NASA's new Mars reference mission is mostly based on Zubrin's The Case For Mars, but crucially, the rotating-with-tether idea for minimizing bone-loss idea has been dropped.
NASA has invested decades of research and gazillions of dollars into investigating medical responses to weightlessness - indeed, it's often cited as the reason for manned space flight. They can't back down and say that Oh, actually, a tether-based system is quick and easy... They cite difficulties in communication (e.g the antenna is rotating) as the main reason why the tether system won't work, but personally, I don't think that's an insurmountable problem. The benefits of doing a 9-month trip in decent (0.39g) gravity far outweight the hazards of having an antenna which will need realigning with that pesky precession.
Solar sails are bombarded with both photons - light - and protons - part of the solar wind.
When a reflective sail is hit by photons, the force generated varies with the angle of the sail (i.e. the sail is pushed normal to the plane of the sail). When a sail is non-reflective, the incoming particles 'stick', transferring their momentum in the direction they were travelling, i.e. radially from the sun.
Okay, they don't have any equipment in the vans: they're just there to be visible, and to scare people. How would you localise a signal from a back bedroom in a block of flats, anyway?
When you buy or rent any kind of TV signal demodulating equipment - TV, video, TV Card - you have to give your name and address to the retailer. They then pass on that info to the TLA, who trawl through it periodically, comparing it with their own records of who's bought a license.
To reiterate, the vans don't do anything!
I don't know about in the States, but the prevalence of SMS (Short Message Service)-capable mobiles in the UK has led to the 'verbing' of the noun 'message', e.g. 'Could you message me his number please?' or 'I'll message you when I get on the train'.
This points out the terrible consequences of mistaking the context. The case was in the 1950s; the man who shot the policeman was under 18 and incacerated, the man who said 'Let him have it' was hanged. By the time computers are intelligent enough to carry out a conversation with you ('Put those files away for storage.','Which files?','Oh those ones over there.') we won't need to perform those kind of operations, because it'll amount to a semi-autonomous AI.
As long as security considerations are taken, the dcop shell scripting capabilities open up a huge amount of possibilities. This looks v. v. interesting
It's *just* been republished in the U.K. by Gollanz: it's available from amazon.co.uk. First the SF Masterworks series, now the Gollanz reprints: older SF is finally getting the recognition it deserves (in the UK at least). Now if only _True Names_ would be republished..
Re:Ken MacLeod is the Second Coming
on
The Star Fraction
·
· Score: 1
I wouldn't go quite as far as saying that he's the second coming, but he's certainly been a refreshing voice in late 90s sf. The Star Fraction, his first book, is in my opinion his strongest: although it's got narrative problems, the ideas are incredibly refreshing. What made me sit up and notice was the way in which he articulated the contemporary themes of the U.K. - the U.S. hegemony, republicanism, the 'barb' (Green terrorists), which to switched-on members of Britain today represent the most interesting and dangerous issues. People fighting for the right to use technology is what the book's central issue is about, and yet (as previous people have said) he does make other viewpoints sympathetic. Especially chilling is the U.S./Stasis agents' comment that a release of an autonomous AI into the datasphere makes the major powers utter phrases like 'clean start' - it is certainly something to think about when everything is wired. Also, one of the images that haunts a main character is of US/UN peacekeepers killing his parents: 'when the peace-process was more deadly that the war' (as the blurb put it) - spot on when it was first published in the aftermath of the First Balkan War. Green terrorism is also only too believable in the current environment of the UK : crops being burnt, GM foods made pariah. The Socialist politics of the book are impressive and refreshing: impressive, given the move towards a consensus of a Centre-Right position in European politics (despite what Tony Blair says!) - that someone dares to keep the old dream alive and update it into something more modern; and refreshing, since cyberpunk (which this book borrows elements from) and most all near-future fantasies give raging capitalism as the background. Ken says (paraphrasing a bit) - 'if socialism is supposed to be more efficient than capitalism, then let us compete with it!' and then creates a world in which it happens - not effectively, but at least with a heart. As a literary work, however, The Star Fraction is very obviously his first work, and also obviously inspired by Banksian prose. Funny, irreverent, yet unstructured and ill-disciplined. View-points jump around, geography undefined (BTW, for the review, Norlonto is NOrth LOndon TOwn, and the region given is actually at the moment horrendous suburbia in my view) and plot elements skimmed without good cause. It makes for harder reading than is necessary, but still, for science fiction buffs, for people interested in politics small and large (for both feature equally), and for people concerned about the state of science in the UK, it is a must read.
The future of growth means, probably, that atomic scale memory is the densest. This'll be reached within half a century and from then on, media problems will be over - however, interface problems won't be. These interface problems (e.g. different filesystems, different data types) will continue for a long, long time: probably many careers will be made in 'programming archaeology.' I don't think the VM idea will work; whose made a VM or tape drivers for NASA's store of 1960s telemetry data, which might one day be needed? Some lucky person will have to hack the tapes directly.
For example, Delphi uses Object Pascal, which is pretty much of a kludge of a language - but the Visual Component Library is very well designed, and makes business apps (not games, admittedly) easy to do.... Java has some excellent libraries (e.g. the Collections framework which is near what Sweeny was describing) and some very poor ones (i/o comes to mind). Choose the language according to the libraries available, not what could be implemented in it.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA has invested decades of research and gazillions of dollars into investigating medical responses to weightlessness - indeed, it's often cited as the reason for manned space flight. They can't back down and say that Oh, actually, a tether-based system is quick and easy... They cite difficulties in communication (e.g the antenna is rotating) as the main reason why the tether system won't work, but personally, I don't think that's an insurmountable problem. The benefits of doing a 9-month trip in decent (0.39g) gravity far outweight the hazards of having an antenna which will need realigning with that pesky precession.
I still miss being able to tell if the computer had crashed by the different hum of the CPU.
When a reflective sail is hit by photons, the force generated varies with the angle of the sail (i.e. the sail is pushed normal to the plane of the sail). When a sail is non-reflective, the incoming particles 'stick', transferring their momentum in the direction they were travelling, i.e. radially from the sun.
Okay, they don't have any equipment in the vans: they're just there to be visible, and to scare people. How would you localise a signal from a back bedroom in a block of flats, anyway?
When you buy or rent any kind of TV signal demodulating equipment - TV, video, TV Card - you have to give your name and address to the retailer. They then pass on that info to the TLA, who trawl through it periodically, comparing it with their own records of who's bought a license. To reiterate, the vans don't do anything!
I don't know about in the States, but the prevalence of SMS (Short Message Service)-capable mobiles in the UK has led to the 'verbing' of the noun 'message', e.g. 'Could you message me his number please?' or 'I'll message you when I get on the train'.
This points out the terrible consequences of mistaking the context. The case was in the 1950s; the man who shot the policeman was under 18 and incacerated, the man who said 'Let him have it' was hanged. By the time computers are intelligent enough to carry out a conversation with you ('Put those files away for storage.','Which files?','Oh those ones over there.') we won't need to perform those kind of operations, because it'll amount to a semi-autonomous AI.
As long as security considerations are taken, the dcop shell scripting capabilities open up a huge amount of possibilities. This looks v. v. interesting
It's *just* been republished in the U.K. by Gollanz: it's available from amazon.co.uk. First the SF Masterworks series, now the Gollanz reprints: older SF is finally getting the recognition it deserves (in the UK at least). Now if only _True Names_ would be republished..
I wouldn't go quite as far as saying that he's the second coming, but he's certainly been a refreshing voice in late 90s sf.
The Star Fraction, his first book, is in my opinion his strongest: although it's got narrative problems, the ideas are incredibly refreshing. What made me sit up and notice was the way in which he articulated the contemporary themes of the U.K. - the U.S. hegemony, republicanism, the 'barb' (Green terrorists), which to switched-on members of Britain today represent the most interesting and dangerous issues. People fighting for the right to use technology is what the book's central issue is about, and yet (as previous people have said) he does make other viewpoints sympathetic. Especially chilling is the U.S./Stasis agents' comment that a release of an autonomous AI into the datasphere makes the major powers utter phrases like 'clean start' - it is certainly something to think about when everything is wired. Also, one of the images that haunts a main character is of US/UN peacekeepers killing his parents: 'when the peace-process was more deadly that the war' (as the blurb put it) - spot on when it was first published in the aftermath of the First Balkan War. Green terrorism is also only too believable in the current environment of the UK : crops being burnt, GM foods made pariah.
The Socialist politics of the book are impressive and refreshing: impressive, given the move towards a consensus of a Centre-Right position in European politics (despite what Tony Blair says!) - that someone dares to keep the old dream alive and update it into something more modern; and refreshing, since cyberpunk (which this book borrows elements from) and most all near-future fantasies give raging capitalism as the background. Ken says (paraphrasing a bit) - 'if socialism is supposed to be more efficient than capitalism, then let us compete with it!' and then creates a world in which it happens - not effectively, but at least with a heart.
As a literary work, however, The Star Fraction is very obviously his first work, and also obviously inspired by Banksian prose. Funny, irreverent, yet unstructured and ill-disciplined. View-points jump around, geography undefined (BTW, for the review, Norlonto is NOrth LOndon TOwn, and the region given is actually at the moment horrendous suburbia in my view) and plot elements skimmed without good cause. It makes for harder reading than is necessary, but still, for science fiction buffs, for people interested in politics small and large (for both feature equally), and for people concerned about the state of science in the UK, it is a must read.
The future of growth means, probably, that atomic scale memory is the densest. This'll be reached within half a century and from then on, media problems will be over - however, interface problems won't be.
These interface problems (e.g. different filesystems, different data types) will continue for a long, long time: probably many careers will be made in 'programming archaeology.'
I don't think the VM idea will work; whose made a VM or tape drivers for NASA's store of 1960s telemetry data, which might one day be needed? Some lucky person will have to hack the tapes directly.
For example, Delphi uses Object Pascal, which is pretty much of a kludge of a language - but the Visual Component Library is very well designed, and makes business apps (not games, admittedly) easy to do.... Java has some excellent libraries (e.g. the Collections framework which is near what Sweeny was describing) and some very poor ones (i/o comes to mind). Choose the language according to the libraries available, not what could be implemented in it.