sudden climate changes were the killer. He leaned more towards new infectious diseases encountered by the dinos as the moved from landmass to landmass over newly created landbridges as the killer. I'm hardly qualified to argue with him, but one thing I got from my BS in biology and 3 years of grad school was that very few things happen for only one reason, so if the dinos are running around gettings exposed to new pathogens while trying to avoid lots of geological activity and the effects of a big-ass comet strike, it's retty hard to point a finger and say 'This is the killer'.
Is it just me or does a lot of the stuff in the ZZZ archive sound like supervillian supplies - superfast ships, mesicopters, exoskeletons, laser freezing guns, personal robotic assistants, microsubmarines, smart dust, etc., etc.
Maybe we should send in 007 and/or the JLA to check it out? Or better yet The Authority:)
Well, when I was the asst. admin at work, if someone would poke their head in my office and say 'Are you in here?', I'd often answer 'Nobody's here!', or some such witticism. (since the regular admin quit, I just grumble:) It seemed natural to continue to be 'nobody' on /., but it was taken, so I stuck the 69 on since that's when I was born. On deja, I often go by 'alshaddai', which I picked up from Robert Anton Wilson's excellent overview of conspiracy theories, 'Everything is Under Control'.
In your mail profile you can replace the servername with it's IP address and it speeds the startup quite a bit...
What I was trying to say was...
Well, this is a pretty ignorant comment, at least with regards to Africa don't you think? You've probably been told a million times to 'put a helmet on your soldier', if you grew up in the USA, but is this true for sub-Saharan Africa?
Let's see, throw out all the times you heard that in school, because you're too poor to go to school.
Throw out all the times you read that someplace because even if you could read well (and it's hard to learn to read without a school), you probably don't have anything to read except maybe a Bible/Koran - no magazines, newspapers, etc. Nothing with new info.
Throw out all the times you saw a 'Safe Sex' PSA or news story, or an after school special on tv, because you're too poor to have a tv, and so's everyone else in your village.
You can probably throw out 99% of the times you heard something about AIDS from the radio too, because you're too poor to own a radio, but somebody in the village probably does.
Throw out all the crap we USAians heard from the government about HIV, because the corrupt general who runs your country doesn't want to admit that anything is going wrong because some other corrupt general might start another revolution and depose/kill him before he finishes looting the treasury.
Throw out all the times you got a speech from a parent or other adult about condoms because they are getting their info from the same places you are - nowhere.
Throw in some speeches about how condoms are make you a bad person, or a girly-man, or that they're unnecessary because 'we' are cleaner than 'they' are, so it's okay.
How would you know that unsafe sex can kill you?
Told that Trent "Lame Duck" Dilfer and Kerry "Lame Drunk" Collins would be the starting quarterbacks in Super Bowl XXXV, Reeves said, "Whooooa."
And everyone else said 'Doh!'
That was my first thought too... But then I realized that they could also show replays of say, Tony Siragusa and Ray Lewis putting the Malacci Crunch on Kerry Collins (or Michael Strahan and Jesse Armstead on Trent Dilfer) and that would be even more Matrix-like. 'Whoa, look at that whiplash!'
I'd still rather have a Raiders-Vikings match-up that the Stupor Bowl that we'll probably have to endure...
(IIRC, LeMay was the model for the general plotting a military coup in the film Seven Days in May, much as Henry Kissinger was the model for the title character of Dr. Strangelove.
I'm pretty sure Dr. Edward Teller was Strangelove's inspiration - scientist with a German accent, thinks a bout nuclear war a lot, heck I think Teller had even lost a leg to diabetes. Was Henry K. even a well known figure at the time Dr. Strangelove was made?
Duh! I should have known that. But per the imdb, it was Walkens' characters name too. Obviously Burton got the name from Nosferatu though...
I think Max Schreck was the (non-superpowered) bad guy in Batman Returns
Look, I never said that the pharms didn't need patents or profits. They do. It just pushes my buttons when people/companies act like they don't owe others squat and really they're standing on the shoulders of giants. Or least others of regular size.
If the feds and non-profits account for such a small percent of the cost of the research, and if private industry is so much more efficient, why don't the pharms just doi their own basic research? Wouldn't they come out ahead?
The R&D that created every new "miracle drug" was funded by the investors and bond holders of private companies.
And the basic reasearch that this applied research was based upon was most likely funded by grants from the NSF, NIH or any of several other TLAs in the US government. And if it wasn't funded by the government, lots of non-profit organizations (the American Heart Association, American Lung Association, American Cancer Society, etc.) fork over grants to university rearchers for doing work on the organizations organ/disease of choice. I certainly don't think that pharm companies should be replaced by the Feds, but it would be nice if people would stop acting like they worked in a vacuum and generated their profits purely de novo, instead of using public domain data to base their IP on.
Do you suppose that the government would use our tax dollars with anywhere near the efficiency that publicly held corporations would? How would the research priorities be set? Would we postpone research on cures for more widespread ailments so that we could focus on "celebrity diseaeses" whose cures would further someone's political career?
It's funny that you offer this up as a pro-pharm arguement, after your sample 'wonder drugs' - Claritin, Flonase and Viagra - cure such life-threatening issues as hay fever and impotence, not cancer or heart disease. I have prescriptions for Claritin and Flonase (and Aerobid-M and Albuterol and Accolate), and my quality of life has improved since I started taking them. But I'd rather have more and better anti-cancer meds for my mom and grandparents so they'd still have the uteruses, kidney and section of colon that they were born with and I'd live with my runny nose and sinus headaches, okay?
Of course, if I needed that Viagra prescription...
We (meaning my wife occasionally and me frequently) use the reel mower we bought last spring for our dinky lawn and you're right about the bennies. But you forgot that the neighbors will almost never borrow it, and nobody will want to borrow it twice. They'll either hate it or get their own. Besides, you don't have to start the the thing - I've done my whole front lawn in the time it's taken my neighbors to get their gas mowers running for more than a minute. Plus the looks you get from people driving by are interesting.
Plus they mispelled 'Authority' on the web page! That's confidence inspiring.
And everybody knows that Harlan Ellison would be nothing if it weren't for the genius Gene Roddenberry mentoring him...
Have you ever read any of Ellison's fiction? You know: 'Deathbird', 'I have no mouth and I must scream', 'Just adrift off the Isles of Langerhans?', '"Repent Harlequin", said the Ticktockman', any of those ring a bell? How can you say Ellison would be nothing without Roddenberry? If you think Ellison's writing is bad, that's one thing, or if he bugs you as a person (Ellison certainly wouldn't be tops on my list of people to go on a long camping trip with), that's another, but saying he'd be nothing without Roddenberry sounds like a total fanboy who hasn't read anything but ST novelizations.
If you don't pay taxes, go home... NO one on welfare should be allowed to vote.
What about people who pay sales/property/inheritance taxes but not income taxes? Does that count? Or is that not not enough for you? Everybody pays taxes. Corps always rationalize their huge property tax breaks and the financial incentives they get from states because they lead to indirect taxes, surely actual human beings should get the benefit of any direct taxes they pay?
What if I only pay $0.01 in income taxes? Should my vote be worth less than yours? Since professional athletes pay more taxes than you (most likely), should Latrell Sprewell's and Dan Wilkinson's votes be worth more than yours? How about Britney Spears? Let's see, that's one guy who tried to strangle his boss, a 300+ lb. college dropout who punched a pregenant woman, and a airheaded popstar who probably make ~200-300 times (conservative estimate) what you do, and therefore get ~200-300 times as many votes as you do.
Are you sure you want suffarage based on income?
Too true, but everyone has quoted W as saying 'There ought to be limits to freedom' and he did try to shut down satirical websites, which hardly makes him Freedom-of-Speech Man. The drug war issue (and crime-related issues in general) are issues that have turned into an arms race between the major parties, because nobody wants to be seen as soft on crime. ('I'll see your asset-forfeiture laws, and raise you by mandatory minimums!') My point was that you should just vote your conscience. Whoever is elected will do something to piss you off, so why kick yourself for voting for someone when you thought there was a better (or less bad) choice? I did wander a wee bit in my post though, didn't I?
Let me get this straight...
You say that freedom is your big issue, but you voted for a candidate who you disagree with about freedom of speech applying to the Internet, abortion rights and the war on drugs? The Prez will appoint the Supreme Court judges that will make decisions regarding the Constitutionality of any of these things, and perhaps more importantly, will also appoint the Federal judges that future Supreme Court justices are almost invariably drawn from (this is the real Reagan legacy, btw). Also, Inet censorship and the Drug War have lots of popular bipartisan support and therefore are incredibly likely to generate new laws and create strict enforcement of the old ones (unless your Daddy's the guv). Meanwhile, the guy you were trying to keep out because he is a 'statist', wants to do stuff that Big Corporate Interests will hate, and therefore have a slim chance of happening, similar to Clinton's healthcare agenda back in the day.
When I'm feeling cynical, I have a hard time telling a difference between the statists and the corporatists, 'cuz either way the citizens are screwed. However, I can vote and maybe affect the state, but with corporations, especially big ones, I don't even have that little influence.
You should have voted your conscience - it's the Right Thing To Do (tm), and if W wins and does things you don't like, you'll be kicking yourself for the next four years.
Wow, I unwittingly made a multi-function analogy. Too bad your version is probably a better one than mine...
The EC acts a buffer for disparites in the population sizes of the states, making each state closer to equal in 'size' for the purpose of electing a prez. Think of it like the World Series or the NBA playoffs, as opposed to the NFL playoffs. When you've got a best of seven series like the NBA/World Series (where the teams play until one team has won 4 games) you're more likely to get the actually better team, as opposed to the lucky team, such as the Titans beating the Bills last year on the last play of the game. If the election was on a pure popular majority, you could just say 'No taxes for Texas, Cali, New Yawk, Florida, screw the rest of the country!' and win. This is obviously an exaggeration, but you get the picture.
People say that their votes don't matter now because the only way one vote makes a difference is if your candidate loses your state by one vote, but in a pure popular vote election, they would only matter if your candidate loses by one vote out of the whole country. A popular vote election would actually dilute the importance of voting, not increase it.
China alone would be more than a match for the U.S.
Well, yes and no. The US probably couldn't invade and take over ther PRC, but if worse came to worst, the US could go nuke and destroy them, and the PRC certainly could not invade the US. Loads of PLA troops would have to somehow get to the US, past SSNs, carrier battle groups, and the USAF, without any log-range air support etc. of their own. Not too likely. Now, if the PRC really wanted to get Taiwan back, it would be hard/impossible to stop them, and we could never liberate the peasants and install our own regime miltarily. It more comes down to how interventionist you want your foreign policy to be.