Starship Troopers and some of the other Heinlein are definitely darker and more political than I remember...
Now that you mention it, Heinlein is pretty dark in almost everything he wrote. Why does that make him unsuitable for teenagers? Adolescence can be pretty dark: you're going through a lot of changes, you spend a lot of time defining and experimenting with your identity, you self image is on a roller coaster. And last but certainly not least, you've just entered that emotional minefield commonly known as Sex.
I can't think of an SF writer better able to connect with teenagers than Heinlein. The political rants in books like Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress may make some adults tear their hair out, but it's just the thing when you're 15 and want to know How to Fix Things. Actually, adolescence is the best time to enjoy Heinlein, before you get all sophisticated and impatient with his unnuanced view of life.
That said, I'd avoid anything he wrote from 1970 (I will Fear No Evil) on. This is when he got all experimental, and also started ignoring his editors. (Judging from the typos in the first edition of Time Enough For Love, he probably tried dispensing with them altogether!) The result is a lot of rambing, bloated work that is guaranteed to bore anybody who's not already a fan — and many who are.
Have you traveled recently? Airline tickets are through the roof, and passengers comfort is nonexistent.
As a matter of fact, I'm waiting to join a teleconference as I type this, and really would like something more interactive than what the simple conference call service my company uses.
That said, I agree that "immersive interaction" is a really dumb model for remote interaction, at least at the current state of the art. All that 3D graphics is a strain for most hardware, and interaction is way too complicated.
Sure, and while they're at it, let's give all the mechanics just one size of wrench and screwdriver.
Mechanics don't create machines, they just fix them. They don't have any control over what kind of screws and nuts they work with. You're really talking about hardware engineers, not mechanics.
Machines do need to have more than one size screw and nut. But suppose you have a big machine designed by a bunch of different engineers, each of which has their own fanatical view about what size screw is "best". Or similar opinions about metric versus SAE versus BA versus Whitworth threading. And about Phillips head versus Frearson, BNAE, hex or TORX. Let's not even get into the issue of screws versus other kinds of fastners....
Fortunately, hardware engineers don't suffer from that kind of fanaticism. When some piece of hardware gets designed, somebody says, "we're only going to use metric Phillips screws" and everybody goes along. But when the equivalent suggestion comes up in a software context, rugged individualists like you whine that it's a "gross misunderstanding of the process".
Frankly, you're the one who doesn't understand the process. Beyond the particular pieces of code that you own, most software is a big honking entity consisting of thousands of pieces that have to fit together. When all the pieces are designed according to each engineers personal whims, you end up with a lot of pieces that don't fit together, and the application as a whole is crap.
Just keep in mind, there's nothing stopping web developers from using straight HTML, CSS, JPG, PNG and GIF for basic animation.
And what if they want something fancier than "basic animation"?
Flash no more "subverts" the web than Photoshop "subverts" image processing,
Apples and oranges. Images created in Photoshop don't need any special software to view. Content created in Flash does.
... or the GPL subverts how software is published.
On the contrary, GPL is meant to subvert proprietary software publishing. The difference is that the subversion is deliberate, and meant to open things up, as opposed to the closing off that Flash, which shuts things off, but only as a kind of side effect.
This is rather an old story. Back in 1995, back when Netscape was the biggest operator in a competitive browser market, they took a lot of flack for introducing non-standard features into HTML. And they didn't do it to "close off the market", they did it because they wanted to create web applications that weren't supported by existing standards, and weren't going to wait for W3C to bring the standards up to date.
Then we went through the whole thing all over with Microsoft and Internet Explorer. And because MS really was trying to control the marketplace, everybody ignored the role W3C was playing. And still plays.
Once management starts treating all programmers as interchangeable is the day that all things start going to hell. Programmers are not interchangeable, and all languages are not interchangeable.
Maybe not, but there has to be some standardization. If every programmer is allowed to do things their own way, you end up with a code hodgepodge that's unmaintainable.
Mild example: I knew a guy once who had a weird thing for Javascript. He had found an engine that allowed him to run it outside a browser, and he used it for everything. (Ironically, he had no occasion to use it for a web application!) He even used it to write an RTF parser. Never mind that Microsoft supplies very nice libraries with all the parsing built in, he had to hand-code his own. The result was temperamental, consumed vast amounts of maintenanced and didn't support many RTF features. But he was insanely loyal to it, and resisted switching to a more common scripting language to the bitter end.
Another co-worker at my current company wrote a bunch of tools that we still use a lot. Basically, he wrote them in Perl. Except Perl wasn't expressive enough for him, so he wrote his very own preprocessor. And it's a beautiful piece of work, his Perl code is very concise. (Brilliant guy, really.) But he never documented the thing, and he doesn't work here any more, so if any of his tools need maintenance, we are SOOL.
Programmers need to get over the idea that they can do every little thing their own way. Your employer's role is not to provide you with a playground for you to do things the way you want. The company needs to sell stuff, and has hired you to make that stuff. Yes, it's a creative job, and you need some leeway. But if there are no rules or standards at all, then everybody's working at cross-purposes and nothing useful gets done.
I've worked at software companies where this was the case. Very unsatisfying places to work because at the end of the day, you really had nothing to show. Plus you spent all day battle everybody's ego trip. That's my idea of workplace hell.
Read that Humane Society survey a little more carefully. It doesn't say "56% of dogs and 71% of cats are euthanized." It says those figure were reported by 100 animal shelters that answered the survey. That's not a lot: 2 per state. I don't know how many animals shelters there are, but animal control is usually a county function, and there are 30,000 counties in the U.S. Some small counties probably have joint operations, so lets say 20,000 shelters. So you have a sample that's self-selected (and you can bet shelters that were ashamed of their kill rate didn't answer the survey) and constitutes 0.5% of all the shelters in the country.
So, that highly unscientific sample has 25% of shelter animals adopted. The PETA shelter claims 12%. That's proof that they're not trying to place animals. Right.
As for this:
Take a look back at my first link, the 2006 line. Out of over 3000 animals, 12 were adopted. Twelve. The year prior, 2005, showed that 146 were adopted. What changed in the course of one year?
Gee, I dunno. Neither do you. Did you happen to notice that at the same time their adoption rate went down, their transfer-out rate went up? Their overall statistics do suck for the last three years (relatively speaking, since all the statistics we're arguing about are pretty nauseating), but there are other explanations besides an anti-animal jihad. Budgets cutbacks? Inept management? Possibly PETA is just screwing up (I never said they were smart), but the dark conspiracy petakillsanimals.org is ranting about is imaginary.
Having dispensed with your statistical fallacies, let's look at your moral fallacy:
What have I done? I certainly haven't killed any animals.
So, your claim to moral superiority is based on what you haven't done. You haven't killed any animals. So you're a moral step ahead of anybody who's ever worked in an animals shelter. Right.
The people who run the PETA shelter maybe, maybe are doing a lousy job of placing animals for adoption. You haven't proven that they have, but lets just say they are. They still managed to place 3,000 animals over 10 years. How many have you placed? What have you done except obtain a fancy dog? Which, I'm guessing, you got from a breeder, not a shelter.
Do the people that make laws have absolutely ANY idea how the internet works and is used?
First of all, nobody's making a law here. This is a grand jury (12 ordinary people) getting persuaded to indict Drew based on a weird legal theory that probably won't stand up in court.
So if this indictment isn't going anywhere, why issue it? Because millions of people are pissed off about the suicide of Megan Meier, which occurred after she was humiliated via that bogus MySpace account. Of course, using an online account to humiliate somebody isn't illegal (if it were, we'd all be accessing Slashdot from jail!), so all this outrage had nowhere to go — until a creative Federal prosecutor came up with this ToS theory. Which, as I said, will probably go nowhere. Lawyers come up with strange legal theories. Judges shoot them down. Happens every day. That's why we have judges.
People need to dial back the outrage. Drew was allegedly pissed at Meier over some stupid teenage thing that happened between Meier and Drew's daughter. Then millions of people got pissed at Drew and demand that she be thrown in jail, never mind what the law says. Now you're pissed at some half-assed legal maneuver whose only really purpose is to appease all the people who are pissed at Drew. Too much pissedness, not enough thinking. Chill out, America!
Dude, you can't buy an NES. That platform is only available in emulation. If the only legal way to play a game is on a Wii ($250 list, actually more on the street, since retailers are using the shortage to force people to buy bundles), and you have no general desire to play Wii games, why should you be forced to buy a Wii to play a game that's worth $5 by itself.
IP owners have a right to a profit, but not to gouge. I think they're beginning to realize that, and not, for example, demand that we pay $70/month for a cable connection just to watch a few shows. If they make a show available online for a reasonable fee, or make a DVD available for sale or rent, I'll pay and not feel ripped off. But if they say no, you gotta subscribe, I have no compunction about downloading an illegal copy. That's a common attitude, and the main reason you can now get many cable shows online.
One nasty example: there's a British TV show called "Life on Mars" I really want to see. (There's going to be an American version; I have zero interest in that.) I've been waiting for years. So far it's only been available on cable — plus, edited down to make room for commercials! Heck with that.
And now I've discovered that it probably never will make it to Region 1 DVD, because U.S. copyright laws have gotten so strict, it would not be feasible to "clear" all the music they use on the show. As soon as I get around to configuring my home route for bittorrent, I am so downloading that sucker.
i.e. = id est = that is e.g. = exempli gratia = for example
I used to make a living typing and copy editing papers for students. When I started doing it, I read the style books and memorized that rule, among many others.
Had one customer, a philosophy grad student, who used "viz." a lot. When I asked him why, he said he could never remember the difference between i.e. and e.g.
Now I'm a technical writer, and and all the technical writer stylebooks say, Don't use Latin abbreviations. Too obscure. Very sensible.
The games in stores are certainly licensed — distributors wouldn't go near them otherwise. I suspect that these games are among those you can't find on download sites.
Either that, or there's not enough money involved to care. Note that you can download the early 2D GTA games for free from the publisher's web site, even though they're also being sold in shrinkwrap.
I too prefer to pay for my software. But if owner doesn't even give me a chance to pay without making me pay for a lot of stuff I don't need, I feel no obligation to refrain from downloading a pirate copy. I shouldn't have to buy a Wii just to play an old C64 game.
Yep, 80%. That's about par for animal shelters in the U.S. Millions of animals get euthanized every year.
And yes, most of them are healthy. That still leaves the problem of where they're supposed to live. Do you know a way to place that many animals with people who will care for them? Or can you come up with the money for to house and feed them?
I don't agree with the way PETA approaches the animal overpopulation problem, but at least they're trying to do something. What have you done?
C64 emulators run on a variety of platforms. Most old gaming platforms have thriving communities of emulator users. Games are readily available online. Technically copyright infringement, but there's not a lot of enforcement, since the software has little or no commercial value.
I'm talking about a system, you're talking about a component. You might as well talk about the Ford Model A still being "made" because you can still get parts for it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing he means U.S. 75. Not a nit worth picking.
Read. The. Fucking. Article. A computer tech only has to be a PI if they are searching a computer for evidence of a crime.
Starship Troopers and some of the other Heinlein are definitely darker and more political than I remember...
Now that you mention it, Heinlein is pretty dark in almost everything he wrote. Why does that make him unsuitable for teenagers? Adolescence can be pretty dark: you're going through a lot of changes, you spend a lot of time defining and experimenting with your identity, you self image is on a roller coaster. And last but certainly not least, you've just entered that emotional minefield commonly known as Sex.
I can't think of an SF writer better able to connect with teenagers than Heinlein. The political rants in books like Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress may make some adults tear their hair out, but it's just the thing when you're 15 and want to know How to Fix Things. Actually, adolescence is the best time to enjoy Heinlein, before you get all sophisticated and impatient with his unnuanced view of life.
That said, I'd avoid anything he wrote from 1970 (I will Fear No Evil) on. This is when he got all experimental, and also started ignoring his editors. (Judging from the typos in the first edition of Time Enough For Love, he probably tried dispensing with them altogether!) The result is a lot of rambing, bloated work that is guaranteed to bore anybody who's not already a fan — and many who are.
Bibliography.
Yeah, and the Republicans are so much better.
When did blogspam from a right wing blog become "news"?
Have you traveled recently? Airline tickets are through the roof, and passengers comfort is nonexistent.
As a matter of fact, I'm waiting to join a teleconference as I type this, and really would like something more interactive than what the simple conference call service my company uses.
That said, I agree that "immersive interaction" is a really dumb model for remote interaction, at least at the current state of the art. All that 3D graphics is a strain for most hardware, and interaction is way too complicated.
Actually, the NASA fuckup was a software issue too.
Sure, and while they're at it, let's give all the mechanics just one size of wrench and screwdriver.
Mechanics don't create machines, they just fix them. They don't have any control over what kind of screws and nuts they work with. You're really talking about hardware engineers, not mechanics.
Machines do need to have more than one size screw and nut. But suppose you have a big machine designed by a bunch of different engineers, each of which has their own fanatical view about what size screw is "best". Or similar opinions about metric versus SAE versus BA versus Whitworth threading. And about Phillips head versus Frearson, BNAE, hex or TORX. Let's not even get into the issue of screws versus other kinds of fastners....
Fortunately, hardware engineers don't suffer from that kind of fanaticism. When some piece of hardware gets designed, somebody says, "we're only going to use metric Phillips screws" and everybody goes along. But when the equivalent suggestion comes up in a software context, rugged individualists like you whine that it's a "gross misunderstanding of the process".
Frankly, you're the one who doesn't understand the process. Beyond the particular pieces of code that you own, most software is a big honking entity consisting of thousands of pieces that have to fit together. When all the pieces are designed according to each engineers personal whims, you end up with a lot of pieces that don't fit together, and the application as a whole is crap.
As, alas, most software is.
Just keep in mind, there's nothing stopping web developers from using straight HTML, CSS, JPG, PNG and GIF for basic animation.
And what if they want something fancier than "basic animation"?
Flash no more "subverts" the web than Photoshop "subverts" image processing,
Apples and oranges. Images created in Photoshop don't need any special software to view. Content created in Flash does.
... or the GPL subverts how software is published.
On the contrary, GPL is meant to subvert proprietary software publishing. The difference is that the subversion is deliberate, and meant to open things up, as opposed to the closing off that Flash, which shuts things off, but only as a kind of side effect.
This is rather an old story. Back in 1995, back when Netscape was the biggest operator in a competitive browser market, they took a lot of flack for introducing non-standard features into HTML. And they didn't do it to "close off the market", they did it because they wanted to create web applications that weren't supported by existing standards, and weren't going to wait for W3C to bring the standards up to date.
Then we went through the whole thing all over with Microsoft and Internet Explorer. And because MS really was trying to control the marketplace, everybody ignored the role W3C was playing. And still plays.
Once management starts treating all programmers as interchangeable is the day that all things start going to hell. Programmers are not interchangeable, and all languages are not interchangeable.
Maybe not, but there has to be some standardization. If every programmer is allowed to do things their own way, you end up with a code hodgepodge that's unmaintainable.
Mild example: I knew a guy once who had a weird thing for Javascript. He had found an engine that allowed him to run it outside a browser, and he used it for everything. (Ironically, he had no occasion to use it for a web application!) He even used it to write an RTF parser. Never mind that Microsoft supplies very nice libraries with all the parsing built in, he had to hand-code his own. The result was temperamental, consumed vast amounts of maintenanced and didn't support many RTF features. But he was insanely loyal to it, and resisted switching to a more common scripting language to the bitter end.
Another co-worker at my current company wrote a bunch of tools that we still use a lot. Basically, he wrote them in Perl. Except Perl wasn't expressive enough for him, so he wrote his very own preprocessor. And it's a beautiful piece of work, his Perl code is very concise. (Brilliant guy, really.) But he never documented the thing, and he doesn't work here any more, so if any of his tools need maintenance, we are SOOL.
Programmers need to get over the idea that they can do every little thing their own way. Your employer's role is not to provide you with a playground for you to do things the way you want. The company needs to sell stuff, and has hired you to make that stuff. Yes, it's a creative job, and you need some leeway. But if there are no rules or standards at all, then everybody's working at cross-purposes and nothing useful gets done.
I've worked at software companies where this was the case. Very unsatisfying places to work because at the end of the day, you really had nothing to show. Plus you spent all day battle everybody's ego trip. That's my idea of workplace hell.
Gad, did I say 30,000 counties? Try 3,000. So maybe 1 in 20 shelters responded. That's a better size sample than I said, but it's still self selected.
Read that Humane Society survey a little more carefully. It doesn't say "56% of dogs and 71% of cats are euthanized." It says those figure were reported by 100 animal shelters that answered the survey. That's not a lot: 2 per state. I don't know how many animals shelters there are, but animal control is usually a county function, and there are 30,000 counties in the U.S. Some small counties probably have joint operations, so lets say 20,000 shelters. So you have a sample that's self-selected (and you can bet shelters that were ashamed of their kill rate didn't answer the survey) and constitutes 0.5% of all the shelters in the country.
So, that highly unscientific sample has 25% of shelter animals adopted. The PETA shelter claims 12%. That's proof that they're not trying to place animals. Right.
As for this:
Take a look back at my first link, the 2006 line. Out of over 3000 animals, 12 were adopted. Twelve. The year prior, 2005, showed that 146 were adopted. What changed in the course of one year?
Gee, I dunno. Neither do you. Did you happen to notice that at the same time their adoption rate went down, their transfer-out rate went up? Their overall statistics do suck for the last three years (relatively speaking, since all the statistics we're arguing about are pretty nauseating), but there are other explanations besides an anti-animal jihad. Budgets cutbacks? Inept management? Possibly PETA is just screwing up (I never said they were smart), but the dark conspiracy petakillsanimals.org is ranting about is imaginary.
Having dispensed with your statistical fallacies, let's look at your moral fallacy:
What have I done? I certainly haven't killed any animals.
So, your claim to moral superiority is based on what you haven't done. You haven't killed any animals. So you're a moral step ahead of anybody who's ever worked in an animals shelter. Right.
The people who run the PETA shelter maybe, maybe are doing a lousy job of placing animals for adoption. You haven't proven that they have, but lets just say they are. They still managed to place 3,000 animals over 10 years. How many have you placed? What have you done except obtain a fancy dog? Which, I'm guessing, you got from a breeder, not a shelter.
Do the people that make laws have absolutely ANY idea how the internet works and is used?
First of all, nobody's making a law here. This is a grand jury (12 ordinary people) getting persuaded to indict Drew based on a weird legal theory that probably won't stand up in court.
So if this indictment isn't going anywhere, why issue it? Because millions of people are pissed off about the suicide of Megan Meier, which occurred after she was humiliated via that bogus MySpace account. Of course, using an online account to humiliate somebody isn't illegal (if it were, we'd all be accessing Slashdot from jail!), so all this outrage had nowhere to go — until a creative Federal prosecutor came up with this ToS theory. Which, as I said, will probably go nowhere. Lawyers come up with strange legal theories. Judges shoot them down. Happens every day. That's why we have judges.
People need to dial back the outrage. Drew was allegedly pissed at Meier over some stupid teenage thing that happened between Meier and Drew's daughter. Then millions of people got pissed at Drew and demand that she be thrown in jail, never mind what the law says. Now you're pissed at some half-assed legal maneuver whose only really purpose is to appease all the people who are pissed at Drew. Too much pissedness, not enough thinking. Chill out, America!
Thanks for the blog photos. Have fun with your new toy.
I was amused to see a manual for QuantumLink, which is an ancestor of AOL.
Dude, you can't buy an NES. That platform is only available in emulation. If the only legal way to play a game is on a Wii ($250 list, actually more on the street, since retailers are using the shortage to force people to buy bundles), and you have no general desire to play Wii games, why should you be forced to buy a Wii to play a game that's worth $5 by itself.
IP owners have a right to a profit, but not to gouge. I think they're beginning to realize that, and not, for example, demand that we pay $70/month for a cable connection just to watch a few shows. If they make a show available online for a reasonable fee, or make a DVD available for sale or rent, I'll pay and not feel ripped off. But if they say no, you gotta subscribe, I have no compunction about downloading an illegal copy. That's a common attitude, and the main reason you can now get many cable shows online.
One nasty example: there's a British TV show called "Life on Mars" I really want to see. (There's going to be an American version; I have zero interest in that.) I've been waiting for years. So far it's only been available on cable — plus, edited down to make room for commercials! Heck with that.
And now I've discovered that it probably never will make it to Region 1 DVD, because U.S. copyright laws have gotten so strict, it would not be feasible to "clear" all the music they use on the show. As soon as I get around to configuring my home route for bittorrent, I am so downloading that sucker.
i.e. = id est = that is
e.g. = exempli gratia = for example
I used to make a living typing and copy editing papers for students. When I started doing it, I read the style books and memorized that rule, among many others.
Had one customer, a philosophy grad student, who used "viz." a lot. When I asked him why, he said he could never remember the difference between i.e. and e.g.
Now I'm a technical writer, and and all the technical writer stylebooks say, Don't use Latin abbreviations. Too obscure. Very sensible.
The games in stores are certainly licensed — distributors wouldn't go near them otherwise. I suspect that these games are among those you can't find on download sites.
Either that, or there's not enough money involved to care. Note that you can download the early 2D GTA games for free from the publisher's web site, even though they're also being sold in shrinkwrap.
My mistake. C64 forever!
That's still not a complete system. "Computer on a chip" is still not a computer.
I too prefer to pay for my software. But if owner doesn't even give me a chance to pay without making me pay for a lot of stuff I don't need, I feel no obligation to refrain from downloading a pirate copy. I shouldn't have to buy a Wii just to play an old C64 game.
"Quite a bit" is probably an exaggeration, but you do have a point.
Excuse me, did you say something?
Yep, 80%. That's about par for animal shelters in the U.S. Millions of animals get euthanized every year.
And yes, most of them are healthy. That still leaves the problem of where they're supposed to live. Do you know a way to place that many animals with people who will care for them? Or can you come up with the money for to house and feed them?
I don't agree with the way PETA approaches the animal overpopulation problem, but at least they're trying to do something. What have you done?
You must be new around here (tm).
C64 emulators run on a variety of platforms. Most old gaming platforms have thriving communities of emulator users. Games are readily available online. Technically copyright infringement, but there's not a lot of enforcement, since the software has little or no commercial value.
I'm talking about a system, you're talking about a component. You might as well talk about the Ford Model A still being "made" because you can still get parts for it.