True. Lots of stuff is trainable, but is inborn for some people. Strength, for example. Some people are naturally stronger than others, but you can make up for the difference by working out in the gym. Absolute hearing (recognizing the pitch of a note of music): my dad has always been able to do it and can't remember a time when he couldn't, nor did he understand why others couldn't. But many musicians need to train quite hard at it. To some it comes naturally after years of making music, to others it doesn't.
Perfect pitch is quite rare in Westerners. Mozart was considered special (in part) because he had it and could name the notes in church bells.
But in China, which uses a tone-based language, 1 out of 10 people have perfect pitch. And this isn't true in other Asian countries that don't use tone. So it certainly is not just an innate skill that some people have.
Personally, I find brains to be fascinating things, with a lot of really interesting facilities. Once you've trained with a device long enough (a car, a waldo, whatever) your brain will actually incorporate it into your automatic actions as if it was part of the body, offloading the work from the neocortex, meaning you can do it smoothly and without needing to think through it. It's also why people tend to flinch when people hit their cars.
In the case of memory, our brains know that if information is readily accessible (say, the list of presidents of the US), then it doesn't need to memorize it, instead retaining the key parts (we've had somewhere around 40 presidents, that Washington was the first, Obama is the current, etc.) It's actually kind of like how the caches work in your computer - retaining the most important and most used information and letting it take a while to find obscure information.
This also explains the phenomenon of instant internet asshat punditry. Because it's so easy to locate specific dates on the internet (the Battle of Manzikert was when?) that critics on Slashdot and elsewhere will criticize someone for getting the date off by a couple years because they pulled it out of their grey matter (i.e. they're actually experts on the subject) because they 'know' better because they looked it up on Wikipedia. So they think the actual expert is stupid, because the asshat 'knows better', though in reality he doesn't have usually get the context or relevance of the raw facts he pulls from wikipedia. Case in point: go back through the archives and look at the threads on here relating to the BP oil spill disaster. You'll see instant experts claiming that "BP should have know better than to put blowout preventers using blah blah blah" when if you'd gone to all that people posting in the thread a week before and asked them in person if they knew what a blowout preventer was, the percentage would be pretty close to zero./. is a pretty highly educated group of folks - I'm sure there are some people that have studied them just 'cause - but certainly not in the numbers that were chiming in here with their opinions after the accident. (Captain Hindsight and all that.)
>>>>I liked Shaun of the Dead, and will play Left 4 Dead, but they're zombies, so it's okay. >>neither one of those are horror.
Well. Comedic horror in the first case, and survival horror in the latter.
I'd say Dead Space is horror, too, even though it is space horror, though I don't like it very much. As I said, I don't really enjoy watching horrible things happen to people.
Oddly enough, the experience is very different from playing Quake or WoW PVP, in which the most horrific thing that can happen to you is getting teabagged by some asshat.
"...of children â" I kid you not â" having their facial skin peeled away"
I see what you did there.
But seriously... there's a lot of people that hate horror movies and video games, myself included, with a few exceptions.
I liked Shaun of the Dead, and will play Left 4 Dead, but they're zombies, so it's okay. But I won't play Silent Hill or Watch the Hills Have Eyes. I have better things to do with my life than watch horrible things happen to people.
Please don't lump NIMBYs and anti-technology enviro-nut groups in with environmentalists.
I think the word "environmentalist" might be beyond salvaging these days
They get lumped in if they sue under environmental protection laws, and win.
You're right the term is meaningless, though. It paints such a wide paintbrush that nobody except a specific subset of people (i.e. Greens) tend to label themselves environmentalists.
Hell, I love the environment. I'll volunteer to pick up litter, go backpacking, etc. But I'd never call myself an environmentalist, even though it's technically true. Like feminist, the word carries a lot more baggage than its simple meaning. (Yes, I want equal rights for women. No, I don't think opening a door for someone is patronizing.)
BP will keep any compensation claims in court until a more favorable (READ: Republican) administration is in office to sweep the whole thing away (note I said away, it's already been swept under the rug, or the ocean as it were). If you don't like it, stop voting Republican. Jeez, they've come out & publicly said they want to dismantle the EPA...
To be fair, the way our environmental law works in America right now, EPA included, is horribly flawed.
Its original mission was to stop the kinds of stuff that *everyone*, right- and left-wing both, can agree is bad: dumping waste into public water systems, belching smoke next to a school, and so forth.
The modern environmentalist movement has moved on from there to basically banning any and all projects, everywhere, if it impacts the environment in the slightest. Some ripe examples of environmentalist hypocrisy: 1) Building a wind farm in upstate Virginia? Some lawyers who owned a vacation farm there (and had *fought* NIMBYs before for companies) sued and got construction blocked. 2) Building an offshore wind farm? Teddy Kennedy,Mr. 90% voting rating by environmental groups, sues to have it blocked. 3) Building a massive solar project in the Mojave desert? Sierra Club sues to have it blocked. 4) Building a new interstate in North Carolina? 10 river snails found in a new branch of a river mean the project has to be rerouted at a cost of billions of dollars and with X tons of extra pollution going into the atmosphere every day from all the extra car-miles being driven, let alone the extra time on the commute. 5) The California High Speed Rail system, which has the support of environmentalists, is currently slogging through its three year and multibillion dollar environmental impact report. They've already been threatened to be sued by environmentalists for going through Pacheco Pass. (And if they went through Altamont? They'd be sued, too.)
Etc., etc.
The arguments always made by these duplicitous bastards is that, "Well, we aren't against X (Wind power, solar, etc.), we're just against it here." And if the place isn't 100% perfect, the judge will agree, and it'll get moved elsewhere, at which point the project gets sued again, and it gets delayed and moved again, and so forth.
One editor put it exceptionally well: You look at all of these developments that environmentalists love - canal walks by DC, highways leading to trail heads in the Sierras, and so forth. And then you realize that all of these things would be impossible to build today. We're so screwed up in our modern society that we could never do another Erie Canal, or a Hoover Dam, or the Interstate System. It's impossible.
So something needs to change. I wouldn't say that banning the EPA is the right way of going about it, but limiting and restricting the EPA to deal simply with actual sources of pollution, would be a very good thing. So they would no longer be an unelected and unaccountable limiter on construction in the US. Revising the Endangered Species Act to eliminate its abuses would be an excellent accompaniment.
More importantly though, we need reform for environmental lawsuits. Perhaps for every major project, a tribunal of judges could be set up to hold all hearings in a unified and systemic fashion. So lawsuits can no longer bounce projects around the countryside, and so that projects no longer require themselves to be perfect to be allowed to go forward, but merely the best option among several choices. And their default behavior should be to allow the project to proceed.
>>It was just a matter of time before someone invoked Godwin.
My smartphone tried to autocorrect Hitler to "Butler". Really, Android? You can't say Hitler? How the hell are we supposed to communicate on the internet if we can't accuse someone of being a maximum?
I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but given that you just reposted the same agreed you said before, but without the "US HAD DEATH CAMPS" screed, kind of puts paid to the notion you're speaking truth to power.
More like, you're someone who nerved paid attention in history class, but heard someone ranting about "death camps" at the last 9/11 truther meeting you went to.
You were rightly modded troll, because you didn't know what you were talking about.
Weren't we talking WW2? Hitler ordered restraint against the Brits until he was enraged by them blowing up a school full of orphans or something like that by accident.
We did a lot of nuke and miltech stuff, especially during the Vietnam War era. I didn't get to do much cool stuff when I was there, just an interference resistant videoconferencing system for soldiers in the field, and some work with severed rabbit hearts kept alive and beating in a vitrious solution...
The Red Shoe was apparently the 4th sign of the Apocalypse, and the Stuart Art collection is rumoured to have another piece as well, though gazing upon it is rumoured to induce permanent insanity.
Sounds great, thanks for the tip!:) All too often everything is depicted really black-and-white, with the "good" guys being stainless, righteous, wonderful and adorable beings and the "bad" guys as loathsome bastards with no morals or regard for anyone but themselves. That is actually part of the reason I liked the Watchmen movie too: the "good" guys themselves are quite loathsome and easy to dislike and thus sets quite a different tone for the whole movie. I actually really hope for more movies and books like that.
Yeah. The Comedian was especially repulsive, yet oddly compelling in his own way.
In the Banewreaker series, the "bad guys" are sympathetic, but they're hardly perfect, or ethical paragons. Actually, the only people on Team Evil that are relatively blameless are the orc- or troll-analogues, who are sort of a tribal people that have a tradition of art, etc., but have been driven out by the "good races" around the world, with only the Sauron-analogue sympathizing with them and giving them a place to live.
Anyhow, send me a message some time and tell me what you think of it. Even among my friends that read a lot of fantasy novels, not many people have heard of it, but I think it is exceptionally well done.
>>The WW2 allies were hardly virtuous, what with fire-bombing of innocent civilians
It's not that simple.
Hamburg, for example, was partly in retaliation for Coventry earlier in the war. But Hitler only took the gloves off and started targeting civilians after the RAF started dropping bombs on German civilians. Why did the RAF target civilians, when the (evil) Nazis were refraining? Because the Luftwaffe had radar navigation, but the RAF thought they had the skill to astronavigate accurately enough to put bombs onto military targets. They didn't.
Then you could get into the whole Battle of the Beams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams), and whether it was ethical to redirect German bombers onto English farmhouses...
>>throwing minority Americans into death camps for the crime of having german/japanese grandparents
I don't think you know what the words "death camps" actually mean.
If y'all are interested in this kind of fiction, Jacqueline Carey did a really good duology on it in her Banewreaker series.
She's mostly known for steamy fantasy/romance novels (the Kushiel series), but she does a very good take on a LOTR-analogue world in which the Sauron equivalent is shown as the good guys. Or not good guys, precisely, but as more or less a guy wanting to be left alone, with the Gandalf-equivalent instigating the "good" races to destroy him in his Mordorish fortress. You really end up hating the good guys by the end of the series. =)
Irresponsible? FFS, I just want to be able to listen to music I bought on my laptop while on the road with my PC. And not have to pull out my laptop, boot it up, and copy the file. I do realize it's hardly an insurmountable problem, but since we can only buy a license to listen to music for one person, that license should extend by default to all machines I have authorized
And yeah. It should allow me to redownload videos I've bought and deleted to free up space. Why not? They have to maintain a copy of the files, so why should I?
For executives who spend most of their work-day running from meeting to meeting, the boons of constant connectivity, super-portability, and a large screen for reviewing metrics are a huge win.
I work at a major tech company. While the vast majority of the employees have no business using an iPad for anything other than iPad development, it's a staple among execs. It slips in a brief-case, can display large pretty charts/email/calendars, provides a better interface than a blackberry or iphone for answering emails, is pretty much instant-on, has 3G so they can use it on the road, and it can be passed around at a formal or informal meeting in a way that a laptop really can't.
I don't own one, but I understand why these people do. I also understand why other non-execs at my work have them; it pays to resemble the boss.
The other killer app that I don't think is fully realized is medical services. Nurses/doctors spend large chunks of the day going from patient to patient, reviewing files, and looking up symptoms. The last four doctor's offices I've visited have all had computers in the room for the practitioner to look stuff up on, and every single one of them does so. None of what they do couldn't be handled just as easily on an iPad, and the aforementioned portability/constant connectivity would be super-useful.
Yeah, I was an iPad doubter when it came out (and still haven't bought one, or any tablet for that matter - I agree with TFA that they're too expensive), but I've seen a few killer applications for them:
1) Travel. I carry my laptop on planes, but it's so much of a pain to get them out, cram them into the minuscule space you get in economy, and put them away 30 minutes before landing that I usually just pull out a book and read the whole flight. (Not to mention on longer flights my laptop will run out of juice.) But an iPad is well suited for that use. Click it on, click it off, and plenty of space to go around.
2) Education. Currently, schools use netbooks at a lot of sites, which gives them enough of a charge to last a whole school day, but at middle and high schools, the time spent booting up, shutting down, etc., cuts into the amount of time you can spend doing stuff during a class period. Additionally, things like iPads autosync with iTunes every night, so they essentially wipe and reformat automatically, meaning your machines can be modified by kids during the day (though you keep the marketplace shut down) and then reset to a pristine state at night. It also allows pushing updates to the machines to be done very easily. With PCs, you have to buy expensive software to do the same thing.
3) Notepads. When I am in a meeting, I tend to just take notes by hand, or punch it into my smartphone. iPads work better at this. Again, much faster than pulling out a laptop and booting it up to take a couple lines worth of notes, but faster than a smartphone, and more readable and persistent than a physical notepad.
4) RPGs. They're great for pen and paper RPGs. You can use a digital character sheet interactively, and can pull up your (totally legal) PDFs of the rule books if you want to look it up. Whenever WOTC gets its act together, they'll allow the iPad to do character creation, treasure and reward tracking, and virtual tabletop gaming as well.
The downside, of course, is that they're expensive, and that it's one more toy you have to lug around. I haven't found any of the above compelling enough for my own use, but if our iPad-in-education project goes through, I'll probably have to get into it, as I'm supposed to be the technology guru. =)
But what really pisses me off about the *.A.As is the double standard bullshit they try to pull. They say "oh you didn't buy the (insert movie/game/CD) you bought a license to use it!" (and thus getting around first sale). Okay, I'll play. That means I get to replace it for free if anything happens to the media, right? After all I already have a license to use it? "Oh no" they say "You bought a copy thus you have to go buy a replacement!"
This is a tremendous problem these days, and will require a law to fix: "The doctrine of first sale is held inviolate." Alternatively or additionally: "If you license a digital product, you must provide reasonable means to replace it if a copy is lost."
Itunes, I'm looking at you. Why the fuck can I not download an album I bought off iTunes on both my laptop and PC? Why the fuck do you make me throw it onto a USB drive and copy it manually? It's not like you don't restrict me to five computers anyway. Be more like Steam.
But, unfortunately, both the Republicans and Democrats show not the slightest interest in fixing it.
>>We do realize that national security "jobs" do not produce anything, don't we?
Amen. It's not a "growth area" in the economic sense of the word when the government expands the jobs it is hiring for. Those are illusory jobs, that will vanish when the government funding dries up.
People (especially those in Wisconsin) need to realize that government funded jobs are not the solution to our current unemployment crisis.
>>Only twats as self-important as they obviously are could write this sort of thing and not even realize what they're saying
They? It was probably one person that wrote this, hoping to get people to sign on to his crusade against the "Love Crusade" (which is one of the worst-named movements in history for an anti-homosexual group).
When people say "if you chop down one anon, another will take his place"... well... who wrote this screed?
No, no, but seriously. Stalin purged so many of his own people in the 30s and 40s that it was by sheer coincidence they still had Zhukov left around to handle Stalingrad.
>>They were members in good standing with the party until Khrushchev won his struggle against Malenkov for leadership of the party in 1955.
>>Solar thermal is too close for comfort, it's in the same order of magnitude now in cost/Watt and a few advances can easily tip the scale.
Order of Magnitude means within a 10x cost differential. This isn't especially encouraging. =)
Looking at the California Energy Commission's cost estimates, a new nuclear plant will have a levelized cost of 11c/KWH, whereas solar (in its various forms) is 36c to 98c per KWH without subsidies.
Whilst nuclear power is certainly something I support, I don't think you can call it a "green energy". There's the unsolved waste issue and in its current non-fusion form it isn't particularly sustainable either, using one of the earth's rarest naturally occurring elements as fuel.
Also you mention subsidies, nuclear power wouldn't be around if it wasn't for trillions of dollars in subsidies.
1) The waste issue would go away if we built out burner reactors. It's entirely a political invention.
2) There's plenty of proven reserves of fissionables to last at least 100 years, if not more.
3) Trillions of dollars of subsidies? This is where having actual numbers is very valuable. The percentage subsidy rate on nuclear is lower than any other green technology. I posted a chart of the subsidy rates on here a week or two ago - you can use the search function to locate it.
>>If you kill enough people you have, for a little while, more stuff per head to distribute to the remainder.
Are you honestly arguing for the ethical nature of the Khmer Rouge?
In any event, their attempt to get back to basics and revert to a simple agricultural society was a complete and unmitigated disaster, with a half million or so of their people dying of starvation.
Slashdot Mirror
>>But where are the Julian Assange contraceptives? ;)
"Courage is Contagious" (http://wikileaks.spreadshirt.com/courage-is-contagious-A7070351/customize/color/294)
Yes, and so is syphilis!
There's your contraceptive. On top of looking like a giant wanker for wearing one of these atrocities.
Perfect pitch is quite rare in Westerners. Mozart was considered special (in part) because he had it and could name the notes in church bells.
But in China, which uses a tone-based language, 1 out of 10 people have perfect pitch. And this isn't true in other Asian countries that don't use tone. So it certainly is not just an innate skill that some people have.
Personally, I find brains to be fascinating things, with a lot of really interesting facilities. Once you've trained with a device long enough (a car, a waldo, whatever) your brain will actually incorporate it into your automatic actions as if it was part of the body, offloading the work from the neocortex, meaning you can do it smoothly and without needing to think through it. It's also why people tend to flinch when people hit their cars.
In the case of memory, our brains know that if information is readily accessible (say, the list of presidents of the US), then it doesn't need to memorize it, instead retaining the key parts (we've had somewhere around 40 presidents, that Washington was the first, Obama is the current, etc.) It's actually kind of like how the caches work in your computer - retaining the most important and most used information and letting it take a while to find obscure information.
This also explains the phenomenon of instant internet asshat punditry. Because it's so easy to locate specific dates on the internet (the Battle of Manzikert was when?) that critics on Slashdot and elsewhere will criticize someone for getting the date off by a couple years because they pulled it out of their grey matter (i.e. they're actually experts on the subject) because they 'know' better because they looked it up on Wikipedia. So they think the actual expert is stupid, because the asshat 'knows better', though in reality he doesn't have usually get the context or relevance of the raw facts he pulls from wikipedia. Case in point: go back through the archives and look at the threads on here relating to the BP oil spill disaster. You'll see instant experts claiming that "BP should have know better than to put blowout preventers using blah blah blah" when if you'd gone to all that people posting in the thread a week before and asked them in person if they knew what a blowout preventer was, the percentage would be pretty close to zero. /. is a pretty highly educated group of folks - I'm sure there are some people that have studied them just 'cause - but certainly not in the numbers that were chiming in here with their opinions after the accident. (Captain Hindsight and all that.)
>>>>I liked Shaun of the Dead, and will play Left 4 Dead, but they're zombies, so it's okay.
>>neither one of those are horror.
Well. Comedic horror in the first case, and survival horror in the latter.
I'd say Dead Space is horror, too, even though it is space horror, though I don't like it very much. As I said, I don't really enjoy watching horrible things happen to people.
Oddly enough, the experience is very different from playing Quake or WoW PVP, in which the most horrific thing that can happen to you is getting teabagged by some asshat.
"...of children â" I kid you not â" having their facial skin peeled away"
I see what you did there.
But seriously... there's a lot of people that hate horror movies and video games, myself included, with a few exceptions.
I liked Shaun of the Dead, and will play Left 4 Dead, but they're zombies, so it's okay. But I won't play Silent Hill or Watch the Hills Have Eyes. I have better things to do with my life than watch horrible things happen to people.
They get lumped in if they sue under environmental protection laws, and win.
You're right the term is meaningless, though. It paints such a wide paintbrush that nobody except a specific subset of people (i.e. Greens) tend to label themselves environmentalists.
Hell, I love the environment. I'll volunteer to pick up litter, go backpacking, etc. But I'd never call myself an environmentalist, even though it's technically true. Like feminist, the word carries a lot more baggage than its simple meaning. (Yes, I want equal rights for women. No, I don't think opening a door for someone is patronizing.)
To be fair, the way our environmental law works in America right now, EPA included, is horribly flawed.
Its original mission was to stop the kinds of stuff that *everyone*, right- and left-wing both, can agree is bad: dumping waste into public water systems, belching smoke next to a school, and so forth.
The modern environmentalist movement has moved on from there to basically banning any and all projects, everywhere, if it impacts the environment in the slightest. Some ripe examples of environmentalist hypocrisy:
1) Building a wind farm in upstate Virginia? Some lawyers who owned a vacation farm there (and had *fought* NIMBYs before for companies) sued and got construction blocked.
2) Building an offshore wind farm? Teddy Kennedy,Mr. 90% voting rating by environmental groups, sues to have it blocked.
3) Building a massive solar project in the Mojave desert? Sierra Club sues to have it blocked.
4) Building a new interstate in North Carolina? 10 river snails found in a new branch of a river mean the project has to be rerouted at a cost of billions of dollars and with X tons of extra pollution going into the atmosphere every day from all the extra car-miles being driven, let alone the extra time on the commute.
5) The California High Speed Rail system, which has the support of environmentalists, is currently slogging through its three year and multibillion dollar environmental impact report. They've already been threatened to be sued by environmentalists for going through Pacheco Pass. (And if they went through Altamont? They'd be sued, too.)
Etc., etc.
The arguments always made by these duplicitous bastards is that, "Well, we aren't against X (Wind power, solar, etc.), we're just against it here." And if the place isn't 100% perfect, the judge will agree, and it'll get moved elsewhere, at which point the project gets sued again, and it gets delayed and moved again, and so forth.
One editor put it exceptionally well: You look at all of these developments that environmentalists love - canal walks by DC, highways leading to trail heads in the Sierras, and so forth. And then you realize that all of these things would be impossible to build today. We're so screwed up in our modern society that we could never do another Erie Canal, or a Hoover Dam, or the Interstate System. It's impossible.
So something needs to change. I wouldn't say that banning the EPA is the right way of going about it, but limiting and restricting the EPA to deal simply with actual sources of pollution, would be a very good thing. So they would no longer be an unelected and unaccountable limiter on construction in the US. Revising the Endangered Species Act to eliminate its abuses would be an excellent accompaniment.
More importantly though, we need reform for environmental lawsuits. Perhaps for every major project, a tribunal of judges could be set up to hold all hearings in a unified and systemic fashion. So lawsuits can no longer bounce projects around the countryside, and so that projects no longer require themselves to be perfect to be allowed to go forward, but merely the best option among several choices. And their default behavior should be to allow the project to proceed.
>>It was just a matter of time before someone invoked Godwin.
My smartphone tried to autocorrect Hitler to "Butler". Really, Android? You can't say Hitler? How the hell are we supposed to communicate on the internet if we can't accuse someone of being a maximum?
I liked Santa Olivia, but I'd have liked it more if I was a boxing fan.
I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but given that you just reposted the same agreed you said before, but without the "US HAD DEATH CAMPS" screed, kind of puts paid to the notion you're speaking truth to power.
More like, you're someone who nerved paid attention in history class, but heard someone ranting about "death camps" at the last 9/11 truther meeting you went to.
You were rightly modded troll, because you didn't know what you were talking about.
Weren't we talking WW2? Hitler ordered restraint against the Brits until he was enraged by them blowing up a school full of orphans or something like that by accident.
Woot, go UCSD!
Ushering in the apocalypse since 1960!
We did a lot of nuke and miltech stuff, especially during the Vietnam War era. I didn't get to do much cool stuff when I was there, just an interference resistant videoconferencing system for soldiers in the field, and some work with severed rabbit hearts kept alive and beating in a vitrious solution...
The Red Shoe was apparently the 4th sign of the Apocalypse, and the Stuart Art collection is rumoured to have another piece as well, though gazing upon it is rumoured to induce permanent insanity.
Yeah. The Comedian was especially repulsive, yet oddly compelling in his own way.
In the Banewreaker series, the "bad guys" are sympathetic, but they're hardly perfect, or ethical paragons. Actually, the only people on Team Evil that are relatively blameless are the orc- or troll-analogues, who are sort of a tribal people that have a tradition of art, etc., but have been driven out by the "good races" around the world, with only the Sauron-analogue sympathizing with them and giving them a place to live.
Anyhow, send me a message some time and tell me what you think of it. Even among my friends that read a lot of fantasy novels, not many people have heard of it, but I think it is exceptionally well done.
>>The WW2 allies were hardly virtuous, what with fire-bombing of innocent civilians
It's not that simple.
Hamburg, for example, was partly in retaliation for Coventry earlier in the war. But Hitler only took the gloves off and started targeting civilians after the RAF started dropping bombs on German civilians. Why did the RAF target civilians, when the (evil) Nazis were refraining? Because the Luftwaffe had radar navigation, but the RAF thought they had the skill to astronavigate accurately enough to put bombs onto military targets. They didn't.
Then you could get into the whole Battle of the Beams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams), and whether it was ethical to redirect German bombers onto English farmhouses...
>>throwing minority Americans into death camps for the crime of having german/japanese grandparents
I don't think you know what the words "death camps" actually mean.
If y'all are interested in this kind of fiction, Jacqueline Carey did a really good duology on it in her Banewreaker series.
She's mostly known for steamy fantasy/romance novels (the Kushiel series), but she does a very good take on a LOTR-analogue world in which the Sauron equivalent is shown as the good guys. Or not good guys, precisely, but as more or less a guy wanting to be left alone, with the Gandalf-equivalent instigating the "good" races to destroy him in his Mordorish fortress. You really end up hating the good guys by the end of the series. =)
I highly recommend it.
http://www.amazon.com/Banewreaker-Sundering-Book-Jacqueline-Carey/dp/0765305216
Irresponsible? FFS, I just want to be able to listen to music I bought on my laptop while on the road with my PC. And not have to pull out my laptop, boot it up, and copy the file. I do realize it's hardly an insurmountable problem, but since we can only buy a license to listen to music for one person, that license should extend by default to all machines I have authorized
And yeah. It should allow me to redownload videos I've bought and deleted to free up space. Why not? They have to maintain a copy of the files, so why should I?
Yeah, I was an iPad doubter when it came out (and still haven't bought one, or any tablet for that matter - I agree with TFA that they're too expensive), but I've seen a few killer applications for them:
1) Travel. I carry my laptop on planes, but it's so much of a pain to get them out, cram them into the minuscule space you get in economy, and put them away 30 minutes before landing that I usually just pull out a book and read the whole flight. (Not to mention on longer flights my laptop will run out of juice.) But an iPad is well suited for that use. Click it on, click it off, and plenty of space to go around.
2) Education. Currently, schools use netbooks at a lot of sites, which gives them enough of a charge to last a whole school day, but at middle and high schools, the time spent booting up, shutting down, etc., cuts into the amount of time you can spend doing stuff during a class period. Additionally, things like iPads autosync with iTunes every night, so they essentially wipe and reformat automatically, meaning your machines can be modified by kids during the day (though you keep the marketplace shut down) and then reset to a pristine state at night. It also allows pushing updates to the machines to be done very easily. With PCs, you have to buy expensive software to do the same thing.
3) Notepads. When I am in a meeting, I tend to just take notes by hand, or punch it into my smartphone. iPads work better at this. Again, much faster than pulling out a laptop and booting it up to take a couple lines worth of notes, but faster than a smartphone, and more readable and persistent than a physical notepad.
4) RPGs. They're great for pen and paper RPGs. You can use a digital character sheet interactively, and can pull up your (totally legal) PDFs of the rule books if you want to look it up. Whenever WOTC gets its act together, they'll allow the iPad to do character creation, treasure and reward tracking, and virtual tabletop gaming as well.
The downside, of course, is that they're expensive, and that it's one more toy you have to lug around. I haven't found any of the above compelling enough for my own use, but if our iPad-in-education project goes through, I'll probably have to get into it, as I'm supposed to be the technology guru. =)
>>The locks on your house do not protect it from you. DRM does protect your media from you.
You must never have locked yourself out of your house or car...
This is a tremendous problem these days, and will require a law to fix: "The doctrine of first sale is held inviolate." Alternatively or additionally: "If you license a digital product, you must provide reasonable means to replace it if a copy is lost."
Itunes, I'm looking at you. Why the fuck can I not download an album I bought off iTunes on both my laptop and PC? Why the fuck do you make me throw it onto a USB drive and copy it manually? It's not like you don't restrict me to five computers anyway. Be more like Steam.
But, unfortunately, both the Republicans and Democrats show not the slightest interest in fixing it.
>>We do realize that national security "jobs" do not produce anything, don't we?
Amen. It's not a "growth area" in the economic sense of the word when the government expands the jobs it is hiring for. Those are illusory jobs, that will vanish when the government funding dries up.
People (especially those in Wisconsin) need to realize that government funded jobs are not the solution to our current unemployment crisis.
>>Only twats as self-important as they obviously are could write this sort of thing and not even realize what they're saying
They? It was probably one person that wrote this, hoping to get people to sign on to his crusade against the "Love Crusade" (which is one of the worst-named movements in history for an anti-homosexual group).
When people say "if you chop down one anon, another will take his place"... well... who wrote this screed?
>>Stalinists weren't purged in the 1940's.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Oh, comrade. You kill me!
No, no, but seriously. Stalin purged so many of his own people in the 30s and 40s that it was by sheer coincidence they still had Zhukov left around to handle Stalingrad.
>>They were members in good standing with the party until Khrushchev won his struggle against Malenkov for leadership of the party in 1955.
True loyalists and members in good standing were purged as well. Even the guy who ran the Great Purge got purged in 1940 by Stalin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov#Fall_from_power
Unless you believe that the free and free-to-edit-by-the-masses wikipedia is a product of capitalist pig dogs, comrade.
>>Better than cutting off their power altogether unless they're incredibly rich, smartarse.
We'd only run out of power entirely... if the Greens take over.
It also sounds to me like you don't even know the difference between oil and coal, dumbarse.
>>Solar thermal is too close for comfort, it's in the same order of magnitude now in cost/Watt and a few advances can easily tip the scale.
Order of Magnitude means within a 10x cost differential. This isn't especially encouraging. =)
Looking at the California Energy Commission's cost estimates, a new nuclear plant will have a levelized cost of 11c/KWH, whereas solar (in its various forms) is 36c to 98c per KWH without subsidies.
1) The waste issue would go away if we built out burner reactors. It's entirely a political invention.
2) There's plenty of proven reserves of fissionables to last at least 100 years, if not more.
3) Trillions of dollars of subsidies? This is where having actual numbers is very valuable. The percentage subsidy rate on nuclear is lower than any other green technology. I posted a chart of the subsidy rates on here a week or two ago - you can use the search function to locate it.
>>If you kill enough people you have, for a little while, more stuff per head to distribute to the remainder.
Are you honestly arguing for the ethical nature of the Khmer Rouge?
In any event, their attempt to get back to basics and revert to a simple agricultural society was a complete and unmitigated disaster, with a half million or so of their people dying of starvation.