However, when a company gets more than 50% of a market they usually tend to become abusive of their users. And I generally find that a a good reason to choose something else.
Personally when I read the MSWind2000 EULA I decided it was time to move to something else. And I did. It took nearly a year, but I wasn't about to agree to that EULA. And I considered that anyone who did was selling their company into slavery for a short-term benefit. I've found that I was right. The transition was very rough, as Linux word processors were pitiful at that time. And Linux had a hard time operating with other systems as anything but a server. It was a starting place.
At that time I choose Red Hat. It wasn't a bad choice, but it was only a starting position. Currently I'm running Debian Lenny (with several qualms...I've occasionally had Debian testing hurt me severely, but stable didn't provide quite the services I needed). I'll probably stay with Lenny when the next version revs to testing, though I'll likely run one test install.
P.S.: I didn't find the shift from Red Hat to Debian all that difficult. To Ubuntu would have been even easier, but it wasn't around then.
P.P.S.: Software *vendors* don't like Linux, because in most domains they are competing with GPL products. This is quite difficult. But really, it's their own fault. If they hadn't left the niches vacant the GPL software likely wouldn't have been developed. Somebody needed something, and it wasn't available, so they built it. Then it slowly got improved until end-users found it acceptable. Now in many cases, and for many uses, it's even better than the commercial users. (OTOH, consider FreeCiv vs. Civilization... it doesn't always get so developed.)
The aptitude designers must have been blind to make the color choices that they did. That, or hated all potential users.
I can't really comment on it's technical capabilities, but when the recommendation came to use aptitude, I tried it.... UGH!!! It would be FAR superior as a monochrome app. As it is the color choices make it so totally unusable that I barely even use it in an emergency. I think I ended up using dselect instead. (Unfortunately, that command seems to be missing from my current system, though references to it are still in the man pages.) (There NOW it's installed. It should be part of the default install!)
If I know the package name of what I'm after, I use apt-get. If I don't, I use Synaptic. Yes, there are CLI approaches that will yield the same info, but they're clumsier to use, especially if I need repeated searches to select just what I'm after.
I don't think such is possible. If one were to do so, there would always be one space that was too tight to fit the package manager into.
Still, I could see something like, say, Puppy Linux with and attachable package manager... (I'm not familiar with Puppy Linux, but if it has one, make it attachable, if not, give it an attachable one.)
But in this case you end up with something that's totally repellent to the end-user. Yes, you could expand it into something end-user friendly, but in doing so you've created a new distro. And other end users would have other requirements. So you're back to right where we are.
And earlier today I was thinking of the Polynesian (well, specifically Hawaiian) taboos around the royal families. Any hair or finger nail clippings were ceremoniously burned. They had special privies built out over the ocean. Etc. To keep samples of their tissue from being collected by evil doers who would cast spells using them.
I was thinking more along the lines of targeted diseases...but clones are another possibility. The only problem is it takes so long to mature them. And they *so* don't want to do as they are told.
Technology isn't so special. Humans, chimpanzees, crows, and dolphins are known to invent tools. Probably some other species that I've missed.
Now clearly dolphins are quite limited in how developed their tools can get. And crows have to fit everything into a rather small RAM. And we have clearly out-competed Chimps. But that's at least three separate lineages that have independently developed tool use. And I believe that evolutionary theory states that any tool using species will develop it's abilities along those lines as long as such development yields advantage. So this implies that intelligence will develop. Language may be something different, but even here we find birds learning their local grammar...and other birds that get deceived and instead learn cell-phone ring-tones or distant jack-hammers. Or people answering the phone. ("Hello, Jack here. Hello, Jack here. Hello, Jack here.")
So I don't think that either intelligence or tool use is a very good argument. The requirement for language means that it will be some sort of social animal, but that's not a large constraint. I'm not at all sure, though, that pack hunting is a requirement. Herbivores might well need intelligence to avoid some particularly dangerous predator. I do, however, suspect that most intelligent tool-users will turn out to be omnivores. Again, this isn't much of a constraint. It doesn't even leave out the Kizinti. Not really. They are described as a rather poorly adapted carnivore. Such animals always each at least some vegetation. Even dogs do. (Cats are obligate carnivores, but not social, so not contestants. Even lion prides aren't social, though that's about as close as cats come to social behavior. Kizinti aren't cats, they just look like them to people.) N.B.: It's impossible to judge from the stories how much of Kizinti is socially conditioned, but clearly a lot of it is. Also they clearly have a carnivorous preference...but guess what, there are groups of people with the same preference. Niven played around a lot with the idea of whether carnivores or herbivores could be intelligent. He decided, I feel reasonably, that both could happen, but would be rare occurrences.
Now as to size.... There are clear limits about being too small. It's much less clear that there are limits about being too large. E.g., I can't see any reason that elephants couldn't be more intelligent than people. (I see no evidence that they ARE, but that's a different matter.) They'd do better with a doubled trunk, of course...but some elephants have doubled "fingers" at the end of their trunk, so they can probably manipulate things pretty well. And they could clearly support a larger thinking overhead than people could. They probably just never needed to develop such a capability before people showed up, and then it was too late.
Since you are using Voyager as your model, you are clearly being conservative. But I would suggest a couple of modifications anyway:
1) You're already in space, so you can launch from orbit. This means that a low impulse thruster will suffice. Ion rockets have a much higher terminal speed, and are well proven.
2) Also the Bussard Ram Jet might not work all that well for accelerating, but theory shows that it should make a dynamite brake. So this means that you don't need to carry much fuel to brake with, merely power.
This means that your difficult problem is carrying a fab that will handle what you need from the materials a destination. We haven't solved that yet, but it looks quite doable. But you'll need to protect the brains and memory of your system during transit. Still, the ion rocket should allow you to carry a lot more mass than would otherwise be reasonable. 0.01C looks quite reasonable, or at least 0.001C. But do note that you leave your origin quite slowly. (Not a lot of thrust, just a very high exhaust velocity. I think that currently the thrust is measured in pounds, and close to 10 of them. And the thrust time is measured in years rather than decades. Also one would prefer to use, e.g., methane as the fuel, or something else that really easy to find by mining an asteroid at a distance from a sun. Currently fuels like Lithium or Xenon are preferred, though I don't know precisely why.)
N.B.: For an ion rocket one essentially splits the fuel into ions, and then runs the split ions through parallel linear accelerators out the stern of the ship. Thus one maintains the ship's neutral charge. That's just the basic idea. Current implementations seem to differ a lot in their design.
Incest!!! They just don't bother to mention the daughters. (Except that when Cain is sent away on his lonesome...he finds women present to marry. O! well...)
Also if only Cain and Able were born, and Cain killed Able, then I guess that we are ALL descendants of Cain. (And who did he think was going to bother him for having the "mark of Cain" on his forehead?)
This makes a bit more sense if you realize that they swiped the Genesis story from a polytheistic society, where other gods could have created other people. I forget whether they swiped it from Babylon or Egypt, but parts of it are word for word copies. (My guess would be Egypt for this one, but the Moses and the water it was Babylon retelling how Sargon of Akkad ended up being a part of the right family. OTOH, I'm no real scholar here.) One tip off that they needed to edit a particular section a bit more heavily to avoid copyright infringement is the use of the term Elohim (sp?). Anyway, god in the plural. Most places they corrected it, but not everywhere.
I wish that I could defend christianity in the same way that I occasionally defend communism, i.e., what is being complained about is a perversion of the intended meaning.
Unfortunately the history of christianity has been so perverted by the official representatives of the same that we have no real knowledge as to what happened historically. In fact even the evidence of Jesus son of Mary's actual existence is a bit dubious. Tax records that should exist, e.g., mysteriously aren't present, etc. Possibly there was an actual person filling the role, and we have merely misplaced his century. Another possibility is that JC was merely a notional person, similar to Nicolas Bourbaki the notional mathematician. Or possibly just lots of records got lost in unexplained ways from unexpected causes. Or possibly he had enemies in office who desired to remove all records of his existence. Secretly. Some of these sound a bit far fetched, but 1000 years is a long time, and something must have happened.
FWIW, it's worth noting that none of the Gospels were written by first hand witnesses. They are at most retellings of stories of first hand witnesses. (50 years isn't that long, so it could have been possible for a genuine witness to write a Gospel, but that isn't what happened.) And these stories that were told were a mixture of religious creed and political propaganda. (The two categories were mixed in Judea at that time.)
So try to guess how much you would believe the Bible if you first encountered it in the context of "Fantasy literature". Then ask yourself why it shouldn't be shelved there. (There ARE reasons...mainly having to do with the mixed nature of what it recounts. PARTS of it are historical. And parts of it should go in erotica. [Not very good porn, but porn nonetheless. Consider the tale of Lot and his daughters. A bit of work could have made that quite spicy.])
It's true that there are christians who don't give christianity a bad name. This includes the majority who despite believing obvious nonsense are pretty quiet about it and don't try to force their tripe onto others.
However most vocal christians are among those who give christianity a bad name. C.S. Lewis may be an exception here as despite his obviously nutty and fantastic ideas, he was entertaining. I quite enjoyed The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. Then there's Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by, I believe, Jonathan Edwards. This causes one to have a justified abhorrence of all things christian, and all who support it. One doesn't have to believe that people who support something themselves intend evil if one believes that they system they support inherently tends towards performing evil. And I feel that christianity has, over the centuries proven again and again that it is such a system.
Not really. It's that they only broadcast for less than 1000 years. In less time than that they switch to cable, or fiber optics, or something else that can't be heard at a long distance.
The Tipler problem is harder, though. If anyone built self-reproducing cosmic explorers, then it should take them only a short time to get here (assuming that they reproduce more quickly than they get destroyed). Of course, whether they'd tell us they were here is a very different matter. And so is how they'd communicate to back home. (Exploration robots don't do much good unless they report back occasionally.)
So maybe we will find a pyramid on the moon, or something hiding in Saturn's rings. Perhaps. (I liked the short story better than the movie.)
More particularly, that is almost certainly a false statement, as it's quite difficult to only do one thing. But in a more general sense, rather than in an extremely precise sense, how do you know what this program does, and on what basis do you trust that "knowledge"?
It is my presumption that you are taking the word of a PR flack...and that HE doesn't know what it does. I'm rather certain that you've neither studied the code nor talked with someone who has. So you're taking someone's word. And the information that can't be seen by direct observation probably comes from a company which appears to me to lie more frequently that it is truthful.
... It's funny how the fanboi mentality works (and not as a valid argument, mind you)
MS creates a browser (and packages it w/ their OS)
Everyone is up in arms. ZOMG monopoly! (Lest you forget they want to create a browser that can function more effectively with their own OS without having to spend all the effort and overhead involved in working with a 3rd party competitor who does not want to work with them?)
...
...
You're forgetting a bit of history here. Netscape was trying to build a business around selling a browser. MS moves in and destroys the possibility. With a product where it promised the authors of the product that it would give them a percentage of the sales in return for the rights to the product...so then it starts giving the product away to destroy Netscape's market without paying Spyglass anything.
One could argue that Netscape had no right to sell Netscape, but I *think* that the legal right is unquestionable, even if the morals were a bit dubious. (Netscape was based off of Open Source code which Netscape closed. But the license allowed this use.)
What MS did was a monopoly in one area tying it to a product in an affiliated area to promote their monopoly and destroy another's business. This is illegal in most jurisdictions. (Caution: IANAL)
I don't think I said it had to be vertical... I didn't intend to be that specific. And I only want it to be powerful enough (i.e., to develop sufficient velocity) to launch into high lunar orbit. This allows a smaller catapult.
Still, there would be advantages in building it ramping up a mountain slope, if you can find one that's easily adapted and facing in the right direction.
P.S.: Don't take Heinlein as a science reference. He didn't let possibility get in the way of a good story (though if he knew something was impossible, he generally tried to write around it).
I enjoyed Heinlein, be he was never one of those I counted as a writer of "hard" science fiction.
N.B.: This is neither vertical nor horizontal. There's no air friction, so vertical isn't appropriate, and horizontal is only desirable in order to make support easier. But I don't know what the optimal elevation is. Also, while we want to limit the launch velocity, we would like to be able to launch rather heavy payloads. This probably has impact on various design features.
That would explain the "cracks" I noticed. I haven't bothered to understand Python very deeply. (Well, to remember the pieces I didn't use.)
I sort of remember that I knew what you said when I was first learning Python, but that was a long time ago, and I haven't used it consistently enough to remember that kind of detail (i.e., the details that don't affect the code I was writing).
The only Steven Brust I've encountered has been fantasy. And I've noticed that after I read his stuff for awhile I feel terrible, so I've stopped reading him. (It *was* the Jehreg series. Perhaps his other works are less... gloomy[?].)
You use catapults! From the moon, the catapults lift the materials into high lunar orbit. From the asteroids, the catapults act as a rocket.
Actually, while the "Mass driver" would work, I think that a rocket would be better. Most asteroids have a lot of methane or other low vaporizing material on them (or in them). Use that with a solar mirror to heat them into a rocket exhaust. Or possibly convert them into fuel for an ion rocket. It'd be slow, but fast compared to something that only ran for a shot time, and then you waited for years. And we're already doing analogous things.
I think the moon is a better place to start, but notice that setting up the lunar catapult itself requires a bunch of work on the surface. And then you need to mine the stuff and feed it. We aren't talking about a small project here! This would take decades.
It'd be a lot easier to just move asteroids into a Near Earth Orbit, but it would also be a bit dangerous. Probably no more than, say, 1000 tonnes at a time should be moved. And it would be slow. Again, a project that would take decades.
I prefer the work be done and materials gathered high lunar orbit for safety reasons. This has obvious costs associated with it, but I think safety should be paramount. After a thing is built in high lunar orbit, it could then be shifted into high earth orbit, and then slowed. (When you are slowing it, you better have a collision shield in place, to catch the garbage that's filling up the area. After you catch it, of course, it becomes material rather than garbage. If nothing else you can use it to reinforce the shield. Once you achieve your final orbit, the shield can slowly be consumed as manufactured material.
All of this is done using ion rockets, or something better. They may be slow, but they don't use much fuel, and fuel will be precious. But the ion rockets will need to be redesigned to use a wider variety of fuels. (You're essentially just putting a charge on something and accelerating it away from you in a linear accelerator, and then also shooting the separate charge away, so that you don't develop enough charge to render your rocket ineffective. That should be able to use nearly anything as fuel. In earth or lunar orbit you could power it from solar power.)
Actually, Python's OO was pretty much "just bolted on", but that happened several iterations of the language ago. Somewhere before 1.4. Possibly before 1.0. (I wasn't there.) As of 1.4, however, the bolting on process was still pretty evident. It's become less and less so with each iteration, until now the interface is pretty smooth. You can still see a few cracks here and there, though possibly with Python3 those will have disappeared.
Python isn't, and never tried to be, Smalltalk. literal numbers haven't been objects. (Possibly they are as of Python3.) This has been for the sake of efficiency, but it's lead to several cracks in the syntax, and many special cases. (Not as many as C++, though. Not nearly as many!)
It isn't quite dead. But compared to only a few decades ago it looks moribund. The last time I went into the local Science Fiction book store I didn't find anything new worth buying. It had been months since I visited it. (Well, shortly before xmas.) I used to vist it several times a week, and usually find something worth the visit. (True, I lived closer then...so the cost of visiting was less... But I moved and they moved.)
P.S.: There's also been a very significant change in the nature of fantasy. Compare Conan, or even Lord of the Rings, with modern fantasy. Modern fantasy is much more orderly, and governed by universal laws. (In Tolkien there was the hidden power of the Ainur and behind them of the creator god, the great composer, but it stayed hidden, and only manifested blatantly through the actions of the Wizards...who were almost certainly Maia, acting with their powers bound. (N.B.: Tom Bombadil was also probably a Maia, but one who came earlier and just never went back to Elvenhome, and thus didn't have his powers bound, though his actions were restrained by the will of Manwe...i.e., he wasn't in rebellion as Morgoth, Sauron and later Saruman were. He was more similar to Melian. (I never did figure out who Goldberry was...or what kind of entity.)
Note the rational ordering that enables one to deduce what kind of entity various beings were when sufficient information is present. This is different from modern fantasy, because the ultimate powers behind things are a single super god and one of his tools acting in rebellion (i.e., Morgoth).
That is, modern fantasy has come part way toward science fiction. It accepts universally acting laws that don't need an external creator because their action is what causes the universe to be as it exists. Asking why about them is rather like asking why 2 + 2 = 4. There *are* answers, but the answers are more difficult to understand than the questions they answer. (Which in fiction means that they are skipped over.)
Looking back over things, I realize that I have made prior eras of fantasy too unified. There were different themes in differing time periods. Lord Dunasy was not Lovecraft, and there were tales before them, back to Herakles and the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, and before. But in none of them do I see so strongly the theme of universally prevalent laws of nature. Not in tales of heros, not in escatology, not in sagas. I may possibly have missed it, but I don't think so.
True. I also liked Oath of Fealty. This isn't a complete list of what I liked. A really nifty one was "Dance of the Gods" (Author: Mayer Alan Brenner, cf. 1994, 4 volumes..all the titles start with "Spell of" ) It starts out looking like an outright fantasy novel, and ends up being rather hard science fiction.
I won't read long works on the computer. Sorry, but paper copies are much easier on the eyes. There are many papers I know I should read, but I won't unless I first print them out, which I'm reluctant to do because loose, unfileable papers make a tremendous mess.
I've recently been throwing out old papers because I couldn't find anything...on the computer I can find it, but can't read it. As loose papers, I can read it but can't find it. As a bound work I can read it AND find it again when I want to refer back. (And if I'm not going to refer back, why was it worth the bother of printing in the first place?)
Note that program listings are things which one only reads a small part of at a time. It's a much different reading experience than a dense mass of text. Ditto for SlashDot. On SlashDot one skips around, and when one is typing (responding) one mainly sees the appearance of what one is going to be typing. Another very different experience.
There's a "Science Fiction" bookstore near where I live, and they've shifted gradually towards carrying mostly fantasy.
Genuine Science Fiction has always been rather thin on the ground. Doing it well is *hard*. Hal Clement was one who did it well. Larry Niven occasionally did it well. (Known Worlds series incl. Ringworld et seq.)
Currently I only know of Charles Stoss, though there may be others. (I've cut back on my reading a lot.)
But a thing to note is...the Science Fiction book store near me doesn't care the magazines regularly. They can't get the distributors to deliver them. And this is in the SF Bay Area, California, USA. Books they can get, but not magazines.
Unfortunately, in my opinion the quality of the single magazine I followed regularly, Analog(Astounding) has also deteriorated. Significantly. Very significantly. So much so that a subscription is practically a waste of money. (There have been a few periods when I also regularly followed Galaxy or Worlds of If...but those are now decades in the past.)
And it's not that I don't still like good Science Fiction...or even good fantasy. I still buy many books. (*Almost* all of which I count as fantasy of one sort or another...but NOT Science Fiction.)
I wish Randall Garrett had lived. *He* could have written decent Science Fiction in the current age. (He wasn't just the Lord Darcy series. There were long periods when he was the most prolific writer that J.W. Campbell had writing for him...under lots of pseudonyms.) He wouldn't have written the same stories that Charles Stoss writes...and nobody will ever know what he would have written. Sigh.
But, in my opinion, most of the magazines don't really deserve to live. It's a real pity, because the magazines is where authors used to develop their skills. Now... now there doesn't seem to be any decent place for such development. Which means that the people who can become authors are far fewer.
On line? Who pays for on line? IMHO that only works if you are already a well enough known name that a publisher will pick up your work anyway. (I.e., even if they don't have exclusive rights to distribution.) A few authors can get away with that.
Science Fiction has always been a shoe-string operation. And SF magazines have always been VERY highly dependent upon their editor. A change of editors can make a weak magazine or break a strong one. Astounding/Analog was extremely lucky in having Campbell for so long. Galaxy was lucky in HL Gold. Asimov's... faded rapidly when he did. I don't think that Stanley Schmidt was as good an editor as Campbell (average rating...Campbell sure had his off periods!), but he was more than adequate. But he didn't keep the spark going. He didn't have the fire that inspires authors and readers. Recently...I haven't been following. Occasionally I see one and pick it up. But rarely...meaning I rarely see one. When I do see one, I'm rarely inspired to buy it.
All magazines are falling off, but Science Fiction magazines have always lived closer to the edge...so any fall off in business affects them more profoundly.
I think you need to look more carefully at the timing. This comes under the heading of "illusion of coincidence". The information from Boycott-Novell comes from a court case, and the source of the evidence is memos from around 2001. (I should check again, but that's how I remember it.) So there's probably 5 or more years in between. (Allowing for various slips in production.)
IOW, I don't think this is a causal connection. Possibly you could dig up something that was, but it probably isn't from this batch.
OTOH, it certainly indicates the KIND of activities that MS engages in (as if there were any doubt). And as a result it's reasonable to suspect that something similar, but as yet undiscovered, underlies this. But it's also quite reasonable that there could be other reasons. (They didn't design the technology, they bought it from someone else, and it might use patents that they don't have a clear title to, and so they can only use them in certain licensed ways, e.g.) Lacking facts one can easily invent numerous stories. Don't believe the stories that you invent to be truth, but only possibility. You may never determine the truth, and that has to be all right.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a part of reality. I'll agree with that.
However, when a company gets more than 50% of a market they usually tend to become abusive of their users. And I generally find that a a good reason to choose something else.
Personally when I read the MSWind2000 EULA I decided it was time to move to something else. And I did. It took nearly a year, but I wasn't about to agree to that EULA. And I considered that anyone who did was selling their company into slavery for a short-term benefit. I've found that I was right. The transition was very rough, as Linux word processors were pitiful at that time. And Linux had a hard time operating with other systems as anything but a server. It was a starting place.
At that time I choose Red Hat. It wasn't a bad choice, but it was only a starting position. Currently I'm running Debian Lenny (with several qualms...I've occasionally had Debian testing hurt me severely, but stable didn't provide quite the services I needed). I'll probably stay with Lenny when the next version revs to testing, though I'll likely run one test install.
P.S.: I didn't find the shift from Red Hat to Debian all that difficult. To Ubuntu would have been even easier, but it wasn't around then.
P.P.S.: Software *vendors* don't like Linux, because in most domains they are competing with GPL products. This is quite difficult. But really, it's their own fault. If they hadn't left the niches vacant the GPL software likely wouldn't have been developed. Somebody needed something, and it wasn't available, so they built it. Then it slowly got improved until end-users found it acceptable. Now in many cases, and for many uses, it's even better than the commercial users. (OTOH, consider FreeCiv vs. Civilization ... it doesn't always get so developed.)
Could I get your definition of "Free Market"? I want to know if your post makes *any* sense.
We don't have a free market in any sense that Adam Smith would have recognized. (His "free market" was as idealized as a chemist's "perfect gas".)
The aptitude designers must have been blind to make the color choices that they did. That, or hated all potential users.
I can't really comment on it's technical capabilities, but when the recommendation came to use aptitude, I tried it. ... UGH!!! It would be FAR superior as a monochrome app. As it is the color choices make it so totally unusable that I barely even use it in an emergency. I think I ended up using dselect instead. (Unfortunately, that command seems to be missing from my current system, though references to it are still in the man pages.) (There NOW it's installed. It should be part of the default install!)
If I know the package name of what I'm after, I use apt-get. If I don't, I use Synaptic. Yes, there are CLI approaches that will yield the same info, but they're clumsier to use, especially if I need repeated searches to select just what I'm after.
Don't worry. It will get those too. Possibly from some government, but from some corporation might be even more likely.
I don't think such is possible. If one were to do so, there would always be one space that was too tight to fit the package manager into.
Still, I could see something like, say, Puppy Linux with and attachable package manager... (I'm not familiar with Puppy Linux, but if it has one, make it attachable, if not, give it an attachable one.)
But in this case you end up with something that's totally repellent to the end-user. Yes, you could expand it into something end-user friendly, but in doing so you've created a new distro. And other end users would have other requirements. So you're back to right where we are.
And earlier today I was thinking of the Polynesian (well, specifically Hawaiian) taboos around the royal families. Any hair or finger nail clippings were ceremoniously burned. They had special privies built out over the ocean. Etc. To keep samples of their tissue from being collected by evil doers who would cast spells using them.
I was thinking more along the lines of targeted diseases...but clones are another possibility. The only problem is it takes so long to mature them. And they *so* don't want to do as they are told.
Technology isn't so special. Humans, chimpanzees, crows, and dolphins are known to invent tools. Probably some other species that I've missed.
Now clearly dolphins are quite limited in how developed their tools can get. And crows have to fit everything into a rather small RAM. And we have clearly out-competed Chimps. But that's at least three separate lineages that have independently developed tool use. And I believe that evolutionary theory states that any tool using species will develop it's abilities along those lines as long as such development yields advantage. So this implies that intelligence will develop. Language may be something different, but even here we find birds learning their local grammar...and other birds that get deceived and instead learn cell-phone ring-tones or distant jack-hammers. Or people answering the phone. ("Hello, Jack here. Hello, Jack here. Hello, Jack here.")
So I don't think that either intelligence or tool use is a very good argument. The requirement for language means that it will be some sort of social animal, but that's not a large constraint. I'm not at all sure, though, that pack hunting is a requirement. Herbivores might well need intelligence to avoid some particularly dangerous predator. I do, however, suspect that most intelligent tool-users will turn out to be omnivores. Again, this isn't much of a constraint. It doesn't even leave out the Kizinti. Not really. They are described as a rather poorly adapted carnivore. Such animals always each at least some vegetation. Even dogs do. (Cats are obligate carnivores, but not social, so not contestants. Even lion prides aren't social, though that's about as close as cats come to social behavior. Kizinti aren't cats, they just look like them to people.)
N.B.: It's impossible to judge from the stories how much of Kizinti is socially conditioned, but clearly a lot of it is. Also they clearly have a carnivorous preference...but guess what, there are groups of people with the same preference.
Niven played around a lot with the idea of whether carnivores or herbivores could be intelligent. He decided, I feel reasonably, that both could happen, but would be rare occurrences.
Now as to size.... There are clear limits about being too small. It's much less clear that there are limits about being too large. E.g., I can't see any reason that elephants couldn't be more intelligent than people. (I see no evidence that they ARE, but that's a different matter.) They'd do better with a doubled trunk, of course...but some elephants have doubled "fingers" at the end of their trunk, so they can probably manipulate things pretty well. And they could clearly support a larger thinking overhead than people could. They probably just never needed to develop such a capability before people showed up, and then it was too late.
Since you are using Voyager as your model, you are clearly being conservative. But I would suggest a couple of modifications anyway:
1) You're already in space, so you can launch from orbit. This means that a low impulse thruster will suffice. Ion rockets have a much higher terminal speed, and are well proven.
2) Also the Bussard Ram Jet might not work all that well for accelerating, but theory shows that it should make a dynamite brake. So this means that you don't need to carry much fuel to brake with, merely power.
This means that your difficult problem is carrying a fab that will handle what you need from the materials a destination. We haven't solved that yet, but it looks quite doable. But you'll need to protect the brains and memory of your system during transit. Still, the ion rocket should allow you to carry a lot more mass than would otherwise be reasonable. 0.01C looks quite reasonable, or at least 0.001C. But do note that you leave your origin quite slowly. (Not a lot of thrust, just a very high exhaust velocity. I think that currently the thrust is measured in pounds, and close to 10 of them. And the thrust time is measured in years rather than decades. Also one would prefer to use, e.g., methane as the fuel, or something else that really easy to find by mining an asteroid at a distance from a sun. Currently fuels like Lithium or Xenon are preferred, though I don't know precisely why.)
N.B.: For an ion rocket one essentially splits the fuel into ions, and then runs the split ions through parallel linear accelerators out the stern of the ship. Thus one maintains the ship's neutral charge. That's just the basic idea. Current implementations seem to differ a lot in their design.
Incest!!! They just don't bother to mention the daughters. (Except that when Cain is sent away on his lonesome...he finds women present to marry. O! well...)
Also if only Cain and Able were born, and Cain killed Able, then I guess that we are ALL descendants of Cain. (And who did he think was going to bother him for having the "mark of Cain" on his forehead?)
This makes a bit more sense if you realize that they swiped the Genesis story from a polytheistic society, where other gods could have created other people. I forget whether they swiped it from Babylon or Egypt, but parts of it are word for word copies. (My guess would be Egypt for this one, but the Moses and the water it was Babylon retelling how Sargon of Akkad ended up being a part of the right family. OTOH, I'm no real scholar here.) One tip off that they needed to edit a particular section a bit more heavily to avoid copyright infringement is the use of the term Elohim (sp?). Anyway, god in the plural. Most places they corrected it, but not everywhere.
I wish that I could defend christianity in the same way that I occasionally defend communism, i.e., what is being complained about is a perversion of the intended meaning.
Unfortunately the history of christianity has been so perverted by the official representatives of the same that we have no real knowledge as to what happened historically. In fact even the evidence of Jesus son of Mary's actual existence is a bit dubious. Tax records that should exist, e.g., mysteriously aren't present, etc. Possibly there was an actual person filling the role, and we have merely misplaced his century. Another possibility is that JC was merely a notional person, similar to Nicolas Bourbaki the notional mathematician. Or possibly just lots of records got lost in unexplained ways from unexpected causes. Or possibly he had enemies in office who desired to remove all records of his existence. Secretly. Some of these sound a bit far fetched, but 1000 years is a long time, and something must have happened.
FWIW, it's worth noting that none of the Gospels were written by first hand witnesses. They are at most retellings of stories of first hand witnesses. (50 years isn't that long, so it could have been possible for a genuine witness to write a Gospel, but that isn't what happened.) And these stories that were told were a mixture of religious creed and political propaganda. (The two categories were mixed in Judea at that time.)
So try to guess how much you would believe the Bible if you first encountered it in the context of "Fantasy literature". Then ask yourself why it shouldn't be shelved there. (There ARE reasons...mainly having to do with the mixed nature of what it recounts. PARTS of it are historical. And parts of it should go in erotica. [Not very good porn, but porn nonetheless. Consider the tale of Lot and his daughters. A bit of work could have made that quite spicy.])
It's true that there are christians who don't give christianity a bad name. This includes the majority who despite believing obvious nonsense are pretty quiet about it and don't try to force their tripe onto others.
However most vocal christians are among those who give christianity a bad name. C.S. Lewis may be an exception here as despite his obviously nutty and fantastic ideas, he was entertaining. I quite enjoyed The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. Then there's Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by, I believe, Jonathan Edwards. This causes one to have a justified abhorrence of all things christian, and all who support it. One doesn't have to believe that people who support something themselves intend evil if one believes that they system they support inherently tends towards performing evil. And I feel that christianity has, over the centuries proven again and again that it is such a system.
Not really. It's that they only broadcast for less than 1000 years. In less time than that they switch to cable, or fiber optics, or something else that can't be heard at a long distance.
The Tipler problem is harder, though. If anyone built self-reproducing cosmic explorers, then it should take them only a short time to get here (assuming that they reproduce more quickly than they get destroyed). Of course, whether they'd tell us they were here is a very different matter. And so is how they'd communicate to back home. (Exploration robots don't do much good unless they report back occasionally.)
So maybe we will find a pyramid on the moon, or something hiding in Saturn's rings. Perhaps. (I liked the short story better than the movie.)
How do you know?
More particularly, that is almost certainly a false statement, as it's quite difficult to only do one thing. But in a more general sense, rather than in an extremely precise sense, how do you know what this program does, and on what basis do you trust that "knowledge"?
It is my presumption that you are taking the word of a PR flack...and that HE doesn't know what it does. I'm rather certain that you've neither studied the code nor talked with someone who has. So you're taking someone's word. And the information that can't be seen by direct observation probably comes from a company which appears to me to lie more frequently that it is truthful.
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It's funny how the fanboi mentality works (and not as a valid argument, mind you)
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You're forgetting a bit of history here. Netscape was trying to build a business around selling a browser. MS moves in and destroys the possibility. With a product where it promised the authors of the product that it would give them a percentage of the sales in return for the rights to the product...so then it starts giving the product away to destroy Netscape's market without paying Spyglass anything.
One could argue that Netscape had no right to sell Netscape, but I *think* that the legal right is unquestionable, even if the morals were a bit dubious. (Netscape was based off of Open Source code which Netscape closed. But the license allowed this use.)
What MS did was a monopoly in one area tying it to a product in an affiliated area to promote their monopoly and destroy another's business. This is illegal in most jurisdictions. (Caution: IANAL)
I don't think I said it had to be vertical... I didn't intend to be that specific. And I only want it to be powerful enough (i.e., to develop sufficient velocity) to launch into high lunar orbit. This allows a smaller catapult.
Still, there would be advantages in building it ramping up a mountain slope, if you can find one that's easily adapted and facing in the right direction.
P.S.: Don't take Heinlein as a science reference. He didn't let possibility get in the way of a good story (though if he knew something was impossible, he generally tried to write around it).
I enjoyed Heinlein, be he was never one of those I counted as a writer of "hard" science fiction.
N.B.: This is neither vertical nor horizontal. There's no air friction, so vertical isn't appropriate, and horizontal is only desirable in order to make support easier. But I don't know what the optimal elevation is. Also, while we want to limit the launch velocity, we would like to be able to launch rather heavy payloads. This probably has impact on various design features.
That would explain the "cracks" I noticed. I haven't bothered to understand Python very deeply. (Well, to remember the pieces I didn't use.)
I sort of remember that I knew what you said when I was first learning Python, but that was a long time ago, and I haven't used it consistently enough to remember that kind of detail (i.e., the details that don't affect the code I was writing).
The only Steven Brust I've encountered has been fantasy. And I've noticed that after I read his stuff for awhile I feel terrible, so I've stopped reading him. (It *was* the Jehreg series. Perhaps his other works are less ... gloomy[?].)
You use catapults! From the moon, the catapults lift the materials into high lunar orbit. From the asteroids, the catapults act as a rocket.
Actually, while the "Mass driver" would work, I think that a rocket would be better. Most asteroids have a lot of methane or other low vaporizing material on them (or in them). Use that with a solar mirror to heat them into a rocket exhaust. Or possibly convert them into fuel for an ion rocket. It'd be slow, but fast compared to something that only ran for a shot time, and then you waited for years. And we're already doing analogous things.
I think the moon is a better place to start, but notice that setting up the lunar catapult itself requires a bunch of work on the surface. And then you need to mine the stuff and feed it. We aren't talking about a small project here! This would take decades.
It'd be a lot easier to just move asteroids into a Near Earth Orbit, but it would also be a bit dangerous. Probably no more than, say, 1000 tonnes at a time should be moved. And it would be slow. Again, a project that would take decades.
I prefer the work be done and materials gathered high lunar orbit for safety reasons. This has obvious costs associated with it, but I think safety should be paramount. After a thing is built in high lunar orbit, it could then be shifted into high earth orbit, and then slowed. (When you are slowing it, you better have a collision shield in place, to catch the garbage that's filling up the area. After you catch it, of course, it becomes material rather than garbage. If nothing else you can use it to reinforce the shield. Once you achieve your final orbit, the shield can slowly be consumed as manufactured material.
All of this is done using ion rockets, or something better. They may be slow, but they don't use much fuel, and fuel will be precious. But the ion rockets will need to be redesigned to use a wider variety of fuels. (You're essentially just putting a charge on something and accelerating it away from you in a linear accelerator, and then also shooting the separate charge away, so that you don't develop enough charge to render your rocket ineffective. That should be able to use nearly anything as fuel. In earth or lunar orbit you could power it from solar power.)
Actually, Python's OO was pretty much "just bolted on", but that happened several iterations of the language ago. Somewhere before 1.4. Possibly before 1.0. (I wasn't there.) As of 1.4, however, the bolting on process was still pretty evident. It's become less and less so with each iteration, until now the interface is pretty smooth. You can still see a few cracks here and there, though possibly with Python3 those will have disappeared.
Python isn't, and never tried to be, Smalltalk. literal numbers haven't been objects. (Possibly they are as of Python3.) This has been for the sake of efficiency, but it's lead to several cracks in the syntax, and many special cases. (Not as many as C++, though. Not nearly as many!)
"I'm not dead yet!"
It isn't quite dead. But compared to only a few decades ago it looks moribund. The last time I went into the local Science Fiction book store I didn't find anything new worth buying. It had been months since I visited it. (Well, shortly before xmas.) I used to vist it several times a week, and usually find something worth the visit. (True, I lived closer then...so the cost of visiting was less... But I moved and they moved.)
P.S.: There's also been a very significant change in the nature of fantasy. Compare Conan, or even Lord of the Rings, with modern fantasy. Modern fantasy is much more orderly, and governed by universal laws. (In Tolkien there was the hidden power of the Ainur and behind them of the creator god, the great composer, but it stayed hidden, and only manifested blatantly through the actions of the Wizards...who were almost certainly Maia, acting with their powers bound. (N.B.: Tom Bombadil was also probably a Maia, but one who came earlier and just never went back to Elvenhome, and thus didn't have his powers bound, though his actions were restrained by the will of Manwe...i.e., he wasn't in rebellion as Morgoth, Sauron and later Saruman were. He was more similar to Melian. (I never did figure out who Goldberry was...or what kind of entity.)
Note the rational ordering that enables one to deduce what kind of entity various beings were when sufficient information is present. This is different from modern fantasy, because the ultimate powers behind things are a single super god and one of his tools acting in rebellion (i.e., Morgoth).
That is, modern fantasy has come part way toward science fiction. It accepts universally acting laws that don't need an external creator because their action is what causes the universe to be as it exists. Asking why about them is rather like asking why 2 + 2 = 4. There *are* answers, but the answers are more difficult to understand than the questions they answer. (Which in fiction means that they are skipped over.)
Looking back over things, I realize that I have made prior eras of fantasy too unified. There were different themes in differing time periods. Lord Dunasy was not Lovecraft, and there were tales before them, back to Herakles and the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, and before. But in none of them do I see so strongly the theme of universally prevalent laws of nature. Not in tales of heros, not in escatology, not in sagas. I may possibly have missed it, but I don't think so.
True. I also liked Oath of Fealty. This isn't a complete list of what I liked. A really nifty one was "Dance of the Gods" (Author: Mayer Alan Brenner, cf. 1994, 4 volumes..all the titles start with "Spell of" ) It starts out looking like an outright fantasy novel, and ends up being rather hard science fiction.
I won't read long works on the computer. Sorry, but paper copies are much easier on the eyes. There are many papers I know I should read, but I won't unless I first print them out, which I'm reluctant to do because loose, unfileable papers make a tremendous mess.
I've recently been throwing out old papers because I couldn't find anything...on the computer I can find it, but can't read it. As loose papers, I can read it but can't find it. As a bound work I can read it AND find it again when I want to refer back. (And if I'm not going to refer back, why was it worth the bother of printing in the first place?)
Note that program listings are things which one only reads a small part of at a time. It's a much different reading experience than a dense mass of text. Ditto for SlashDot. On SlashDot one skips around, and when one is typing (responding) one mainly sees the appearance of what one is going to be typing. Another very different experience.
There's a "Science Fiction" bookstore near where I live, and they've shifted gradually towards carrying mostly fantasy.
Genuine Science Fiction has always been rather thin on the ground. Doing it well is *hard*. Hal Clement was one who did it well. Larry Niven occasionally did it well. (Known Worlds series incl. Ringworld et seq.)
Currently I only know of Charles Stoss, though there may be others. (I've cut back on my reading a lot.)
But a thing to note is...the Science Fiction book store near me doesn't care the magazines regularly. They can't get the distributors to deliver them. And this is in the SF Bay Area, California, USA. Books they can get, but not magazines.
Unfortunately, in my opinion the quality of the single magazine I followed regularly, Analog(Astounding) has also deteriorated. Significantly. Very significantly. So much so that a subscription is practically a waste of money. (There have been a few periods when I also regularly followed Galaxy or Worlds of If...but those are now decades in the past.)
And it's not that I don't still like good Science Fiction...or even good fantasy. I still buy many books. (*Almost* all of which I count as fantasy of one sort or another...but NOT Science Fiction.)
I wish Randall Garrett had lived. *He* could have written decent Science Fiction in the current age. (He wasn't just the Lord Darcy series. There were long periods when he was the most prolific writer that J.W. Campbell had writing for him...under lots of pseudonyms.) He wouldn't have written the same stories that Charles Stoss writes...and nobody will ever know what he would have written. Sigh.
But, in my opinion, most of the magazines don't really deserve to live. It's a real pity, because the magazines is where authors used to develop their skills. Now ... now there doesn't seem to be any decent place for such development. Which means that the people who can become authors are far fewer.
On line? Who pays for on line? IMHO that only works if you are already a well enough known name that a publisher will pick up your work anyway. (I.e., even if they don't have exclusive rights to distribution.) A few authors can get away with that.
Science Fiction has always been a shoe-string operation. And SF magazines have always been VERY highly dependent upon their editor. A change of editors can make a weak magazine or break a strong one. Astounding/Analog was extremely lucky in having Campbell for so long. Galaxy was lucky in HL Gold. Asimov's ... faded rapidly when he did. I don't think that Stanley Schmidt was as good an editor as Campbell (average rating...Campbell sure had his off periods!), but he was more than adequate. But he didn't keep the spark going. He didn't have the fire that inspires authors and readers. Recently...I haven't been following. Occasionally I see one and pick it up. But rarely...meaning I rarely see one. When I do see one, I'm rarely inspired to buy it.
All magazines are falling off, but Science Fiction magazines have always lived closer to the edge...so any fall off in business affects them more profoundly.
I think you need to look more carefully at the timing. This comes under the heading of "illusion of coincidence". The information from Boycott-Novell comes from a court case, and the source of the evidence is memos from around 2001. (I should check again, but that's how I remember it.) So there's probably 5 or more years in between. (Allowing for various slips in production.)
IOW, I don't think this is a causal connection. Possibly you could dig up something that was, but it probably isn't from this batch.
OTOH, it certainly indicates the KIND of activities that MS engages in (as if there were any doubt). And as a result it's reasonable to suspect that something similar, but as yet undiscovered, underlies this. But it's also quite reasonable that there could be other reasons. (They didn't design the technology, they bought it from someone else, and it might use patents that they don't have a clear title to, and so they can only use them in certain licensed ways, e.g.) Lacking facts one can easily invent numerous stories. Don't believe the stories that you invent to be truth, but only possibility. You may never determine the truth, and that has to be all right.