The California State Constitution lists privacy as one of the inalienable rights. This actually came up in one of the landmark cases that lead to the state's sodomy laws being struck down.
What makes this particularly amusing is that Facebook, Google, and even Klout are all based in California! (The last one may go beyond amusing into appalling territory.)
I'm too busy being pleased that they're honoring an explorer instead of just someone else with a high body count. In any case, there's a good chance it'll get re-used later. In case you haven't noticed, that tends to happen a lot with vehicle names.
Several years back, a guy I know threw a huge party. He bought cheap beer, but as a joke, he had his own labels printed and replaced the brewery's labels. His labels quite clearly stated, "smooth as making love in a canoe".:)
Until you can go into a bar and have a proper beer pulled from its own barrel, which changes by what is being made at the time of year...
So, until things "become" the way they have been for at least the last couple of decades? Because that's an accurate description of a lot of bars and pubs around here. (Of course, I live fairly close to one of the main epicenters of the microbrew explosions.)
Heck, there's more than a few bars here in the Bay Area where I can go in, order a beer, and chat with the guy who made it!
Just because our big native breweries have been bought by foreign investors doesn't mean they've changed the traditional recipes. Bud and Coors are still as American as... polysorbate 60.
Sam Adams is meh. Better that the bland, tasteless crap produced by the big guys, but only "quite good" if your standards are quite low. For American breweries that predate the microbrew explosion and actually have flavor, I'll take Anchor Steam, thanks. And even they're not as good as the good American beers that are available these days.
The thing is that "American beer" can have two meanings. If you mean "beer made in America", then yes, there's plenty that's quite passable (including even Sam Adams), but I think it can also be used in the sense of "American cheese", as a description of a style of beer that is utterly flavorless, except perhaps for a few hints of nastyness, as exemplified by Bud and Coors.
Very true, and furthermore, within a distro, package selection generally is a subset of settings. While I use Debian at home, I tend to like Ubuntu at work, because it's quick and easy to get it running in a heterogenous network environment. But you can still take any version of Ubuntu and replace the default desktop with FVWM95, if that's what floats your boat.
If you want bleeding edge, Arch is better, but expect to bleed occasionally.
Really? Better than Debian Unstable? Which is what I've been running for over a dozen years now, with very little bleedage.
Not that long ago, pretty much all Debian Developers ran unstable, because you pretty much had to in order to be able to build and upload new packages. Which meant that there was a lot of incentive not to break things too badly. Now, a lot of them are using VMs or chroot jails, but I think the habit of keeping Unstable fairly solid and reliable persists.
I suspect he's referring to the many tags whose only functional definition is by reference to undefined behavior of earlier MS products. Which is not so much impossible to implement (obviously MS can do so) as it is impossible for anyone but MS to verify. Which makes it a little hard to call it a standard.
Whoops, I misread the post I replied to. We're obviously actually in agreement. Still, I hope I explained the mechanism involved a little better for people who may have been confused by the original post.
Actually, I've usually heard Olympus Mons mentioned as evidence against plate techtonics. It was created by a hot-spot, like the Hawaiian islands, but the reason it's so big is that the plates aren't moving, so the hot-spot stayed in the same place the whole time. If the Pacific plate weren't moving, there would only be one Hawaiian island, and it would be much bigger!
Oh man, I think I created an account for Starcraft I. Do you suppose it's still active? I doubt I can remember what password I used all those years ago, or what email address I might have had at the time.
Absolutely! He's the first name that sprang into my mind when I saw the topic. And I've been reading a lot of SF for a lot of years. McDevitt's been a runner-up for the Hugo and Nebula so many times, and it doesn't seem to have ever translated into wider popularity. I'm hoping that his actual Nebula win last year will help. We'll see.
Though I must admit that Space Archaelogy was a strange thing to specialize in. At least until you realize that that's what you'd get if you mixed Indiana Jones with Star Wars.:)
I never much cared for her fantasy, but her SF holds up surprisingly well. I went back and tried to read some of the YA SF I read as a kid, and most of it (Asimov, Heinlein, etc.) was hard to choke down. Norton's stuff was a notable exception, at least for me.
Vernor Vinge anticipated most of the cyber-punkish ideas there with his 1981 Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novella, "True Names", first published in 1981. But he's hardly underappreciated (though that particular story is), and Moran is worth recommending.:)
Yes, the woman who has nearly twice as many Hugos as any other writer, anywhere, would hardly seem underappreciated. But well worth checking out if you've been hiding under a stone somewhere, and haven't heard of her.:)
Agreed; Courtship Rite is an amazingly underappreciated book, though the whole "everybody is into cannibalism" thing probably put some people off, even though it was thoroughly justified by the setting. I really loved the ways he subverted expectations in that, by having the eccentric anti-cannibalism crusader turn out to be wrong about so many important things.:)
I actually met Kingsbury at a Worldcon a few years ago, and he's a fascinating man to talk to as well as to read.
I liked him better when he was called Hal Clement!:)
Seriously, there are any number of physicists who have tried their hands at writing science fiction. Most of them have produced eminently forgettable works. A few (David Brin, Gregory Benford) have turned out to be pretty decent. Forward wrote one fairly entertaining Hal Clement pastiche, then followed it up with some not-very-good space operas, and then dropped out of sight. Which leads me to suspect that his one good book was a fluke, and he really belongs in my first category. (Though that book is worth reading, especially if you haven't yet encountered Hal Clement.)
Now Greg Egan is a mathematician, not a physicist, but if you want good, super-hard, physics-based SF, he's hard to beat. Schild's Ladder has equations and graphs in the first chapter--if Egan weren't a hero in Australia, I doubt he would have gotten it published. The man-on-the-street doesn't handle plots that require some elementary calculus just to follow the story very well.:)
Mmm, Stand on Zanzibar is my favorite of Brunner's books, and easily makes my top twenty list of books overall. But it retained a solid thread of optimism throughout all the darkness. The way I used to describe it is "a book that predicts things will get better and worse at ever increasing rates." Which was an easy prediction, even back in the sixties, but one that few writers bothered with.
Brunner's Shockwave Rider is often cited as the strongest evidence for claims that he's the godfather of cyberpunk, but I found it a little too happy and optimistic overall. On the other hand, The Sheep Look Up (and The Jagged Orbit) are almost too grim even for me. No one can say the man didn't have range.:)
Indeed, he's often considered the godfather of cyberpunk for just this reason, even though most of his work was written decades before the cyberpunks appeared. For a serious, grinding, downtrodden dystopia, though, it doesn't get much better than his The Sheep Look Up. The name says it all.
But I do have to give it to them for giving us a common language that was easy to port from platform to platform back in the day. Not an easy thing considering the vast architectural differences between those machines. I'm not sure if that is what they intended, but it worked out that way. I mean, you could take a BASIC program for calculating orbits that was developed on a Cromemco and quickly get it running on a C64.
I used Forth for that, which was even more portable, and is the language I referred to earlier when I mentioned contributing to the ISO standard (I'm the reason that the tick operator returns the execution address instead of the data address). It had its warts (like being a write-only language), but it was smaller than BASIC, generally faster than C, and usually more compact than assembler. You got both an interpreter and a compiler in about 2k, making it suitable for everything from exploratory hobbyist stuff to real-time industrial applications. And it was essentially open-source years before such things were common--the Forth Interest Group had ports for most common microprocessors and some minis, and they charged $25 for a listing, but once you had one, you could do whatever you wanted with it, including sell commercial versions. And portability of application source code was generally superior than that of most BASIC versions.
I'm actually responsible for one of the commercial versions of Forth on the C64. I did end up switching to C almost as soon as it became available on PCs, but for the eight-bit machines, Forth really was da bomb, IMO.
Anyway, MS didn't create BASIC. (I actually learned BASIC on an HP mainframe at a local science museum when I was in Junior High, a few years before MS was founded.)
Also, I grew up just outside of Silicon Valley, and knew many of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club, so I'm not too impressed with MS's selection of the Pacific Northwest as a home--I'm not a huge fan of that much rain. And the thought of snow still boggles me. Seattle's ok, but I'll stick with the SF Bay, thanks.:)
Nope. Most people don't know what the software market was like before MS, and those people are divided between bashers and non-bashers. Some people know what the software market was like before MS, and they are also divided between bashers and non-bashers.
I used QDOS before Microsoft bought it and renamed it MS-DOS. I helped develop software for the IBM PC before it was released to the general public. I used CP/M, Apple II DOS, C64 OS, and Unix before MS was more than an obscure BASIC vendor. I contributed to at least one ISO language standard before the PC was released. I know what the market was like back then, and I unreservedly bash MS.
The best thing they've done is try to implement Gary Kildall's vision--badly. The worst thing they've done is set software development back by years if not decades by deliberately ignoring or undermining open standards, and by destroying competition in the market. Between those two, I think the latter is more significant, so I freely bash them. I think I've earned the right.
You seem to be confusing "personal computers" with Microsoft. Microsoft didn't invent the personal computer, and they weren't the first to come up with the idea of creating a vendor-independent OS. In fact, I come up empty trying to list their actual contributions to the world--aside from not dropping the market IBM handed them on a silver platter.
Without a monopoly, much of this behavior is not anti-competitive. In particular, anything that involves leveraging a monopoly is impossible if you haven't got a monopoly. A Linux vendor bundling Firefox, for example, is not the same as MS bundling IE, because no Linux vendor has a desktop monopoly.
Now, the question of whether Apple might actually have a monopoly in some market is a reasonable one to ask. I don't know, since I own zero Apple products, but they might be getting close to a monopoly in on-line music distribution. However, until a court determines that they do have a monopoly, they can't be judged to be leveraging it in an illegal manner, any more than the Linux vendor who bundles Firefox is.
Nobody implied that they were equivalent, you inferred that all on your own.
Right. He just happened to mention them both, side-by-side, as if for easy comparison. Just a pure coincidence; no connection intended. If I were to write, "I don't like drinkypoo; pedophiles are bad people", you'd argue that there's no implications there as well? Yes, separating the ideas like that might allow me a technical defense in a slander case, but anyone who tries to argue that the implications are imaginary is crazy. (And for the record, I neither like or dislike you--I just disagree with you here.)
The statement as it is written is a bit vague
More than vague. It's either a stupid non-sequitor or it was intended to present implications bordering on trollish. And I don't like calling people stupid, so I went with the latter option.:)
If it was suggesting that the cops were justified, then mentioning home addresses was ridiculous, since nobody posted the cops' home addresses. If it was suggesting that the cops were not justified, because their home addresses weren't posted, then mentioning the pics was silly, because those were posted. And if it was just intended as a flat statement, it was irrelevent to the discussion, since only one of those actually things happened. It might as well have said, "cops don't like having their photos taken or being attacked by giant space walruses."
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The California State Constitution lists privacy as one of the inalienable rights. This actually came up in one of the landmark cases that lead to the state's sodomy laws being struck down.
What makes this particularly amusing is that Facebook, Google, and even Klout are all based in California! (The last one may go beyond amusing into appalling territory.)
I'm too busy being pleased that they're honoring an explorer instead of just someone else with a high body count. In any case, there's a good chance it'll get re-used later. In case you haven't noticed, that tends to happen a lot with vehicle names.
Several years back, a guy I know threw a huge party. He bought cheap beer, but as a joke, he had his own labels printed and replaced the brewery's labels. His labels quite clearly stated, "smooth as making love in a canoe". :)
Until you can go into a bar and have a proper beer pulled from its own barrel, which changes by what is being made at the time of year...
So, until things "become" the way they have been for at least the last couple of decades? Because that's an accurate description of a lot of bars and pubs around here. (Of course, I live fairly close to one of the main epicenters of the microbrew explosions.)
Heck, there's more than a few bars here in the Bay Area where I can go in, order a beer, and chat with the guy who made it!
Just because our big native breweries have been bought by foreign investors doesn't mean they've changed the traditional recipes. Bud and Coors are still as American as ... polysorbate 60.
Sam Adams is meh. Better that the bland, tasteless crap produced by the big guys, but only "quite good" if your standards are quite low. For American breweries that predate the microbrew explosion and actually have flavor, I'll take Anchor Steam, thanks. And even they're not as good as the good American beers that are available these days.
The thing is that "American beer" can have two meanings. If you mean "beer made in America", then yes, there's plenty that's quite passable (including even Sam Adams), but I think it can also be used in the sense of "American cheese", as a description of a style of beer that is utterly flavorless, except perhaps for a few hints of nastyness, as exemplified by Bud and Coors.
Very true, and furthermore, within a distro, package selection generally is a subset of settings. While I use Debian at home, I tend to like Ubuntu at work, because it's quick and easy to get it running in a heterogenous network environment. But you can still take any version of Ubuntu and replace the default desktop with FVWM95, if that's what floats your boat.
If you want bleeding edge, Arch is better, but expect to bleed occasionally.
Really? Better than Debian Unstable? Which is what I've been running for over a dozen years now, with very little bleedage.
Not that long ago, pretty much all Debian Developers ran unstable, because you pretty much had to in order to be able to build and upload new packages. Which meant that there was a lot of incentive not to break things too badly. Now, a lot of them are using VMs or chroot jails, but I think the habit of keeping Unstable fairly solid and reliable persists.
I suspect he's referring to the many tags whose only functional definition is by reference to undefined behavior of earlier MS products. Which is not so much impossible to implement (obviously MS can do so) as it is impossible for anyone but MS to verify. Which makes it a little hard to call it a standard.
Whoops, I misread the post I replied to. We're obviously actually in agreement. Still, I hope I explained the mechanism involved a little better for people who may have been confused by the original post.
Actually, I've usually heard Olympus Mons mentioned as evidence against plate techtonics. It was created by a hot-spot, like the Hawaiian islands, but the reason it's so big is that the plates aren't moving, so the hot-spot stayed in the same place the whole time. If the Pacific plate weren't moving, there would only be one Hawaiian island, and it would be much bigger!
Oh man, I think I created an account for Starcraft I. Do you suppose it's still active? I doubt I can remember what password I used all those years ago, or what email address I might have had at the time.
Absolutely! He's the first name that sprang into my mind when I saw the topic. And I've been reading a lot of SF for a lot of years. McDevitt's been a runner-up for the Hugo and Nebula so many times, and it doesn't seem to have ever translated into wider popularity. I'm hoping that his actual Nebula win last year will help. We'll see.
Though I must admit that Space Archaelogy was a strange thing to specialize in. At least until you realize that that's what you'd get if you mixed Indiana Jones with Star Wars. :)
I never much cared for her fantasy, but her SF holds up surprisingly well. I went back and tried to read some of the YA SF I read as a kid, and most of it (Asimov, Heinlein, etc.) was hard to choke down. Norton's stuff was a notable exception, at least for me.
Vernor Vinge anticipated most of the cyber-punkish ideas there with his 1981 Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novella, "True Names", first published in 1981. But he's hardly underappreciated (though that particular story is), and Moran is worth recommending. :)
Yes, the woman who has nearly twice as many Hugos as any other writer, anywhere, would hardly seem underappreciated. But well worth checking out if you've been hiding under a stone somewhere, and haven't heard of her. :)
Agreed; Courtship Rite is an amazingly underappreciated book, though the whole "everybody is into cannibalism" thing probably put some people off, even though it was thoroughly justified by the setting. I really loved the ways he subverted expectations in that, by having the eccentric anti-cannibalism crusader turn out to be wrong about so many important things. :)
I actually met Kingsbury at a Worldcon a few years ago, and he's a fascinating man to talk to as well as to read.
I liked him better when he was called Hal Clement! :)
Seriously, there are any number of physicists who have tried their hands at writing science fiction. Most of them have produced eminently forgettable works. A few (David Brin, Gregory Benford) have turned out to be pretty decent. Forward wrote one fairly entertaining Hal Clement pastiche, then followed it up with some not-very-good space operas, and then dropped out of sight. Which leads me to suspect that his one good book was a fluke, and he really belongs in my first category. (Though that book is worth reading, especially if you haven't yet encountered Hal Clement.)
Now Greg Egan is a mathematician, not a physicist, but if you want good, super-hard, physics-based SF, he's hard to beat. Schild's Ladder has equations and graphs in the first chapter--if Egan weren't a hero in Australia, I doubt he would have gotten it published. The man-on-the-street doesn't handle plots that require some elementary calculus just to follow the story very well. :)
Mmm, Stand on Zanzibar is my favorite of Brunner's books, and easily makes my top twenty list of books overall. But it retained a solid thread of optimism throughout all the darkness. The way I used to describe it is "a book that predicts things will get better and worse at ever increasing rates." Which was an easy prediction, even back in the sixties, but one that few writers bothered with.
Brunner's Shockwave Rider is often cited as the strongest evidence for claims that he's the godfather of cyberpunk, but I found it a little too happy and optimistic overall. On the other hand, The Sheep Look Up (and The Jagged Orbit) are almost too grim even for me. No one can say the man didn't have range. :)
Indeed, he's often considered the godfather of cyberpunk for just this reason, even though most of his work was written decades before the cyberpunks appeared. For a serious, grinding, downtrodden dystopia, though, it doesn't get much better than his The Sheep Look Up. The name says it all.
But I do have to give it to them for giving us a common language that was easy to port from platform to platform back in the day. Not an easy thing considering the vast architectural differences between those machines. I'm not sure if that is what they intended, but it worked out that way. I mean, you could take a BASIC program for calculating orbits that was developed on a Cromemco and quickly get it running on a C64.
I used Forth for that, which was even more portable, and is the language I referred to earlier when I mentioned contributing to the ISO standard (I'm the reason that the tick operator returns the execution address instead of the data address). It had its warts (like being a write-only language), but it was smaller than BASIC, generally faster than C, and usually more compact than assembler. You got both an interpreter and a compiler in about 2k, making it suitable for everything from exploratory hobbyist stuff to real-time industrial applications. And it was essentially open-source years before such things were common--the Forth Interest Group had ports for most common microprocessors and some minis, and they charged $25 for a listing, but once you had one, you could do whatever you wanted with it, including sell commercial versions. And portability of application source code was generally superior than that of most BASIC versions.
I'm actually responsible for one of the commercial versions of Forth on the C64. I did end up switching to C almost as soon as it became available on PCs, but for the eight-bit machines, Forth really was da bomb, IMO.
Anyway, MS didn't create BASIC. (I actually learned BASIC on an HP mainframe at a local science museum when I was in Junior High, a few years before MS was founded.)
Also, I grew up just outside of Silicon Valley, and knew many of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club, so I'm not too impressed with MS's selection of the Pacific Northwest as a home--I'm not a huge fan of that much rain. And the thought of snow still boggles me. Seattle's ok, but I'll stick with the SF Bay, thanks. :)
Nope. Most people don't know what the software market was like before MS, and those people are divided between bashers and non-bashers. Some people know what the software market was like before MS, and they are also divided between bashers and non-bashers.
I used QDOS before Microsoft bought it and renamed it MS-DOS. I helped develop software for the IBM PC before it was released to the general public. I used CP/M, Apple II DOS, C64 OS, and Unix before MS was more than an obscure BASIC vendor. I contributed to at least one ISO language standard before the PC was released. I know what the market was like back then, and I unreservedly bash MS.
The best thing they've done is try to implement Gary Kildall's vision--badly. The worst thing they've done is set software development back by years if not decades by deliberately ignoring or undermining open standards, and by destroying competition in the market. Between those two, I think the latter is more significant, so I freely bash them. I think I've earned the right.
You seem to be confusing "personal computers" with Microsoft. Microsoft didn't invent the personal computer, and they weren't the first to come up with the idea of creating a vendor-independent OS. In fact, I come up empty trying to list their actual contributions to the world--aside from not dropping the market IBM handed them on a silver platter.
Without a monopoly, much of this behavior is not anti-competitive. In particular, anything that involves leveraging a monopoly is impossible if you haven't got a monopoly. A Linux vendor bundling Firefox, for example, is not the same as MS bundling IE, because no Linux vendor has a desktop monopoly.
Now, the question of whether Apple might actually have a monopoly in some market is a reasonable one to ask. I don't know, since I own zero Apple products, but they might be getting close to a monopoly in on-line music distribution. However, until a court determines that they do have a monopoly, they can't be judged to be leveraging it in an illegal manner, any more than the Linux vendor who bundles Firefox is.
Ok, just to get it out of the way, here's the obligatory question: This happened millions of years ago! How is it news for nerds?
p.s. anyone who answers this as if it were a legitimate question shall be dunked into a tank full of melted asteroids. :)
Nobody implied that they were equivalent, you inferred that all on your own.
Right. He just happened to mention them both, side-by-side, as if for easy comparison. Just a pure coincidence; no connection intended. If I were to write, "I don't like drinkypoo; pedophiles are bad people", you'd argue that there's no implications there as well? Yes, separating the ideas like that might allow me a technical defense in a slander case, but anyone who tries to argue that the implications are imaginary is crazy. (And for the record, I neither like or dislike you--I just disagree with you here.)
The statement as it is written is a bit vague
More than vague. It's either a stupid non-sequitor or it was intended to present implications bordering on trollish. And I don't like calling people stupid, so I went with the latter option. :)
If it was suggesting that the cops were justified, then mentioning home addresses was ridiculous, since nobody posted the cops' home addresses. If it was suggesting that the cops were not justified, because their home addresses weren't posted, then mentioning the pics was silly, because those were posted. And if it was just intended as a flat statement, it was irrelevent to the discussion, since only one of those actually things happened. It might as well have said, "cops don't like having their photos taken or being attacked by giant space walruses."
Yes. That's why my last sentence was "the cops were way out of line here."