It's actually pretty good. They got a really good cast. Michael Gambino and Jeremy Irons were great in their roles, and watching Stephen Frye in a brief cameo as an eccentric inventor who proposed to use trained dogs to solve the longitude issue was hilarious.
The Nova episode was based on the book, but A&E made the miniseries afterward. They're both worth watching, certainly; the Nova episode is a historical documentary while the A&E series is a dramatization.
At least that actually is a bomb. There are Facebook memes going around that purport to show that Ahmed's clock actually resembles "a real bomb"...but the "real bomb" photo they use is a photo of a Honeywell security testing kit, ganked from a blog entry in which the owner of said kit elects not to bring it on an airline trip for fear it would be mistaken for a bomb. Which is rather ironic, or something.
It's not as if this idea is exactly unknown, though the outfit I know of (and subscribe to) that's doing it right, Karma, now only gives 100 megabytes for free, then you have to pay for more. (Though if you use your personal referral code, anyone who buys a hotspot saves with it $10, and you get $10, too. Thanks to a couple of blog posts, I've earned nearly $400 worth of free WiFi so far.)
That being said, 100 megabytes is more than enough for someone to hook up for long enough to check his email, do a little social networking, and so on. And they give it to you at the full 4G LTE super-speed. not some super-throttled you-really-should-pay-us-if-you-want-it-faster scheme.
The one problem with the scheme is that the public nature of it means you don't get the benefit of password encryption on your WiFi. But VPNs are pretty cheap these days.
The "No Award" option has been present for years, and has been used multiple times before when the majority of the voters felt that nothing in a given category merited an award this year. That's not a "slate," that's a valid voting choice people can make if they think all the nominations either suck or simply should not have been nominated. There's nothing new about it being used again now, save that so many of them happened at once. Fans sent a strong message that they will not tolerate some minority diddling with the nominations.
Even if it was a "slate," if you're going to say that the original "slate" was a valid means of nominating, the idea of an opposing "slate" being used to cancel it out should be equally valid.
This whole movement came out of the same place as GamerGate. A reactionary minority group, upset that their media fandom was getting too diverse, tried to spark a backlash. It didn't work for GamerGate, and it didn't work for the Puppies either.
The fans rejected the Puppies' attempt to stuff the ballot with their own (largely subpar) works, and now the Puppies are claiming victory with a refrain that sounds an awful lot like "Those grapes were probably sour anyway."
Gregory Benford had a great column about this, all the way back in 2000. It also involved a nuclear powered satellite.
It's human nature to react more extremely to new things, especially if they seem "unnatural." This might have been a survival instinct in bygone days, when the hominid who noticed that bush was out of place could take another path and avoid getting eaten by the sabertooth tiger behind it. But like so many such instincts, it translates poorly into the technological era.
The interesting thing is that particular anime was basically a satire on the problem Japan faced from its aging population...the same problem that these robotic walkers are designed to help ameliorate.
If your email's already been registered somewhere, try the "forgot your password?" link? It'll send the new password out to, duh, your email.
Likewise, you can stick on a +whatever on the end of your userID to make it into a "different" email address (and this will also help you know which websites are leaking your email.
I was watching G.I. Joe: Retribution in a theater with a "zero tolerance" cell phone policy, and the jerk in front of me took his phone out and texted several times during the movie. I considered asking him to stop, but I just don't like getting into confrontations. I further considered going and telling a staffer, but I didn't want to miss part of the movie to do it. Also the guy was there with a kid, and I didn't want to be responsible for ruining the kid's movie experience.
I'm not a programmer or a hardware hacker. I don't know anything about soldering circuit boards. I'm just a guy who likes to surf the net, write stories, play games, hang out on-line, and so on. What is the availability of this $15 device going to mean for me?
I mean, at least (as far as) I know the Raspberry Pi is going to be producing fully-realized devices that I can buy, plug in a keyboard and monitor and Ethernet cable, and I'm done. It sounds like this project is just about building a circuit board. And while it's nice it will be 40% cheaper and three times as fast, I'd like to know what I could do with it if someone came up to me on the street and handed me one.
Your body of work seems to have a remarkable split personality. A lot of your songs are perfectly kid-friendly, while others are rather raunchy. ("It's the first of May, first of May...") Does that ever get you into trouble?
For example, do you ever look out into the audience at one of your posted adults-only shows and see kids? If so, what have you done? Have you ever had to decide on the spur of the moment to "redact" an R-rated song from your playlist at a show?
Well, not "caves" per se, but we do have the Springfield Underground, an extensive system of underground limestone quarries, the mined-out parts of which have been converted into office, data hosting, warehousing, and manufacturing space. (Here's a video tour.)
For what it's worth, it's generated ill-will on the part of e-book consumers, too, many of whom feel this whole thing is yet another instance of the continued cluelessness over e-books that they've had to endure for the past ten years, and who feel that authors and publishers are deliberately ignoring them or misrepresenting their positions.
I'd tend to agree with you. There are a number of things I enjoy reading or writing or playing video games about that I wouldn't dream of doing in real life. Skydiving, for instance.
But there are certain hot-button topics where you just don't want to take chances. Where even if you only screw up one time out of a thousand, it costs innocent lives. Ask the Secret Service how seriously they take even "obvious" jokes about threatening the President or his family, for instance.
Right or wrong, perceived threats to children are one of those hot buttons. (In fact, you could argue that, from an evolutionary standpoint, it's vital to overreact to threats to children.) There's a reason "won't somebody think of the children?" is such a cliché, and that's because it's true.
I think the theory is that "child porn" of any kind, including cartoon character or virtual, promotes the child-molesting mindset in a child-porn fan. So, even cartoon kiddie porn might make it more likely that the viewer might go and molest a real kid someday.
Not saying it's right, but just that I seem to remember hearing that's what the theory was.
That's exactly right. The only reason the OLPC group set out to design the XO in the first place was that there were no computers in that size and price range at the time. They simply did not exist.
Well, now they exist. Cherrypal is selling them. They're not going to have the same kind of standardized architecture that the XO does, but nonetheless they're Real Live Computers that can run real operating systems (and by "real operating systems" I of course mean Linux).
OLPC ought to be putting educational software on those rather than blowing more money chasing this touchscreen pipe dream.
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually pretty good. They got a really good cast. Michael Gambino and Jeremy Irons were great in their roles, and watching Stephen Frye in a brief cameo as an eccentric inventor who proposed to use trained dogs to solve the longitude issue was hilarious.
The Nova episode was based on the book, but A&E made the miniseries afterward. They're both worth watching, certainly; the Nova episode is a historical documentary while the A&E series is a dramatization.
At least that actually is a bomb. There are Facebook memes going around that purport to show that Ahmed's clock actually resembles "a real bomb"...but the "real bomb" photo they use is a photo of a Honeywell security testing kit, ganked from a blog entry in which the owner of said kit elects not to bring it on an airline trip for fear it would be mistaken for a bomb. Which is rather ironic, or something.
It's not as if this idea is exactly unknown, though the outfit I know of (and subscribe to) that's doing it right, Karma, now only gives 100 megabytes for free, then you have to pay for more. (Though if you use your personal referral code, anyone who buys a hotspot saves with it $10, and you get $10, too. Thanks to a couple of blog posts, I've earned nearly $400 worth of free WiFi so far.)
That being said, 100 megabytes is more than enough for someone to hook up for long enough to check his email, do a little social networking, and so on. And they give it to you at the full 4G LTE super-speed. not some super-throttled you-really-should-pay-us-if-you-want-it-faster scheme.
The one problem with the scheme is that the public nature of it means you don't get the benefit of password encryption on your WiFi. But VPNs are pretty cheap these days.
The "No Award" option has been present for years, and has been used multiple times before when the majority of the voters felt that nothing in a given category merited an award this year. That's not a "slate," that's a valid voting choice people can make if they think all the nominations either suck or simply should not have been nominated. There's nothing new about it being used again now, save that so many of them happened at once. Fans sent a strong message that they will not tolerate some minority diddling with the nominations.
Even if it was a "slate," if you're going to say that the original "slate" was a valid means of nominating, the idea of an opposing "slate" being used to cancel it out should be equally valid.
That and all the tweets that have both the #gamergate and Hugo-related hashtags together, on the same tweet. Lots and lots of them, on any given day
This whole movement came out of the same place as GamerGate. A reactionary minority group, upset that their media fandom was getting too diverse, tried to spark a backlash. It didn't work for GamerGate, and it didn't work for the Puppies either.
The fans rejected the Puppies' attempt to stuff the ballot with their own (largely subpar) works, and now the Puppies are claiming victory with a refrain that sounds an awful lot like "Those grapes were probably sour anyway."
Uh...Philae was a European probe, not NASA. Your argument is invalid.
Gregory Benford had a great column about this, all the way back in 2000. It also involved a nuclear powered satellite.
It's human nature to react more extremely to new things, especially if they seem "unnatural." This might have been a survival instinct in bygone days, when the hominid who noticed that bush was out of place could take another path and avoid getting eaten by the sabertooth tiger behind it. But like so many such instincts, it translates poorly into the technological era.
Aw damn, you beat me to it.
The interesting thing is that particular anime was basically a satire on the problem Japan faced from its aging population...the same problem that these robotic walkers are designed to help ameliorate.
If your email's already been registered somewhere, try the "forgot your password?" link? It'll send the new password out to, duh, your email.
Likewise, you can stick on a +whatever on the end of your userID to make it into a "different" email address (and this will also help you know which websites are leaking your email.
I was watching G.I. Joe: Retribution in a theater with a "zero tolerance" cell phone policy, and the jerk in front of me took his phone out and texted several times during the movie. I considered asking him to stop, but I just don't like getting into confrontations. I further considered going and telling a staffer, but I didn't want to miss part of the movie to do it. Also the guy was there with a kid, and I didn't want to be responsible for ruining the kid's movie experience.
I'm just too nice. :P
Destination: Void by Frank Herbert. (Or as I like to call it: "Destination: Avoid".)
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke.
I'm not a programmer or a hardware hacker. I don't know anything about soldering circuit boards. I'm just a guy who likes to surf the net, write stories, play games, hang out on-line, and so on. What is the availability of this $15 device going to mean for me?
I mean, at least (as far as) I know the Raspberry Pi is going to be producing fully-realized devices that I can buy, plug in a keyboard and monitor and Ethernet cable, and I'm done. It sounds like this project is just about building a circuit board. And while it's nice it will be 40% cheaper and three times as fast, I'd like to know what I could do with it if someone came up to me on the street and handed me one.
Your body of work seems to have a remarkable split personality. A lot of your songs are perfectly kid-friendly, while others are rather raunchy. ("It's the first of May, first of May...") Does that ever get you into trouble?
For example, do you ever look out into the audience at one of your posted adults-only shows and see kids? If so, what have you done? Have you ever had to decide on the spur of the moment to "redact" an R-rated song from your playlist at a show?
And here I thought they'd only just adopted Hurd.
Well, keep watching. Apparently there's going to be some news on Wednesday.
It's a marketing stunt plain and simple. They're just coming out of beta.
Mine too. So naturally I had to search the comment threads to see if someone had posted it already. :)
Well, not "caves" per se, but we do have the Springfield Underground, an extensive system of underground limestone quarries, the mined-out parts of which have been converted into office, data hosting, warehousing, and manufacturing space. (Here's a video tour.)
I've been in it. It's pretty impressive.
You do realize that PG hasn't been ASCII-only for several years now, right?
For what it's worth, it's generated ill-will on the part of e-book consumers, too, many of whom feel this whole thing is yet another instance of the continued cluelessness over e-books that they've had to endure for the past ten years, and who feel that authors and publishers are deliberately ignoring them or misrepresenting their positions.
A couple of examples:
"Maybe we should be hurting the authors" by Ficbot
"The Amazon/Macmillan blow-up: An e-book lover's appeal for understanding" by me
I don't condone it. Just trying to explain the thinking behind it. You (or someone so far up the thread that I can't see who it was now) did ask.
I'd tend to agree with you. There are a number of things I enjoy reading or writing or playing video games about that I wouldn't dream of doing in real life. Skydiving, for instance.
But there are certain hot-button topics where you just don't want to take chances. Where even if you only screw up one time out of a thousand, it costs innocent lives. Ask the Secret Service how seriously they take even "obvious" jokes about threatening the President or his family, for instance.
Right or wrong, perceived threats to children are one of those hot buttons. (In fact, you could argue that, from an evolutionary standpoint, it's vital to overreact to threats to children.) There's a reason "won't somebody think of the children?" is such a cliché, and that's because it's true.
I think the theory is that "child porn" of any kind, including cartoon character or virtual, promotes the child-molesting mindset in a child-porn fan. So, even cartoon kiddie porn might make it more likely that the viewer might go and molest a real kid someday.
Not saying it's right, but just that I seem to remember hearing that's what the theory was.
That's exactly right. The only reason the OLPC group set out to design the XO in the first place was that there were no computers in that size and price range at the time. They simply did not exist.
Well, now they exist. Cherrypal is selling them. They're not going to have the same kind of standardized architecture that the XO does, but nonetheless they're Real Live Computers that can run real operating systems (and by "real operating systems" I of course mean Linux).
OLPC ought to be putting educational software on those rather than blowing more money chasing this touchscreen pipe dream.