They have a place, but only as an example of what not to do!!!
The shape of the space ship, for instance, has good scientific roots. If it's using some kind of nuclear drive (there's several varieties in theory, and these are the only practical long-distance power source since rocket fuel doesn't have the energy density), then that implies large quantities of radiation coming out of it, hence the living quarters need to be a long way away from it. Therefore the long structure. If you want multiple engines, the only two natural shapes for packing tubes together efficiently are the triangle and the hexagon.
The critic is forgetting that Clarke worked on the project. Clarke couldn't write for shit (sorry, but his prose is bad) but the guy was a flat-out genius when it came to scientific "prophesy". He worked out from first principles exactly what engineering solutions would be needed to solve particular problems, and used these in his books. Read "Rendezvous with Rama" for instance. This book has very little about what exploring an alien spaceship is like, but it goes into massive detail about the engineering involved.
My point is that you can dig so far and no further. OK, you can use characters and conversations to illustrate what the social climate of the time was. OK, you can dig out quite a few analogies, especially if the author isn't around to deny it. But if the creation process is well-documented, this all falls down. You're left with the conclusion that it must all be subconscious - ie. that an entire roomful of ppl working out a plotline equate a hexagonal tile to going to the toilet, and that they can all get a "90% anagram" subconsciously. Sorry, that's pure bullshit.
Didn't realise he did MtF - god that was a sick film! LMAO like never before!:-)
Bakshi told the story reasonably well, but the animation was no better than your typical early-morning kiddy job, which kind of pisses off adult fans of the book.
As far as the being a true fan goes, though, that's no guarantee. Think Dungeons and Dragons, and be afraid, be very afraid...
One thing I will say from this trailer, the lad playing Frodo seems pretty crap. He looks and sounds a bit too much like he's a graduate of the Keanu Reeves school of acting. I hope to god I'm wrong or I'll be extremely pissed off - given that a few thousand actors would gladly sell their mothers for soap to be in LotR, they'd damn well better do it right first time.
Grab.
Re:Best Pratchett's put out in a while...
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Thief of Time
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· Score: 2
If it's anything like Pyramids, don't stand in my way in the bookshop queue or you'll get run down!:-)
As far as the internal monologue goes, sometimes this is bcos the character _is_ complex. Carrot for instance appears whiter than white, but certain scenes (killing Cruces, the end of Fifth Elephant) show that good doesn't always mean nice (the classic line of "Pray you never meet a good man. He'll kill you without a word."). And an internal monologue for Granny Weatherwax, who's essentially nasty but knows she has to be good, would be mindbending! IMO, adding any kind of internal monologue to the Patrician was a mistake - he's another character who should just _be_ and you work him out from what he does.
I'm quite a fan, but sometimes the humanist bits get a bit tiring when they're forced down your throat. Reading a few back-to-back, I'm come away on a couple with the distinct feeling of the same theme in different clothes. Maybe Pterry should be forced to re-read his last dozen books every month while he's writing a new one, then he won't be tempted to re-use themes!;-)
It's more than a "cautionary note" to say "you are extremely unlikely to get this game to run"!!!
Consider cars. A typical car review says how well styled it is and how well (or badly) it corners, accelerates and brakes. If a reviewer was given a new car with a blown cylinder head, a leaky exhaust and no brakes, you reckon it'd get a good review? Uh-uh - they'd say "I've been given a dangerous and severely broken pile of shite, and the best I can do is advise ppl to stay the hell away from it".
Sending a kid off to the public library, watching porn is the least worrying thing. Somewhere further up the list are: gangs; drive-by shootings; ppl who have easy access to _legal_ firearms, never mind _illegal_ ones; SUVs with bull-bars; drunk drivers; ppl with mental health problems who aren't getting help to sort themselves out; and easy access to quick-dependency drugs like crack. The phrase "don't sweat the small stuff" springs inevitably to mind...
Not to mention sex itself. Would you rather your kid saw porn to learn how it went (think of it as "practical anatomy";-) or would you rather they were actually out having unprotected sex? It's a bad age to be at. Teenage boys are just going through puberty, they haven't got a clue what the f*ck's going on, half the time they're scared of girls and the other half they want something they don't understand. Meantime, teenage girls have mostly got puberty under control (having started the hormonal changes on average 4 years earlier) and are starting to actively look for sex. Porn gives teenage boys a safe way to explore their sexuality without risking anything.
Someone else pointed out the best solution - put the public terminals foursquare in the middle of the library, so everyone can see what you're doing. There aren't any privacy issues with a library terminal, any more than there are with seeing what books the person ahead of you in the library queue is borrowing, and having to surf for porn in public is going to put off damn near every teenage kid.
I have a similar problem - I'm very short-sighted in one eye, but the other's fine. Since I've got one good eye, I don't need to bother with glasses - my brain's adapted just fine to having one eye. My weak eye does contribute to the image, but not that much.
Anyway, I seem to get my main depth information from my eyes' focus. I think everyone uses it to some extent, but for me it's the main source of Z-axis info. I've yet to have any 3-D effect work for me, apart from those Escher-type drawings which just work by providing depth cues. I very much doubt that anyone will ever get a 3-D system which works properly for me.
Trial by jury is still in - the ruling simply gives rights to magistrates (think "lower court judges") to rule on open-and-shut cases. If someone's stolen a car, 20 people saw him do it and his fingerprints are all over the steering wheel, why do you need a jury? Incidentally, 300 MPs is slightly under 50% (total is 659 MPs) - if 60 of the 659 abstain, then 300 is enough to win a vote. If 320 vote yes, then only 20 would have to abstain. I don't know the vote in question, so I can't comment on the numbers involved.
The "freer press" in the US is owned by a few very rich people, who also own many industrial operations. Think any dodgy deals in those businesses are going to be reported? Think again. We have exactly that situation with newspapers over here (Rupert Murdoch owns most of them), but luckily the impartial BBC reporting gives us a reliable TV news.
A written constitution - and damn, doesn't your government take notice of it when making laws! Hell, if the US didn't come up with such dumb-ass laws,/. would be _sooo_ quiet! Not to mention a president explicitly violating the constitution (separation of church and state). I very much suspect the courts will do nothing at all about it.
"No French-speaking federal partner" - aren't you forgetting Louisiana? Incidentally, the US is getting on for a majority Spanish-speaking nation! AFAIK, no EU-wide laws on libel are coming out - the EU is still a trading bloc rather than a federal state, and the majority of EU residents are opposed to federalisation.
I would not choose the US legal system. We've got the start of ambulance-chasing lawyers over here, and no-one's too keen to see that happen. Grandstanding for the public and blatant lies - the Menendez case springs to mind. The US police and paramilitary organisations (FBI, DEA, etc) are notorious for literally getting away with murder. And the US civil courts are a bad joke. Having said that, the British system is far from perfect as well, and I doubt you'll find a truly perfect legal system anywhere. But I can at least walk around London without getting shot - I couldn't do the same in Washington, I'd be dead.
I wouldn't recommend a US citizen fleeing to the UK, though. The "special relationship" is fairly weak but it does still exist. Chances are, the UK would just hand him back rather than prejudice their trading relations with the US.
Grab.
Re:I forgot the catholic church & political democr
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The Business
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· Score: 2
"Citizens electing a president" is peers electing one of their own? Uh-uh. Now, "businesses electing a president", or "rich guys who've never worked and inherited everything from daddy electing a president", that I can see.:-) A US president is only a peer of other multimillionaires. They have nothing in common with other citizens.
Yeah, Donaldson stuff is pretty damn good - good 3-D characters and imaginative situations. Trouble is, Donaldson is too fond of himself. He's a great fan of using long or uncommon words to show he's clever rather than actually bcos they fit in. And he's too-obviously looked them up in the thesaurus rather than them being words he'd use naturally - the same words come up again and again (IIRC, "crepuscular" is one of his favourites in TCtU) which demonstrates a lack of real vocabulary. Both TCtU series and the Gap-war series suffer from that (in the Gap-war series, he can't get over how clever he was at inventing the matter cannon).
But if you can put up with the slightly pretentious bits every now and again, Donaldson is good. The Gap-war series is brilliant for the imagination and sheer depth; just a shame it occasionally goes off the scale on the pretentiometer! Best is the short story collection "Daughter of Regals" - highly recommended.
Grab.
Sure, Y2K went right. Largely bcos of ppl testing and fixing stuff.
Credit cards and banks really were in the shitter - if they hadn't had their Y2K stuff going, you really wouldn't have been able to get any money out, or you would have had some arbitrarily large sum added or deducted from your account when interest was worked out. And even with all the testing, there were some errors.
Complaining that Y2K went smoothly is like complaining that the Shuttle didn't blow up on launch, or that an Indycar/F1 race didn't have someone get killed. There's a chance of the shit really hitting the fan, but large numbers of ppl were trying to make sure it didn't, and they succeeded.
Sure, there's some guys cashed in on it with their crappy little programs that claimed to fix your PC, and there's some ppl tried to make money off the "survivalist" thing. But there's always someone selling snake-oil. You work in industry, you just have to be able to tell snake-oil from substance.
Isolated cases where Y2K fault-detection was required and important: banks, loan companies, credit card companies, point-of-sale systems. Failure of these would make it difficult for ppl to get food, which is a major issue. Isolated cases where Y2K fault-detection was required but non-critical: heating control systems, alarms, lifts, anything running from Excel or Access on a PC. Failure of these would not be life-threatening, but could be annoying. And failure of Excel or Access (or custom database/organisation programs) to work properly would be terminal for many businesses.
"Hypertext...changes our sense of authorship, authorial property, and creativity (or originality) by moving away from the constructions of page-bound technology."
I realise this is a quote from another source, but I'm don't think that's true. Just bcos I can navigate to anywhere I want in a website, it doesn't give me any feeling of ownership over the site. The old choose-your-own adventure books in the 80s were fun, but you always knew Steve Jackson or whoever had written them. And real creativity isn't possible in a multiple-choice environment (eg. the options of "open the door boldly and fight/open the door carefully and backstab" don't cover the third option of "get some drapes from the last room, soak them in the pool of oil in the room before that, and burn the buggers out").
Nor does linking change anything. Essentially, all linking does is tell your readers how to find source material or related information - it doesn't mean, for instance, that 2600 actually owns DeCSS (a point on which the US legislature need to get a clue).
Authorship and authorial property are another point. There's a long history of breaking copyright by copying music for your friends - hell, that's the only reason to have a twin-deck tape player! We always knew it was technically wrong, but we did it anyway bcos we couldn't afford to buy as much music as we wanted - and the same goes for copying computer games on tape. Napster and co have just made it easier to break copyright law. But there's still no argument over the author of the music - regardless of who you pirated it off on Napster/Gnutella, you still know that the music was written by Metallica or whoever.
The more I see articles about "the Web changes everything", the more I realise that the article-writers (and book writers in this case) need a clue. Certainly it's changed things, but it's only changed them in the way that it's made existing interactions (passing information, copying music onto tapes for your friends, getting pr0n, etc) easier and/or more convenient than before. The telephone made it easier to interact with people on the other side of the country (or the other side of the world), but people still managed to communicate before it came along. "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
Grab.
PS. Yes I do know the original French, but many Americans probably don't!;-)
First year English majors, encountering some of the whacko theories regarding modern literature, are quick to say that this is a bunch of bullshit. But us old hat parties in the field of discourse are forced to wonder if there isn't more to it.
Unfortunately, what forces English majors into wondering about this is the ppl who've already graduated and are teaching. If you need to get a degree, you'll spout any crap so long as it sounds like what the lecturer wants. My wife just recently did an English and Philosophy degree, and found the situation was that if you gave a lecturer an essay saying his view is right (or using a technique he particularly likes) you get good marks, and if you didn't you got crap marks. Given this situation, what do you think the result is?
And then you graduate with an English Lit degree. Pardon me for saying this, but that makes you pretty damn unemployable - you've proved you're smart, but you've not proved you know shit about the outside world (or even that you can survive in the outside world!) and you have no skills. The ones that can survive go on to do law, accounting, whatever, and get good money.
But there's some that can't survive outside of academia. They do post-grad work on even more bizarre shit, and then become lecturers and teach this same stuff to new students. It becomes self-perpetuating, and no-one can say that the emperor has no clothes, bcos if you do you remove your reason for having a job.
I don't say that English degrees are pointless. Universities aren't purely for factual education, they're also to teach you how to learn and how to think, so any degree can be useful if properly taught. But when they're merely teaching you to be a yes-man, that's going to screw you up for life when you find that a yes-man simply gets walked over like a doormat.
Sure, if there's only enough capacity to do one thing well, then do it that way. But the trend is for consolidation of devices with similar functions into one device which can do them all - the PC is the most obvious example, and PDAs and mobile phones are going the same way. The physical limits for these are in no way set by the components inside, it's all set by the size of keyboard and screen you need. Ditch these, and I'd be surprised if you couldn't get it all into something significantly smaller. Flexible circuit boards are a wonderful invention, and should make it easy to put all the circuitry in something the size of your typical fluorescent marker pen. Even today, with today's tech, you could do that with a mobile phone circuit (trust me, I've seen the circuits and it'd be quite possible).
Having said that, you've got the problem of getting a battery supply in there. But batteries are usually sealed, tough and non-bendable, so one of those in a holster on your belt isn't a big deal. Seal the battery pack and pen to IP68, two jack plugs in the pen (one to the battery, one to the headset), and bingo.
Admittedly then you're stuck with the processing power of a mobile phone. You want more power, you need more silicon, but Moore's Law should help with that. And there's always the possibility of networking these so that one can do all the phone and interface stuff and the other can be free to do the processing, for example. It'd be quite feasible to have a belt with a bandolier-type arrangement, with lots of little cases around it, each of them doing a part of the processing. Take the size of each down to a lipstick case or so, and it'd hardly even get in your way.
Someone quoted Neil Stephenson (got the wrong book, but anyway). I'll quote as well - "Diamond Age" suggests that nanotech is good enough to do direct neural interfaces, but most ppl don't use them bcos of hackers. From memory: "Bud knew a guy who had an ad for roach motels flashing 24 hours a day in his peripheral vision until the guy whacked himself." Later on in the same book, it shows a torture session using nanotech to interface directly to the nerves to cause pain.
Controlling you isn't likely to be an issue - the nervous system is a hub network requiring the brain to process inputs and issue commands based on those inputs. But someone could spoof the inputs, so someone who can crack your direct neural connection could hijack your visual field or cause you as much pain as they liked. Not good...
And this isn't how every company in the world works? Check out how Cisco, Ford, etc operate. If you don't have the skills in-house, then you either contract out (as they are basically doing with Matrix) or you look to buy out a smaller company which does have the skills.
Some large companies are adept at pissing in the soup - they buy a smaller company and immediately install all sorts of big-company procedures which stop the small company working effectively, and all the ppl who provided the skills bugger off elsewhere. Most have learned by now that if you buy a small company, you let them run just as they are, otherwise you're strangling the goose in an attempt to get more golden eggs.
Sure, MS has had some dodgy games, but equally they've done some great ones. As you say, they're not produced them in-house - they have the smarts to know that they don't have the skills to do it, so they get someone else to. This is no more wrong than taking your car to a mechanic to get it repaired.
The Amiga had a similar tutorial bundled with it (called "Very First" IIRC). I found out more from trying it out in the first couple of evenings than I did in going through the manual, but it is useful to fill in any gaps for stuff you've missed.
The most obvious example of fair use I can think of is quoting. You have a right to quote excerpts from a work up to some limit (10% of the work IIRC) for research purposes.
This is basically designed for textual sources, but there's no reason why it shouldn't apply to music and video. If in 10 years time you're writing a dissertation on the visual effects used in the Star Wars films, you MUST have access to the originals so that you can analyse it frame by frame and pixel by pixel. A grainy, noise-added copy just isn't good enough to base your work on. For a textual analogy, a literature student has to work off the original source-book, not off a Reader's Digest condensed version!
Slashdot Mirror
They have a place, but only as an example of what not to do!!!
The shape of the space ship, for instance, has good scientific roots. If it's using some kind of nuclear drive (there's several varieties in theory, and these are the only practical long-distance power source since rocket fuel doesn't have the energy density), then that implies large quantities of radiation coming out of it, hence the living quarters need to be a long way away from it. Therefore the long structure. If you want multiple engines, the only two natural shapes for packing tubes together efficiently are the triangle and the hexagon.
The critic is forgetting that Clarke worked on the project. Clarke couldn't write for shit (sorry, but his prose is bad) but the guy was a flat-out genius when it came to scientific "prophesy". He worked out from first principles exactly what engineering solutions would be needed to solve particular problems, and used these in his books. Read "Rendezvous with Rama" for instance. This book has very little about what exploring an alien spaceship is like, but it goes into massive detail about the engineering involved.
My point is that you can dig so far and no further. OK, you can use characters and conversations to illustrate what the social climate of the time was. OK, you can dig out quite a few analogies, especially if the author isn't around to deny it. But if the creation process is well-documented, this all falls down. You're left with the conclusion that it must all be subconscious - ie. that an entire roomful of ppl working out a plotline equate a hexagonal tile to going to the toilet, and that they can all get a "90% anagram" subconsciously. Sorry, that's pure bullshit.
Grab.
Didn't realise he did MtF - god that was a sick film! LMAO like never before! :-)
Bakshi told the story reasonably well, but the animation was no better than your typical early-morning kiddy job, which kind of pisses off adult fans of the book.
As far as the being a true fan goes, though, that's no guarantee. Think Dungeons and Dragons, and be afraid, be very afraid...
One thing I will say from this trailer, the lad playing Frodo seems pretty crap. He looks and sounds a bit too much like he's a graduate of the Keanu Reeves school of acting. I hope to god I'm wrong or I'll be extremely pissed off - given that a few thousand actors would gladly sell their mothers for soap to be in LotR, they'd damn well better do it right first time.
Grab.
If it's anything like Pyramids, don't stand in my way in the bookshop queue or you'll get run down! :-)
;-)
As far as the internal monologue goes, sometimes this is bcos the character _is_ complex. Carrot for instance appears whiter than white, but certain scenes (killing Cruces, the end of Fifth Elephant) show that good doesn't always mean nice (the classic line of "Pray you never meet a good man. He'll kill you without a word."). And an internal monologue for Granny Weatherwax, who's essentially nasty but knows she has to be good, would be mindbending! IMO, adding any kind of internal monologue to the Patrician was a mistake - he's another character who should just _be_ and you work him out from what he does.
I'm quite a fan, but sometimes the humanist bits get a bit tiring when they're forced down your throat. Reading a few back-to-back, I'm come away on a couple with the distinct feeling of the same theme in different clothes. Maybe Pterry should be forced to re-read his last dozen books every month while he's writing a new one, then he won't be tempted to re-use themes!
Grab.
It's more than a "cautionary note" to say "you are extremely unlikely to get this game to run"!!!
Consider cars. A typical car review says how well styled it is and how well (or badly) it corners, accelerates and brakes. If a reviewer was given a new car with a blown cylinder head, a leaky exhaust and no brakes, you reckon it'd get a good review? Uh-uh - they'd say "I've been given a dangerous and severely broken pile of shite, and the best I can do is advise ppl to stay the hell away from it".
Grab.
Gratuitous karma whoring, but funny as hell all the same! :-) Top marks!
Grab.
Only if you can convince the judge that it's of benefit to the community. ;-)
Grab.
Sending a kid off to the public library, watching porn is the least worrying thing. Somewhere further up the list are: gangs; drive-by shootings; ppl who have easy access to _legal_ firearms, never mind _illegal_ ones; SUVs with bull-bars; drunk drivers; ppl with mental health problems who aren't getting help to sort themselves out; and easy access to quick-dependency drugs like crack. The phrase "don't sweat the small stuff" springs inevitably to mind...
;-) or would you rather they were actually out having unprotected sex? It's a bad age to be at. Teenage boys are just going through puberty, they haven't got a clue what the f*ck's going on, half the time they're scared of girls and the other half they want something they don't understand. Meantime, teenage girls have mostly got puberty under control (having started the hormonal changes on average 4 years earlier) and are starting to actively look for sex. Porn gives teenage boys a safe way to explore their sexuality without risking anything.
Not to mention sex itself. Would you rather your kid saw porn to learn how it went (think of it as "practical anatomy"
Someone else pointed out the best solution - put the public terminals foursquare in the middle of the library, so everyone can see what you're doing. There aren't any privacy issues with a library terminal, any more than there are with seeing what books the person ahead of you in the library queue is borrowing, and having to surf for porn in public is going to put off damn near every teenage kid.
Grab.
To quote Winston, "This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put!"
:-)
In other words, if we don't talk the way the rules say, then the rules just aren't keeping up.
Grab.
I have a similar problem - I'm very short-sighted in one eye, but the other's fine. Since I've got one good eye, I don't need to bother with glasses - my brain's adapted just fine to having one eye. My weak eye does contribute to the image, but not that much.
Anyway, I seem to get my main depth information from my eyes' focus. I think everyone uses it to some extent, but for me it's the main source of Z-axis info. I've yet to have any 3-D effect work for me, apart from those Escher-type drawings which just work by providing depth cues. I very much doubt that anyone will ever get a 3-D system which works properly for me.
Graham.
Trial by jury is still in - the ruling simply gives rights to magistrates (think "lower court judges") to rule on open-and-shut cases. If someone's stolen a car, 20 people saw him do it and his fingerprints are all over the steering wheel, why do you need a jury? Incidentally, 300 MPs is slightly under 50% (total is 659 MPs) - if 60 of the 659 abstain, then 300 is enough to win a vote. If 320 vote yes, then only 20 would have to abstain. I don't know the vote in question, so I can't comment on the numbers involved.
/. would be _sooo_ quiet! Not to mention a president explicitly violating the constitution (separation of church and state). I very much suspect the courts will do nothing at all about it.
The "freer press" in the US is owned by a few very rich people, who also own many industrial operations. Think any dodgy deals in those businesses are going to be reported? Think again. We have exactly that situation with newspapers over here (Rupert Murdoch owns most of them), but luckily the impartial BBC reporting gives us a reliable TV news.
A written constitution - and damn, doesn't your government take notice of it when making laws! Hell, if the US didn't come up with such dumb-ass laws,
"No French-speaking federal partner" - aren't you forgetting Louisiana? Incidentally, the US is getting on for a majority Spanish-speaking nation! AFAIK, no EU-wide laws on libel are coming out - the EU is still a trading bloc rather than a federal state, and the majority of EU residents are opposed to federalisation.
I would not choose the US legal system. We've got the start of ambulance-chasing lawyers over here, and no-one's too keen to see that happen. Grandstanding for the public and blatant lies - the Menendez case springs to mind. The US police and paramilitary organisations (FBI, DEA, etc) are notorious for literally getting away with murder. And the US civil courts are a bad joke. Having said that, the British system is far from perfect as well, and I doubt you'll find a truly perfect legal system anywhere. But I can at least walk around London without getting shot - I couldn't do the same in Washington, I'd be dead.
I wouldn't recommend a US citizen fleeing to the UK, though. The "special relationship" is fairly weak but it does still exist. Chances are, the UK would just hand him back rather than prejudice their trading relations with the US.
Grab.
"Citizens electing a president" is peers electing one of their own? Uh-uh. Now, "businesses electing a president", or "rich guys who've never worked and inherited everything from daddy electing a president", that I can see. :-) A US president is only a peer of other multimillionaires. They have nothing in common with other citizens.
Grab.
Yeah, Donaldson stuff is pretty damn good - good 3-D characters and imaginative situations. Trouble is, Donaldson is too fond of himself. He's a great fan of using long or uncommon words to show he's clever rather than actually bcos they fit in. And he's too-obviously looked them up in the thesaurus rather than them being words he'd use naturally - the same words come up again and again (IIRC, "crepuscular" is one of his favourites in TCtU) which demonstrates a lack of real vocabulary. Both TCtU series and the Gap-war series suffer from that (in the Gap-war series, he can't get over how clever he was at inventing the matter cannon). But if you can put up with the slightly pretentious bits every now and again, Donaldson is good. The Gap-war series is brilliant for the imagination and sheer depth; just a shame it occasionally goes off the scale on the pretentiometer! Best is the short story collection "Daughter of Regals" - highly recommended. Grab.
Sure, Y2K went right. Largely bcos of ppl testing and fixing stuff.
Credit cards and banks really were in the shitter - if they hadn't had their Y2K stuff going, you really wouldn't have been able to get any money out, or you would have had some arbitrarily large sum added or deducted from your account when interest was worked out. And even with all the testing, there were some errors.
Complaining that Y2K went smoothly is like complaining that the Shuttle didn't blow up on launch, or that an Indycar/F1 race didn't have someone get killed. There's a chance of the shit really hitting the fan, but large numbers of ppl were trying to make sure it didn't, and they succeeded.
Sure, there's some guys cashed in on it with their crappy little programs that claimed to fix your PC, and there's some ppl tried to make money off the "survivalist" thing. But there's always someone selling snake-oil. You work in industry, you just have to be able to tell snake-oil from substance.
Isolated cases where Y2K fault-detection was required and important: banks, loan companies, credit card companies, point-of-sale systems. Failure of these would make it difficult for ppl to get food, which is a major issue. Isolated cases where Y2K fault-detection was required but non-critical: heating control systems, alarms, lifts, anything running from Excel or Access on a PC. Failure of these would not be life-threatening, but could be annoying. And failure of Excel or Access (or custom database/organisation programs) to work properly would be terminal for many businesses.
Grab.
pussy being thrown at you from every direction
... well, more cats out there!" "Blame it on that Japanese weather forecaster predicting a hairstorm."
:-)
"It's raining cats and
Sorry.
Grab.
"Hypertext...changes our sense of authorship, authorial property, and creativity (or originality) by moving away from the constructions of page-bound technology."
;-)
I realise this is a quote from another source, but I'm don't think that's true. Just bcos I can navigate to anywhere I want in a website, it doesn't give me any feeling of ownership over the site. The old choose-your-own adventure books in the 80s were fun, but you always knew Steve Jackson or whoever had written them. And real creativity isn't possible in a multiple-choice environment (eg. the options of "open the door boldly and fight/open the door carefully and backstab" don't cover the third option of "get some drapes from the last room, soak them in the pool of oil in the room before that, and burn the buggers out").
Nor does linking change anything. Essentially, all linking does is tell your readers how to find source material or related information - it doesn't mean, for instance, that 2600 actually owns DeCSS (a point on which the US legislature need to get a clue).
Authorship and authorial property are another point. There's a long history of breaking copyright by copying music for your friends - hell, that's the only reason to have a twin-deck tape player! We always knew it was technically wrong, but we did it anyway bcos we couldn't afford to buy as much music as we wanted - and the same goes for copying computer games on tape. Napster and co have just made it easier to break copyright law. But there's still no argument over the author of the music - regardless of who you pirated it off on Napster/Gnutella, you still know that the music was written by Metallica or whoever.
The more I see articles about "the Web changes everything", the more I realise that the article-writers (and book writers in this case) need a clue. Certainly it's changed things, but it's only changed them in the way that it's made existing interactions (passing information, copying music onto tapes for your friends, getting pr0n, etc) easier and/or more convenient than before. The telephone made it easier to interact with people on the other side of the country (or the other side of the world), but people still managed to communicate before it came along. "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
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PS. Yes I do know the original French, but many Americans probably don't!
Didn't the Challenger crew use that 30 acres behind the barn? Spread evenly over all 30 acres? ;-)
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PS. I know it's sick, but I couldn't help it...
First year English majors, encountering some of the whacko theories regarding modern literature, are quick to say that this is a bunch of bullshit. But us old hat parties in the field of discourse are forced to wonder if there isn't more to it.
Unfortunately, what forces English majors into wondering about this is the ppl who've already graduated and are teaching. If you need to get a degree, you'll spout any crap so long as it sounds like what the lecturer wants. My wife just recently did an English and Philosophy degree, and found the situation was that if you gave a lecturer an essay saying his view is right (or using a technique he particularly likes) you get good marks, and if you didn't you got crap marks. Given this situation, what do you think the result is?
And then you graduate with an English Lit degree. Pardon me for saying this, but that makes you pretty damn unemployable - you've proved you're smart, but you've not proved you know shit about the outside world (or even that you can survive in the outside world!) and you have no skills. The ones that can survive go on to do law, accounting, whatever, and get good money.
But there's some that can't survive outside of academia. They do post-grad work on even more bizarre shit, and then become lecturers and teach this same stuff to new students. It becomes self-perpetuating, and no-one can say that the emperor has no clothes, bcos if you do you remove your reason for having a job.
I don't say that English degrees are pointless. Universities aren't purely for factual education, they're also to teach you how to learn and how to think, so any degree can be useful if properly taught. But when they're merely teaching you to be a yes-man, that's going to screw you up for life when you find that a yes-man simply gets walked over like a doormat.
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Sure, if there's only enough capacity to do one thing well, then do it that way. But the trend is for consolidation of devices with similar functions into one device which can do them all - the PC is the most obvious example, and PDAs and mobile phones are going the same way. The physical limits for these are in no way set by the components inside, it's all set by the size of keyboard and screen you need. Ditch these, and I'd be surprised if you couldn't get it all into something significantly smaller. Flexible circuit boards are a wonderful invention, and should make it easy to put all the circuitry in something the size of your typical fluorescent marker pen. Even today, with today's tech, you could do that with a mobile phone circuit (trust me, I've seen the circuits and it'd be quite possible).
Having said that, you've got the problem of getting a battery supply in there. But batteries are usually sealed, tough and non-bendable, so one of those in a holster on your belt isn't a big deal. Seal the battery pack and pen to IP68, two jack plugs in the pen (one to the battery, one to the headset), and bingo.
Admittedly then you're stuck with the processing power of a mobile phone. You want more power, you need more silicon, but Moore's Law should help with that. And there's always the possibility of networking these so that one can do all the phone and interface stuff and the other can be free to do the processing, for example. It'd be quite feasible to have a belt with a bandolier-type arrangement, with lots of little cases around it, each of them doing a part of the processing. Take the size of each down to a lipstick case or so, and it'd hardly even get in your way.
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Good point! :-)
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Someone quoted Neil Stephenson (got the wrong book, but anyway). I'll quote as well - "Diamond Age" suggests that nanotech is good enough to do direct neural interfaces, but most ppl don't use them bcos of hackers. From memory: "Bud knew a guy who had an ad for roach motels flashing 24 hours a day in his peripheral vision until the guy whacked himself." Later on in the same book, it shows a torture session using nanotech to interface directly to the nerves to cause pain.
Controlling you isn't likely to be an issue - the nervous system is a hub network requiring the brain to process inputs and issue commands based on those inputs. But someone could spoof the inputs, so someone who can crack your direct neural connection could hijack your visual field or cause you as much pain as they liked. Not good...
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And this isn't how every company in the world works? Check out how Cisco, Ford, etc operate. If you don't have the skills in-house, then you either contract out (as they are basically doing with Matrix) or you look to buy out a smaller company which does have the skills.
Some large companies are adept at pissing in the soup - they buy a smaller company and immediately install all sorts of big-company procedures which stop the small company working effectively, and all the ppl who provided the skills bugger off elsewhere. Most have learned by now that if you buy a small company, you let them run just as they are, otherwise you're strangling the goose in an attempt to get more golden eggs.
Sure, MS has had some dodgy games, but equally they've done some great ones. As you say, they're not produced them in-house - they have the smarts to know that they don't have the skills to do it, so they get someone else to. This is no more wrong than taking your car to a mechanic to get it repaired.
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Oh no, the paperclip's been cut from Office! Don't let me die this way!
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The Amiga had a similar tutorial bundled with it (called "Very First" IIRC). I found out more from trying it out in the first couple of evenings than I did in going through the manual, but it is useful to fill in any gaps for stuff you've missed.
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The most obvious example of fair use I can think of is quoting. You have a right to quote excerpts from a work up to some limit (10% of the work IIRC) for research purposes.
This is basically designed for textual sources, but there's no reason why it shouldn't apply to music and video. If in 10 years time you're writing a dissertation on the visual effects used in the Star Wars films, you MUST have access to the originals so that you can analyse it frame by frame and pixel by pixel. A grainy, noise-added copy just isn't good enough to base your work on. For a textual analogy, a literature student has to work off the original source-book, not off a Reader's Digest condensed version!
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Whew! No wonder I had problems following the film then!
;-)
Like "2001", I guess. You don't read the book to find if it's better than the film, you read the book to find what actually _happened_ in the film.
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