Probably using the definition of conceit where it means a far fetched idea or metaphor.
2.something that is conceived in the mind; a thought; idea: He jotted down the conceits of his idle hours.... 5.an elaborate, fanciful metaphor, esp. of a strained or far-fetched nature.
Makes perfect sense to me; the idea that you meet a lot of people is far fetched, but makes the game play work, so you use your imagination to pretend it isn't unrealistic...
I have read of people who had their computers' fans stop working while using Ubuntu. Fans stop working can mean overheated and destroyed internal components. So yes, software can destroy hardware.
I shop late at night at the 24 hour Kroger near me every couple of weeks, buying a whole cart full of items ($120-150). At that time, typically only the self-serve lines are open, 4-6 of them staffed by one cashier. However, rather than deal with half an hour of checking myself out and listening to "please put the item in the bag. Please take the item out of the bag and scan it. Please put the item in the bag," the cashier will almost always open a regular checkout for me and check me out that way. All I do is ask politely.
Assume the roaches are fairly indecisive and if there are more than one empty shelter it will be rare for a roach to give up trying to find an inhabited shelter with room and actually enter an empty shelter. This would account for all the milling about and touching/smelling each other that was supposedly communication.
Once a roach finally gives in and goes into an empty shelter, and the other roaches see that it wasn't a trap and the roach is okay in there, they kind of all follow suit into it.
So the rules become more like:
- look for a shelter that has room that has cockroachers in it (SAFE FOR ME). - if you can't find one look for all possible shelters that are empty. Once you're really, really sure there's no SAFE shelter, try out one of these dangerous shelters. - periodically exit, for a look around/search for food/to excrete/etc, then repeat algorithm.
That would account for so few (50) not having the concurrency issues. I bet if they had oh say.... 10,000 roaches and 250 50-roach spots it would not be quite so mathematically perfect as to say that the concurrency had not occurred a few times.
Find all easily available places to hide. If all places are empty, stay in one of them randomly. If a place is full already, it does not count as a place to hide.
If more than one place already has a hiding cockroach, stay in whichever one has fewest.
Occasionally venture out and then start the algorithm over from scratch, not remembering your previous hiding place.
*that* should result in the observed Cockroach behavior and is still small.
Also an announcement that "Lord Recluse" no longer works on City of Villains was sneaked in in the last day or two.
NCSoft subtle announcement that Zeb Cook no longer works for Cryptic and they wish him well in future endeavors. Still we're all wondering what those'll be?
I noticed that too. In fact they were speculating that the habit of activity or not activity might be formed in youth, or have to do with mood, and so on.
There was no genetic testing or mapping done whatsoever.
I liked the article. It's not "a joke," it's a constant pressure of disbelief that can be wearying and frustrating.
Sure, I know there's a lot of females playing various online games. But many men seem comfortable believing there aren't. Even one man I have played online games with and talked to on the phone for years and he's also talked to my husband on the phone for years - says things like "I just assume everyone's a fat guy with a beard."
In some societies, the punishment for social misbehavior was ostracism. Everyone pretended you didn't exist. This is an emotionally painful thing - perhaps more so for women because of the way girls are socialized. Women players of online games are tired of being "ostracized" not for any rudeness but for the fact we are female!
The next, and almost as bad thing, is the seeming denial of the femaleness of "ugly" or "fat" women. Yes, hello, women are women. They are women if they are fat and they are women if they are thin. They are women if they are pretty, ugly, young or old. 18 year old girls not yet out of high school or 65 year old grandmothers already retired, all women. But no, to these boys this article mentions, you are not really female if you are "fat and ugly." It's the next thing to not existing!
For a good take on that, I'd always recommend "The Women Men Don't See" by James Tiptree Jr. (Pen name of Alice Sheldon, another woman who apparently had to pretend to be a man to have another 'women don't exist' world take her seriously).
Women exist and are people. Their appearance is irrelevant to internet gaming. If there is a woman in your "WoW clan": she doesn't care if you want to have sex with her, and she doesn't have any obligation to prove she is "hot" to you. She's a fellow player like any other and all that matters is her gaming skill and courtesy. Pretend she is your sister or your mom if that helps you treat her better.
I would like to see a review from a player who is a newbie to flight sims, but an experienced SWG player or at least an experienced MMORPG player. Their "newbie" review was someone who was already good at flight sims... There was little idea how difficult it would be as a game to someone who'd played a lot of rpg's but little of the realtime flying around stuff (I watched people play wing commander, but never played it myself, etc) whether it's worth getting JTL and what are the high and low points from that perspective.
You're mistaken... there have been virtual wars over spawn points. For example, there were several disputes that approached the level of battles and/or lawsuits (metaphorically) over the (at that time solely random) spawn of Ragefire, a bottleneck for the epic quest for clerics, until a change was made that allowed this dragon to be triggered.
Also you will find message boards for each Everquest class that often behave like political parties or at least political organizations, and call for their class to be "beefed" / other classes to be "nerfed." This happens all the time, and as with the Ragefire example, there are changes made in reaction to these issues (or promised... as the "melee classes revisited" has been promised since May)
The article says 71% of boys and 34% of girls have played this one particular game.
That comes out to around 52% of teenagers have played it, *not* 'over 70%' -- there are slightly more girls than boys.
Some kids may have played violent video games other than GTA but not GTA. There is really no information in the article about how they would have determined how many teens 'play violent video games' on a regular basis, so I assume they did not determine that factoid at all.
A lot of these supposed "similarities" are very misleading. For example, what are they saying the "Death Dealers" are like, the Black Hand or the Assamites? Those are completely different in the World of Darkness, so an organization that can be compared to both is probably not much like either. Is the "New World Coven" the Sabbat or the Camarilla? It's compared to both. Again, not a very convincing argument.
Look at these 2: 27. In the World of Darkness, certain vampires are able to get pregnant. In Underworld, at least one vampire is able to get pregnant.
35. In the World of Darkness, vampires cast reflections. In Underworld, vampires cast reflections.
All right. Let's be real here. Vampires either do or don't cast reflections, and either can or can't get pregnant. In the World of darkness, MOST vampires CANNOT get pregnant, only "Kindred of the East" that I know of which are very infrequent. And MOST vampires cast reflections but the Lasombra do not. So, if the movie had done it the other way (vampires can't get pregnant and don't cast shadows) they still could've put it as points of similarity with just as much right... which is to say none. If you have vampires, you have to pick one of these 2, and whichever you pick, matches something in World of Darkness.
I could make a list equally or more convincing for every TV show and movie that's had vampires and werewolves in it. Cold Hearts? Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for goodness sake, has most of these or other areas it's similar to World of Darkness. Laurell Hamilton's Anita Blake books. The similarities to Nancy Collins' story aren't convincingly more similar than any other two stories based on the "Romeo and Juliet" concept. The "deathlike sleep" comes from Shakespeare, too.
And some are so vague that you wonder what else they could do. "Multiple types of vampires interact under a single leader." Vampires are, when not solo, almost always portrayed as having a leader. It did not sound like there were *kinds* of vampires in the same way WW has clans. In fact you can tell they leave that out. Vampires living in mansions? Dracula... please... Vampires seeking beauty, that's kind of the Anne Rice territory now. The "Embrace" too. It shows common sources.
It's too bad, because this kind of movie, if it's really good, would be a boost/advertising and get people into the genre so they'd want to buy more White Wolf products, if anything.
Nancy Collins was writing vampire novels before she wrote World of Darkness stories, too.
Books by Maxine MacArthur - "Time Present" and sequels "Time Past" and "Time Future" (not positive of the order of these, or of her age) - reminded me of Babylon 5, but novels instead of TV series. Has both interesting characters and interesting ideas.
Books by Catherine Asaro - "The Last Hawk" and "Primary Inversions" among others. I think she's about my age (36)? Not sure. Maybe in her 40s. Romance-y SF like Anne McCafferty used to do, maybe with some CJ Cherryh "men in jeopardy" stuff thrown in.
Kage Baker writes time travel series, and I just enjoyed "Signal to Noise" by Eric Nylund also. They're fairly new writers.
As for older writers writing strong books still, I loved "Kiln People" which I bought recently, by David Brin, and "Probability Moon" by Nancy Kress. I second the recommendation of John Barnes, too, though I don't like everything he writes, the most recent book of his that I read, "The Merchants of Souls," was very good, a lot like 'golden age' SF in some ways, but completely contemporary as well. And Ursula Le Guin is going through a downward track in her writing but her zenith was too esoteric for me, I'm enjoying her return to the Hain world type of stories. "The Telling" was the one I most recently bought.
All very good recent science fiction that I sincerely recommend everyone to buy. And which I did buy new myself.
Girls who like Heinlein / Girls who like Gor
on
New Heinlein Novel
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is a very interesting observation here, and as I was a girl who read and enjoyed Heinlein and felt his books were a formative experience for her, and had acquaintances in college who felt likewise about Norman (whose only book I even started reading ended up in the trash can) - I can point to some serious irony going on here, as well as accurate observation.
Why is it, I wonder, that the girls who enjoyed the stories about women who were empowered by sex, enjoyed it, had it with the people they cared about whoever those were, and were happily married as equals to as many guys as they wanted, were less likely to want casual sex with buddies or to be sexually promiscuous, than the girls who liked stories about women who were uptight, overprotected virgins who were kidnapped, raped, and found they enjoyed being sex slaves?
Far be it from me to imply that the former are better adjusted and more sane, I think there's something going on beyond that...;) not sure what, though...
I found this (the parent post's) approach to understanding these series of novels very stimulating of insights (which isn't exactly the same thing as insightful, and I wanted to post, not moderate anyway;)
First off, I disagree strongly about the higher education part. The most significant things I learned in my university education were to always read critically, and to watch for places where the top experts disagreed. I learned that it's true that the more you know, the more you realize is unknown -- not just to you, but unknown period. I don't think I was the only one to learn that, though.
As for a darker view on life. It's true that some people attract bad experiences to themselves, and that those are the people who believe most strongly in the prevalence of evil nature in humanity, and in the fact that bad things will happen to them. I don't know which is the cause and which the effect, though, of those two. I suspect it's their experiences that form their outlook, not the reverse; and that it is the bad experiences happening to them as impressionable children that make them unconsciously seek them out in the rest of their life.
I also think that it's not a bad thing to have stories that explore the darker side of human nature. Even those of us who have had happy, fortunate lives and believe more in a fair and sane world, have darker aspects to our inner selves that we exclude or ignore to our own detriment. Safe ways of exploring one's own resonances with danger and evil can be good experiences in life.
George R. R. Martin's writing has explored a wide variety of themes, and this is not his only or even his predominant theme. Give the series a chance to finish up and see what it's about as a whole; also, don't be distracted by one aspect you disagree with from seeing the rest of what he's writing about.
As for other novels or series that have similar effects, I agree that Guy Gavriel Kay's work is one example. My personal favorites of his are A Song for Arbonne and the two parter, Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors. Others, not mentioned, include M. K. Wren's series Sword of the Lamb and sequels. And for purely historical fiction with a lot of the same feel to it, I highly recommend Colleen McCullogh's Rome series, starting with "The First Man in Rome" and continuing with The Grass Crown, Fortune's Favorites, etc. It has tremendously interesting characters taken from history, as deeply characterized as Martin's and as likely to die (a they all, of course, are now dead;)
"Assume you have four euclidean points, A, B, C, and D. A, B, and C are colinear, and B, C, and D are colinear. Assume D is *not* on the line A-B-C."
No, this is solvable with points, too. Notice that you did not say four DISTINCT points. All you have to do is make B and C identical. (With pennies, you put one on top of the other). Now, a line is not defined by two points, it is defined by two distinct points. So, B = C is the answer.
For those of you who are saying that if the RH is proven, it will make big prime numbers easy (or easier) to factor:
1) Assume the RH has been proven. 2) Write a computer program using this assumption that can factor large numbers quickly, or whatever else it is that will mess with cryptography. 3) If your program works, sell the resulting decryption engine for $$$. If your program does not work, use the fact that it does not work as a disproof of RH -- because if RH had been true, it would have worked. Claim million dollar prize. Profit either way!
I believe that the above demonstrates that proving the RH will not make factoring prime numbers any easier.
IANAMathematician (though I took complex analysis as an undergrad, so I sort of understand what they're talking about in the articles)
I've been playing Everquest for nearly 2 years, my husband for nearly 4 years. It is a remarkably cheat-proof game. Nothing that ShowEQ does for people really impacts us. In fact even though we have never used it and never will, it's helped us because it supplies information to the people who supply it to the sites that we go to for information.
The creators of Everquest have not allowed item duplication cheats, item stealing cheats, run speed cheats, etc. such as those described in the article referenced. In fact everquest "cheats" are things that you can do in game anyway: tracking (get a ranger of any level, or a sufficient level bard or druid), see invisible (a spell that takes hardly any mana, that casters all get at fairly low levels) etc. And things that everyone benefits from, not some unfairly (knowing what spells are available, what each spell does).
Unlike other online games that I've played, Everquest hasn't been ruined by cheating. It's also fun for all levels, and though its true that those starting today may never catch up with the uberest players, that doesn't matter: it's fun at all levels. It's fun from beginning to end. It isn't about winning, it's -- like a tabletop rpg -- about playing and having fun.
I don't think ShowEQ or its like applications (EQWin, that lets people play everquest in a window) cause any harm or help really. They are nice for people who like that kind of thing, but they are not cheats that ruin the game for everyone else.
Maps are nice, but there's maps all over the web and freely available to anyone who cares to look for them; there are maps for sale by Sony in an official EQ Atlas as well.
Basically, it's an excellent game that was well designed from the beginning to make sure the server took care of all important information exchanges. When there are occasional client side cheats allowed by new bugs introduced by a patch, they're always fixed super-fast.
There are things Sony has done not that well with Everquest, but allowing cheaters to ruin the game for the rest of us isn't one of them.
Yes, acclaimed, at least, to your standards: he has won awards, been nominated, etc.
"Anderson's solo work has garnered wide critical acclaim: CLIMBING OLYMPUS (voted the best paperback SF novel of 1995 by Locus magazine), RESURRECTION, INC. (nominated for the Bram Stoker Award), and his novel BLINDFOLD (1996 preliminary Nebula nominee).... [X Files novels] GROUND ZERO was voted "Best Science Fiction Novel of 1995" by the readers of SFX magazine. RUINS hit the New York Times bestseller list, the first X-FILES novel ever to do so, and was voted "Best Science Fiction Novel of 1996. " (from his professional bio)
"Whereas I think I read shockwave rider (not sure of the title, but it had a techie hero, a manage-a-trois love scene, using eels to splice nerves, etc) and it also had the zen unity angle going for it, but it SUCKED"
Whatever it is you're describing, you're right about one thing -- you got the title confused. Shockwave Rider doesn't have any of those things. It has for a protagonist a confused guy (Nick) who was the product of a weird experimental school (Tarnover), escaped, and ended up in a secret town built with serious amounts of QWAN and funded by a hotline of *listeners* (talk about selling your attention). That's Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, a cyberpunk pre-cursor. (Nick reprogrammed his lives using a telephone touch pad... pre PC, pre cell phone tech.)
I don't think I ever read the 3-way-eel-splicing book. But I'm curious what the title is if anyone remembers.
At the gym I went to about 5 years ago, they had a bicycle with a screen. You could ride your bike around an island, a city, a forest, or the fourth setting was an aztec-theme ball court where you were trying to 'kick' the ball into the goal. You could play vs the computer or vs someone on the next bike. It was a blast:) since that was 5 years ago, they should have something better by now... too bad I don't live near that gym anymore, the ones near my house now don't have the cool stuff. Based on this article I'm thinking of getting dance dance for my ps2 or computer to get my son to exercise more. I could too:)
Eight years ago I started teaching introductory OO programming classes, first in Smalltalk, then in Java. The classes I taught (which I didn't completely design myself, but mostly taught classes designed by my employers, though I had a bit of free reign to actual instructional technique) did not start with Hello World because that is not the best place to start when teaching object oriented programming.
I saw people ask "well how else can you print" and the answer is: don't start by teaching people how to print. Start by teaching them what objects are, then how to create objects, then how to interact with objects (send messages), then have them create an object and interact with it. If you need to, write a simple "print" object and preload it for them in a JAR so they don't have to think about how to print, they can send a string to the print object and it prints it for them. This is how you get new programmers' heads aimed in the right direction for OO.
Smalltalk is better for this because it always comes with a print object: the Transcript. But it is not so hard to do in Java really.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably using the definition of conceit where it means a far fetched idea or metaphor.
2.something that is conceived in the mind; a thought; idea: He jotted down the conceits of his idle hours. ...
5.an elaborate, fanciful metaphor, esp. of a strained or far-fetched nature.
taken from: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conceit
Makes perfect sense to me; the idea that you meet a lot of people is far fetched, but makes the game play work, so you use your imagination to pretend it isn't unrealistic...
Shakespeare got a lot of mileage out of variations on 'a bunch of stuff happens... then... everybody dies' - so I'm not sure what your objection is.
I've read most of Brunner's work. Someone survives in nearly all of them though, so probably not the same ones radtea read :)
I have read of people who had their computers' fans stop working while using Ubuntu. Fans stop working can mean overheated and destroyed internal components. So yes, software can destroy hardware.
I shop late at night at the 24 hour Kroger near me every couple of weeks, buying a whole cart full of items ($120-150). At that time, typically only the self-serve lines are open, 4-6 of them staffed by one cashier. However, rather than deal with half an hour of checking myself out and listening to "please put the item in the bag. Please take the item out of the bag and scan it. Please put the item in the bag," the cashier will almost always open a regular checkout for me and check me out that way. All I do is ask politely.
Assume the roaches are fairly indecisive and if there are more than one empty shelter it will be rare for a roach to give up trying to find an inhabited shelter with room and actually enter an empty shelter. This would account for all the milling about and touching/smelling each other that was supposedly communication.
Once a roach finally gives in and goes into an empty shelter, and the other roaches see that it wasn't a trap and the roach is okay in there, they kind of all follow suit into it.
So the rules become more like:
- look for a shelter that has room that has cockroachers in it (SAFE FOR ME).
- if you can't find one look for all possible shelters that are empty. Once you're really, really sure there's no SAFE shelter, try out one of these dangerous shelters.
- periodically exit, for a look around/search for food/to excrete/etc, then repeat algorithm.
That would account for so few (50) not having the concurrency issues. I bet if they had oh say.... 10,000 roaches and 250 50-roach spots it would not be quite so mathematically perfect as to say that the concurrency had not occurred a few times.
How about this:
Find all easily available places to hide. If all places are empty, stay in one of them randomly. If a place is full already, it does not count as a place to hide.
If more than one place already has a hiding cockroach, stay in whichever one has fewest.
Occasionally venture out and then start the algorithm over from scratch, not remembering your previous hiding place.
*that* should result in the observed Cockroach behavior and is still small.
Also an announcement that "Lord Recluse" no longer works on City of Villains was sneaked in in the last day or two.
NCSoft subtle announcement that Zeb Cook no longer works for Cryptic and they wish him well in future endeavors. Still we're all wondering what those'll be?
I noticed that too. In fact they were speculating that the habit of activity or not activity might be formed in youth, or have to do with mood, and so on.
There was no genetic testing or mapping done whatsoever.
I liked the article. It's not "a joke," it's a constant pressure of disbelief that can be wearying and frustrating.
Sure, I know there's a lot of females playing various online games. But many men seem comfortable believing there aren't. Even one man I have played online games with and talked to on the phone for years and he's also talked to my husband on the phone for years - says things like "I just assume everyone's a fat guy with a beard."
In some societies, the punishment for social misbehavior was ostracism. Everyone pretended you didn't exist. This is an emotionally painful thing - perhaps more so for women because of the way girls are socialized. Women players of online games are tired of being "ostracized" not for any rudeness but for the fact we are female!
The next, and almost as bad thing, is the seeming denial of the femaleness of "ugly" or "fat" women. Yes, hello, women are women. They are women if they are fat and they are women if they are thin. They are women if they are pretty, ugly, young or old. 18 year old girls not yet out of high school or 65 year old grandmothers already retired, all women. But no, to these boys this article mentions, you are not really female if you are "fat and ugly." It's the next thing to not existing!
For a good take on that, I'd always recommend "The Women Men Don't See" by James Tiptree Jr. (Pen name of Alice Sheldon, another woman who apparently had to pretend to be a man to have another 'women don't exist' world take her seriously).
Women exist and are people. Their appearance is irrelevant to internet gaming. If there is a woman in your "WoW clan": she doesn't care if you want to have sex with her, and she doesn't have any obligation to prove she is "hot" to you. She's a fellow player like any other and all that matters is her gaming skill and courtesy. Pretend she is your sister or your mom if that helps you treat her better.
If you read the article, it says they are hiring women to staff their booth for their skills and interest rather than their appearance.
It does NOT say they are hiring women specifically because they are unattractive. Whether or not they are attractive just isn't the issue.
I think many, many commenters missed that part, including the original editor who posted the story.
I would like to see a review from a player who is a newbie to flight sims, but an experienced SWG player or at least an experienced MMORPG player. Their "newbie" review was someone who was already good at flight sims... There was little idea how difficult it would be as a game to someone who'd played a lot of rpg's but little of the realtime flying around stuff (I watched people play wing commander, but never played it myself, etc) whether it's worth getting JTL and what are the high and low points from that perspective.
You're mistaken... there have been virtual wars over spawn points. For example, there were several disputes that approached the level of battles and/or lawsuits (metaphorically) over the (at that time solely random) spawn of Ragefire, a bottleneck for the epic quest for clerics, until a change was made that allowed this dragon to be triggered.
Also you will find message boards for each Everquest class that often behave like political parties or at least political organizations, and call for their class to be "beefed" / other classes to be "nerfed." This happens all the time, and as with the Ragefire example, there are changes made in reaction to these issues (or promised... as the "melee classes revisited" has been promised since May)
The article says 71% of boys and 34% of girls have played this one particular game.
That comes out to around 52% of teenagers have played it, *not* 'over 70%' -- there are slightly more girls than boys.
Some kids may have played violent video games other than GTA but not GTA. There is really no information in the article about how they would have determined how many teens 'play violent video games' on a regular basis, so I assume they did not determine that factoid at all.
A lot of these supposed "similarities" are very misleading. For example, what are they saying the "Death Dealers" are like, the Black Hand or the Assamites? Those are completely different in the World of Darkness, so an organization that can be compared to both is probably not much like either. Is the "New World Coven" the Sabbat or the Camarilla? It's compared to both. Again, not a very convincing argument.
Look at these 2:
27. In the World of Darkness, certain vampires are able to get pregnant. In Underworld, at least one vampire is able to get pregnant.
35. In the World of Darkness, vampires cast reflections. In Underworld, vampires cast reflections.
All right. Let's be real here. Vampires either do or don't cast reflections, and either can or can't get pregnant. In the World of darkness, MOST vampires CANNOT get pregnant, only "Kindred of the East" that I know of which are very infrequent. And MOST vampires cast reflections but the Lasombra do not. So, if the movie had done it the other way (vampires can't get pregnant and don't cast shadows) they still could've put it as points of similarity with just as much right... which is to say none. If you have vampires, you have to pick one of these 2, and whichever you pick, matches something in World of Darkness.
I could make a list equally or more convincing for every TV show and movie that's had vampires and werewolves in it. Cold Hearts? Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for goodness sake, has most of these or other areas it's similar to World of Darkness. Laurell Hamilton's Anita Blake books. The similarities to Nancy Collins' story aren't convincingly more similar than any other two stories based on the "Romeo and Juliet" concept. The "deathlike sleep" comes from Shakespeare, too.
And some are so vague that you wonder what else they could do. "Multiple types of vampires interact under a single leader." Vampires are, when not solo, almost always portrayed as having a leader. It did not sound like there were *kinds* of vampires in the same way WW has clans. In fact you can tell they leave that out. Vampires living in mansions? Dracula... please... Vampires seeking beauty, that's kind of the Anne Rice territory now. The "Embrace" too. It shows common sources.
It's too bad, because this kind of movie, if it's really good, would be a boost/advertising and get people into the genre so they'd want to buy more White Wolf products, if anything.
Nancy Collins was writing vampire novels before she wrote World of Darkness stories, too.
Books by Maxine MacArthur - "Time Present" and sequels "Time Past" and "Time Future" (not positive of the order of these, or of her age) - reminded me of Babylon 5, but novels instead of TV series. Has both interesting characters and interesting ideas.
Books by Catherine Asaro - "The Last Hawk" and "Primary Inversions" among others. I think she's about my age (36)? Not sure. Maybe in her 40s. Romance-y SF like Anne McCafferty used to do, maybe with some CJ Cherryh "men in jeopardy" stuff thrown in.
Kage Baker writes time travel series, and I just enjoyed "Signal to Noise" by Eric Nylund also. They're fairly new writers.
As for older writers writing strong books still, I loved "Kiln People" which I bought recently, by David Brin, and "Probability Moon" by Nancy Kress. I second the recommendation of John Barnes, too, though I don't like everything he writes, the most recent book of his that I read, "The Merchants of Souls," was very good, a lot like 'golden age' SF in some ways, but completely contemporary as well. And Ursula Le Guin is going through a downward track in her writing but her zenith was too esoteric for me, I'm enjoying her return to the Hain world type of stories. "The Telling" was the one I most recently bought.
All very good recent science fiction that I sincerely recommend everyone to buy. And which I did buy new myself.
This is a very interesting observation here, and as I was a girl who read and enjoyed Heinlein and felt his books were a formative experience for her, and had acquaintances in college who felt likewise about Norman (whose only book I even started reading ended up in the trash can) - I can point to some serious irony going on here, as well as accurate observation.
;) not sure what, though...
Why is it, I wonder, that the girls who enjoyed the stories about women who were empowered by sex, enjoyed it, had it with the people they cared about whoever those were, and were happily married as equals to as many guys as they wanted, were less likely to want casual sex with buddies or to be sexually promiscuous, than the girls who liked stories about women who were uptight, overprotected virgins who were kidnapped, raped, and found they enjoyed being sex slaves?
Far be it from me to imply that the former are better adjusted and more sane, I think there's something going on beyond that...
But isn't it ironic?
I found this (the parent post's) approach to understanding these series of novels very stimulating of insights (which isn't exactly the same thing as insightful, and I wanted to post, not moderate anyway ;)
;)
First off, I disagree strongly about the higher education part. The most significant things I learned in my university education were to always read critically, and to watch for places where the top experts disagreed. I learned that it's true that the more you know, the more you realize is unknown -- not just to you, but unknown period. I don't think I was the only one to learn that, though.
As for a darker view on life. It's true that some people attract bad experiences to themselves, and that those are the people who believe most strongly in the prevalence of evil nature in humanity, and in the fact that bad things will happen to them. I don't know which is the cause and which the effect, though, of those two. I suspect it's their experiences that form their outlook, not the reverse; and that it is the bad experiences happening to them as impressionable children that make them unconsciously seek them out in the rest of their life.
I also think that it's not a bad thing to have stories that explore the darker side of human nature. Even those of us who have had happy, fortunate lives and believe more in a fair and sane world, have darker aspects to our inner selves that we exclude or ignore to our own detriment. Safe ways of exploring one's own resonances with danger and evil can be good experiences in life.
George R. R. Martin's writing has explored a wide variety of themes, and this is not his only or even his predominant theme. Give the series a chance to finish up and see what it's about as a whole; also, don't be distracted by one aspect you disagree with from seeing the rest of what he's writing about.
As for other novels or series that have similar effects, I agree that Guy Gavriel Kay's work is one example. My personal favorites of his are A Song for Arbonne and the two parter, Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors. Others, not mentioned, include M. K. Wren's series Sword of the Lamb and sequels. And for purely historical fiction with a lot of the same feel to it, I highly recommend Colleen McCullogh's Rome series, starting with "The First Man in Rome" and continuing with The Grass Crown, Fortune's Favorites, etc. It has tremendously interesting characters taken from history, as deeply characterized as Martin's and as likely to die (a they all, of course, are now dead
"Assume you have four euclidean points, A, B, C, and D. A, B, and C are colinear, and B, C, and D are colinear. Assume D is *not* on the line A-B-C."
No, this is solvable with points, too. Notice that you did not say four DISTINCT points. All you have to do is make B and C identical. (With pennies, you put one on top of the other). Now, a line is not defined by two points, it is defined by two distinct points. So, B = C is the answer.
For those of you who are saying that if the RH is proven, it will make big prime numbers easy (or easier) to factor:
1) Assume the RH has been proven.
2) Write a computer program using this assumption that can factor large numbers quickly, or whatever else it is that will mess with cryptography.
3) If your program works, sell the resulting decryption engine for $$$. If your program does not work, use the fact that it does not work as a disproof of RH -- because if RH had been true, it would have worked. Claim million dollar prize. Profit either way!
I believe that the above demonstrates that proving the RH will not make factoring prime numbers any easier.
IANAMathematician (though I took complex analysis as an undergrad, so I sort of understand what they're talking about in the articles)
That's just wrong. However, my husband cracked up laughing when he read it.
I've been playing Everquest for nearly 2 years, my husband for nearly 4 years. It is a remarkably cheat-proof game. Nothing that ShowEQ does for people really impacts us. In fact even though we have never used it and never will, it's helped us because it supplies information to the people who supply it to the sites that we go to for information.
The creators of Everquest have not allowed item duplication cheats, item stealing cheats, run speed cheats, etc. such as those described in the article referenced. In fact everquest "cheats" are things that you can do in game anyway: tracking (get a ranger of any level, or a sufficient level bard or druid), see invisible (a spell that takes hardly any mana, that casters all get at fairly low levels) etc. And things that everyone benefits from, not some unfairly (knowing what spells are available, what each spell does).
Unlike other online games that I've played, Everquest hasn't been ruined by cheating. It's also fun for all levels, and though its true that those starting today may never catch up with the uberest players, that doesn't matter: it's fun at all levels. It's fun from beginning to end. It isn't about winning, it's -- like a tabletop rpg -- about playing and having fun.
I don't think ShowEQ or its like applications (EQWin, that lets people play everquest in a window) cause any harm or help really. They are nice for people who like that kind of thing, but they are not cheats that ruin the game for everyone else.
Maps are nice, but there's maps all over the web and freely available to anyone who cares to look for them; there are maps for sale by Sony in an official EQ Atlas as well.
Basically, it's an excellent game that was well designed from the beginning to make sure the server took care of all important information exchanges. When there are occasional client side cheats allowed by new bugs introduced by a patch, they're always fixed super-fast.
There are things Sony has done not that well with Everquest, but allowing cheaters to ruin the game for the rest of us isn't one of them.
"Anderson's solo work has garnered wide critical acclaim: CLIMBING OLYMPUS (voted the best paperback SF novel of 1995 by Locus magazine), RESURRECTION, INC. (nominated for the Bram Stoker Award), and his novel BLINDFOLD (1996 preliminary Nebula nominee).... [X Files novels] GROUND ZERO was voted "Best Science Fiction Novel of 1995" by the readers of SFX magazine. RUINS hit the New York Times bestseller list, the first X-FILES novel ever to do so, and was voted "Best Science Fiction Novel of 1996. " (from his professional bio)
Whatever it is you're describing, you're right about one thing -- you got the title confused. Shockwave Rider doesn't have any of those things. It has for a protagonist a confused guy (Nick) who was the product of a weird experimental school (Tarnover), escaped, and ended up in a secret town built with serious amounts of QWAN and funded by a hotline of *listeners* (talk about selling your attention). That's Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, a cyberpunk pre-cursor. (Nick reprogrammed his lives using a telephone touch pad... pre PC, pre cell phone tech.)
I don't think I ever read the 3-way-eel-splicing book. But I'm curious what the title is if anyone remembers.
At the gym I went to about 5 years ago, they had a bicycle with a screen. You could ride your bike around an island, a city, a forest, or the fourth setting was an aztec-theme ball court where you were trying to 'kick' the ball into the goal. You could play vs the computer or vs someone on the next bike. It was a blast :) since that was 5 years ago, they should have something better by now... too bad I don't live near that gym anymore, the ones near my house now don't have the cool stuff. Based on this article I'm thinking of getting dance dance for my ps2 or computer to get my son to exercise more. I could too :)
I saw people ask "well how else can you print" and the answer is: don't start by teaching people how to print. Start by teaching them what objects are, then how to create objects, then how to interact with objects (send messages), then have them create an object and interact with it. If you need to, write a simple "print" object and preload it for them in a JAR so they don't have to think about how to print, they can send a string to the print object and it prints it for them. This is how you get new programmers' heads aimed in the right direction for OO.
Smalltalk is better for this because it always comes with a print object: the Transcript. But it is not so hard to do in Java really.