Under Steve Jobs, Apple always was litigious. Tim Cook is just continuing the same strategy - and, long-term, that's pretty much the problem Apple faces.
What I mean by that is that Jobs, whatever you might think of him as a person, was clearly a visionary. He envisioned products for needs that people didn't even know they had, until Apple produced them - and thereby created markets that hadn't previously existed. The problem Apple faces is that Cook is not Jobs. Not even, not by a long stretch. Jobs was a conceptual thinker and a design maven. Cook is a bean counter. His vision is strictly limited to cost control and supply-line dynamics.
So Apple now faces the same problem it had when its Board of Directors kicked Jobs to the curb in the late 1980's, and handed control of the company over to a series of bean-counting "business leaders", instead: a complete lack of product vision on the part of management led to technological stagnation and chronic laurel-resting on the part of the company. Sure, they retained their profit margins... but their market share and total sales first stagnated, then started dwindling away. By the time the Board hired egomaniac Gilbert Amelio to run the company and HE hired Ellen Hancock (the woman who previously had single-handedly destroyed IBM's PC software division) as Apple's CTO, the best minds at Apple were diving overboard in lemming-like droves.
And it sure looks like that same cycle of stagnation and decline is facing the latter-day Apple Corp. Sure, the i-Stuff is selling really well now - but there are NO new breakthrough products on Apple's horizon, and my bet is that there aren't going to be. Steve Jobs was pretty much the avatar of the modern Key Man Problem, and, in order to replace him, Apple's Board first would have to FIND the next Jobs, and then would have to push Tim Cook aside and entrust the company to Jobs II. My bet is that that just ain't gonna happen. Ever.
So Apple's riding high on a mountain of cash right now, and the i-Stuff is deluging its coffers with more money every quarter - but the end of that ride is in sight, and it won't be much more than a decade before litigation is ALL the company has left - because Steve Jobs, the technological Elvis, has left the buidling for good.
There are no known threats. The FBI has laughed off the bullshit claims by the idiots that posted people's information. The newspaper is looking to demonize people exercising their rights. Fuck them.
The "idiots" in question exercised their 1st Amendment right to publish data that, by New York state law, is public information. Which is to say that their readers have a legal right to this information. It could be argued (I'd argue it, for one - and I'll bet you a shiny, new quarter that H. L. Menchken, who famously stated it is the job of journalists, "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," would have, too) that The Journal News has an actual duty to publish the map in question.
Of course, the hypocritic idiots who love the 2nd Amendment, but disdain the 1st are looking to demonize journalists exercising their rights...
The irony is extremely thick.
The irony - which is that your dogmatic drivel was modded +5 Insightful - is not the only thing that's thick.
I've never read any of your work and I'm not likely to, as I've never heard of you and never seen if your work is exceptional or crap. You expect me to buy your work sight-unseen? If so, you're a fool.
Nobody ever lost money from piracy, but many an author has starved in obscurity. If you're talented, your greed will guarantee your failure.
I guess you're all for shutting down the public libraries, too? Damn, dude, nice job shooting yourself in the foot.
So you only read books by authors with whom you're already familiar?
Like Mr. T, I pity the fool.
As for my "greed" - I make my old Boardwatch columns and articles freely available on my web site. I also make a 38,000-word preview of my novel available there, in a variety of ebook formats. And I permit no ads on my site.
Oh, and I'm the former president of the Friends of the El Cerrito Library.
So: no more Jules Vernes, no more Robert Heinleins, no more Iain M. Banks, and no more consistently high-quality streams of work from writers who are free to concentrate on writing, because their writing pays the bills, instead of being forced to focus on plumbing, or selling cars, or doing double-entry accounting, because the bills MUST be paid.
Prompting hazah to blather:
Verne: born into a wealthy family
Heinleins: navy
Iain M. Banks: he eludes me for the time being but I'll dig his orgins up too.
2 of 3 of your examples had a means to support their hobbies outside of strict sales of their material. Pretty much the OPPOSITE of what you're trying to say.
In fact, Verne's father was an attorney (i.e. - middle class, not wealthy), and he DISOWNED Jules when he learned he was writing, rather than studying law.
Heinlein was medically discharged from the Navy in 1934, BEFORE THERE WAS A G.I. BILL. So, NO NAVY PENSION.
Thus, neither man had an outside source of income to support them. They both made their livings BY WRITING. Period.
FWIW, Iain Banks' father was a Navy officer. His mother was an ice skater. Neither one was wealthy.
Banks has made his living as a writer since the 1970's - when his first (mainstream) book won the Whitbread Prize.
I then mentioned Theodore Sturgeon, prompting hazah to again quote Wikipedia:
As an adolescent, he wanted to be a circus acrobat; an episode of rheumatic fever prevented him from pursuing this.
From 1935 (aged 17) to 1938, he was a sailor in the merchant marine, and elements of that experience found their way into several stories.
He sold refrigerators door to door.
He managed a hotel in Jamaica around 1940–1941, worked in several construction and infrastructure jobs (driving a bulldozer in Puerto Rico, operating a gas station and truck lubrication center, work at a drydock) for the US Army in the early war years, and by 1944 was an advertising copywriter.
In addition to freelance fiction and television writing, he also operated a literary agency (which was eventually transferred to Scott Meredith), worked for
I think I see a trend here... I wonder if you do.
Indeed. I see a professional writer's typical career arc: a seemingly random series of jobs that create a fund of experience that provide the writer with a well of knowledge and incident on which he will later draw when he finally settles on WRITING as a profession.
I see another trend as well: a fucking imbecile who quotes blindly from Wikipedia without ever understanding the implications of the factoids which he selects in a desperate (and doomed) attempt to prop up his ethically and intellectually bankrupt pretext for piracy.
The rest of your response is similarly lame - and for identical reasons. You have the intellectual depth of a Kleenex, you grasp at straws, in the futile hope that no one will notice, and your defensiveness precludes any useful introspection. In short, you're a swine.
Ergo, I will be damned if I will continue to cast pearls before you.
That somehow that implies that copyright itself should be abolished is idiocy, promoted exclusively by selfish fools, and it should be rejected by anyone with a particle of sense.
Prompting Omestes to respond:
Its a good thing I didn't espouse this, then. And I doubt it is really a very common view among the non/. crowd. I bet even most of them would shut up if we had something sane, like 30 years, with a 15 year extension, or limiting transferability, or just expanding and protecting fair-use. Though I'd probably still be a pirate, for the reasons I stated (try before you buy), but I view this as ethical piracy, as long as you purchase it, or delete it once sampled.
I doubt most of the yammerheads who currently employ pretzel logic to defend their UNethical piracy would reduce the volume of their bullshit by a single decibel, even if a sane a copyright law revision was implemented. When satisfying your greed depends on ethical blindness, the wise man invests in dark glasses and white canes.
I actually have no problem at all with "try before you buy". No one should be asked to blindly invest his hard-earned money in bad writing. That's why I make a 38,000-word excerpt of my novel freely available for download in a number of ereader-friendly formats (see my.sig for a link). I'm confident that anyone who likes the disaster/thriller genre and reads the excerpt will gladly pay for the full novel.
And, no, I don't think we're far apart on copyright law, at all. Others, however, are badly in need of a one-eyed king.
And what makes you think you can be one, or be professional?
Because I've made my living as a writer since 1995?
Also, as a tangent, their might be more Jules Vernes out there if we let copyrights lapse again. When he was writing, copyright existed a mere 28 years after the works creation, with a chance at a further 14 renewal. Just think if this was true still, we'd have everything up to the early '80s to inspire us.
I am convinced that copyright law, as it currently exists, is badly broken, and is contrary to the best interests of civilization. I support a return to strict limits on copyright length and renewability. At the same time, I am unshakably convinced that authors MUST have the right to control the dissemination of their own work. That copyright law is in dire need of major reform is, I think, established beyond debate. That somehow that implies that copyright itself should be abolished is idiocy, promoted exclusively by selfish fools, and it should be rejected by anyone with a particle of sense.
If you take out profit as a motivation, we'll still have new books. Better books, probably, because then only truly passionate people will write.
Passion alone is insufficient to produce great literature. With VERY few exceptions, it takes lots and lots of time for a talented writer to hone his skills sufficiently to become great. Having to make a living doing something other than writing drastically reduces the time available in which to write.
Try taking a look at Authonomy.com. You will find there THOUSANDS of writers who are passionate about their writing. At best, there are mere hundreds whose work is actually any good.
Writing is a skill. Anyone can learn to do it well enough to achieve some level of competence - but even achieving mere competence is a lot of hard work. Achieving greatness? Like any skill, very few will ever become truly great at it. And next to none of them will do so without the ability to essentially devote their entire lives to the effort.
Even if we banished writing altogether, we'd still have so many great classics that we could spent our whole lives reading only amazing, ageless books that have already been written.
And there are currently more movies available than any one person, no matter how dedicated, can watch in one lifetime. Should we then simply accept that there will be no more movies made? Ever? How about software? Millions of programs have been written to date. Why would we need any new ones?
If you're that willing to sacrifice an entire realm of human endeavor - not to mention an art form that's been evolving since the Epic of Gilgamesh - you are certainly no friend of civilization. To dispense with the aspiration to create greatness is only to ensure decay. To consign that aspiration entirely to the hands of amateurs is to relegate it to the status of mere hobby. Either mistake would be a disservice to humanity of the very worst, and most pernicious kind.
Holy crap, batman.. Does it ever occur to you that if you don't have a clear path to income from your work, is that your work is absolutely worthless to everyone but you? You are not entitled. In fact, if you ever want me to read your crap, I'm going to go ahead and ask that you pay me for my time.
THIS crap is modded "interesting"?
Look - professional writers need to make income from their work. Period.
In the absence of income from their work, there will be no professional writers. Period.
I realize that most idiots sincerely believe that professional-quality writing is something that "anybody can do." Being idiots, they are, of course, completely, utterly, and profoundly wrong about that. In fact, there is only a relatively small percentage of the population who have the inherent talent to write well enough to eventually become professionals at it. Idiots like hazah are almost certainly not among them.
And yet hazah has the chutzpah to proclaim, ex cathedra from his asshole, that Belial6 - with whose work he is almost unquestionably totally unfamiliar - has no right to profit from his hard work. Instead, presumably, hazah believes HE has a right to make Belial6 his entertainment slave. "Amuse me, vassal," he demands, from his lofty position atop Selfish Cunt Mountain.
Fuck you, hazah. YOU are the one claiming an unearned privilege, not Belial6. If you don't want to read his work, then don't fucking read it - but don't claim that somehow he has an obligation to provide you with free entertainment. Because he doesn't. Period.
Writing is not easy. It is hard, hard work. The more effortless prose appears to be to the reader, nearly without exception, the more that prose has required long hours of drafting, re-drafting, and polishing to seem to flow that freely. Writing fiction at a professional level is an art form which requires a combination of creativity, vision, persistence, judgement, and stringent self-discipline. Any aspiring professional writer must have the right to charge his audience for the pleasure of reading his work, or there will BE no professional writers. Only amateurs. And what you will quickly create, in a world without professional writers, is a world without professional-quality writing.
So: no more Jules Vernes, no more Robert Heinleins, no more Iain M. Banks, and no more consistently high-quality streams of work from writers who are free to concentrate on writing, because their writing pays the bills, instead of being forced to focus on plumbing, or selling cars, or doing double-entry accounting, because the bills MUST be paid.
The late, great, professional science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon pointed out that 90% of science fiction is utter, irredeemable crap. It is worth noting that he was talking about 90% of published science fiction. If hazah's vision of how the world ought to work were to become reality, that percentage would increase to more like 99.9% - and idiots like hazah would be justly punished by being forced to choke down a steady diet of utter, irredeemable crap, with only the most infrequent relief of merely competent writing to mitigate the ordeal.
Want to prove me wrong? Go ahead, hazah - dazzle us with your authorial brilliance.
C'mon. Whip it out - or else shut the fuck up and go the fuck away.
It's really no different than making a programming tutorial site and calling it code university or.
Well... no.
As someone who is currently enrolled in a Coursera class in Greek and Roman Mythology - which is taught by Dr. Peter Struck of the University of Pennsylvania, perhaps THE premiere college for students of ancient history and the classics in the USA - I think I can speak with a certain degree (pun intended) of authority on this question.
Dr. Struck's course demands the same amount of reading from a student as he would be required to do in a class for which he would receive university credit. It also includes approximately two hours of video lectures per week, and a weekly quiz, as well. There are two, short writing assignments (350-450 word essays) over the 10-week course, one of which is due this Sunday. (Unlike a for-credit class, these assignments are peer-graded - a necessity when there are over 50,000 students registered for this particular course.) There's also a final exam. Students with questions regarding the lectures or the reading are encouraged to take them to peer forums, where there are, in fact, some extremely knowlegeable participants who seem eager to provide explanations. Those who successfully complete the course will receive a certificate of completion - which is meaningless to me, because I'm taking the class strictly for the content.
Are there shortcomings to this model? Yes, indeed. I'm dubious about the utility of peer grading of essays, for instance, and I think that, in general 350-450 words is nowhere near enough space to propose, explain, and defend an academic thesis. At least one of the weekly exams thus far has included a question derived from the reading for the FOLLOWING week - which hardly seems fair, and indicates to me that Professor Struck is not paying as much attention to coordinating his test questions with his course material as we students deserve. And, for my own tastes, I think Professor Struck's lectures focus too much on the narrative content of our reading, and not enough on the actual mythology it presents and illuminates, given that the course is supposed to be about Greek and Roman mythology. And, while I understand his desire to make the reading material as accessible as possible, I think the students would be better served if the texts on which his lectures are based were open-access versions (such as those on Perseus), rather than on texts that the student has to purchase. (Having said that, I hasten to add that students are free to USE the open-access editions, if they prefer, but Professor Struck's lectures are still based on closed-access versions.)
Anyhow, despite those issues, I think the quality of the information conveyed is at least equal to what a community college student could expect - assuming, of course, that you could even FIND a community college course on Greek and Roman mythology. It might even be as good as a state university's satellite campus offering.
Frankly I'm amazed the law in the US even allows them to do this. In the UK contracts cannot take away your legal rights, including the right to take legal action.
Remember, as Mitt Romney said, "Corporations are people, my friend."
As for me, I mailed PayPal's legal department my opt-out letter yesterday - and included a demand that they acknowledge its receipt in writing.
I took chemistry AND physics in high school. That's because I entered my senior year with more than enough credits to graduate - except that the state of Ohio required me to have a half-semester in an Ohio-mandated civics course (I moved here from Florida after my junior year). No exceptions, thank you very much.
I could have decided to take only half-semester courses (or, for that matter, only THAT half-semester course) and graduate mid-year, but that didn't appeal to me, for various reasons. Instead, I decided to take both full-semester science courses, along with various other subjects that interested me, because wtf.
Ohio offers achievement tests in assorted subjects. I took both the chem and the physics tests. I came in first in my school by a fairly hefty margin, and tied with my lab partner for third in physics.
Forty years later, I retain very little of what I was taught in chemistry, and even less of that physics class - but I continue to be interested in science in general, and my physics lab partner went on to be the best man at my wedding, and is now my oldest friend (as in "the one who's been my friend for the longest period"). I was never interested in becoming a scientist, but I've been a professional writer (defined as "one who gets paid for it") since 1994, and one of the things I enjoy most about that career is the opportunity to research myriads of fields, and to continuously add to my knowledge base.
As it turns out, I'm also an excellent - and quite experienced - public speaker, songwriter, and HTML hand-coder. I've run twice for public office - alas, unsucessfully - and I'm nearly two-thirds of the way through writing a novel that other authors have praised:
1. $50,000 is not a high amount and doesn't require corporate donations. I've seen missionaires collect more money from friends and family than that.
2. Why are you posting to Slashdot about this? I may not like ABC's position, but have no control over it.
3. Why did Slashdot accept this? They aren't even close to their mission statement on this
That's not "a couple problems". It's THREE problems.
That's the problem with/. Apparently even nerds can't do math...
Wouldn't calling a religion "batshit crazy" qualify as both vulgar and profane? Or is "profanity" specific to using religious words (e.g. damn, hell, etc.) as curses?
Since the "simple" definition of profanity is irreverance, then, yes: vulgar and profane.
Cursing is yet another form of malediction, the specific meaning of which is "to place a curse on [a person, place, or thing]."
i.e. - "Damn you," or "To Hell with you," or "May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits," etc.
Technically speaking, the poster is incorrect in referring to Linus Torvalds's comments as "profanity". They are, instead, vulgarity (common or coarse language), rather than profanity (language which demeans the sacred).
Buying votes is forbidden. Just putting in the law "forbidden" is not enough: people will try to find ways around it, they always do.
Putting measures in place to make breaking the law easier is always a bad thing, as it will result in more people breaking these laws. Prevention is always better than curing, and prosecution for vote fraud is just a cure - the votes have been casted, damage has been done.
Nonsense. That's the exact same argument the U.S. drug warriors employ against decriminalizing possesion of scheduled substances, and it is demonstrably wrong (i.e.: Holland's experience with decriminalizing the possession of heroin).
Insofar as voting is concerned, one of the principle objections to purely-electronic voting is the lack of a paper trail that can be audited to determine whether votes were properly recorded. Here in Ohio, we've used touch-screen voting for a while now. As an election official (currently a Presiding Judge - not as impressive as it sounds, but the person who is responsible for opening and closing voting machines, and preserving the trail of custody between the polling place and the country election commission headquarters, where they are officially tallied), I can tell you that we have pretty stringent measures in place to make sure that, in primary elections, the number of partisan ballots recorded in our logbooks as cast for any given party matches the machine totals EXACTLY. This Spring, my crew spent more than an hour tracking down ONE erroneously-recorded vote, correcting the logbook, and fully notating the changes - and I'm the one who signed the report.
The thing is, at that same election, I had a Republican voter object to being asked publicly to state which ballot he wished to vote (there were four partisan and one non-partisan "issues-only" ballots from which to choose). The law states that we pollworkers have to ask, and we are required by law to challenge voters who claim a party affiliation we have cause to suspect they don't actually hold.
That's nonsensical, of course. Any voter should be free to vote any ballot he/she chooses. But the point is that that requirement was put into law by Republican lawmakers, ostensibly to prevent voter fraud. The bar code mechanism (in an entirely different state, I hasten to add) was emplaced for the same reason - to provide an audit trail in order to reduce the chances of voter fraud.
The fact is that there is always going to be tension between the tradition of anonymous voting and the need to prevent fraud - whether it's vote-buying, or hijacking ballots, electronically or otherwise. That anonymity is a tradition that goes back to the Athenian democracy doesn't in any way make it sacrosanct. It's just a tradition. Yes, I understand the argument that a public vote subjects the voter to pressure and retaliation. There are laws to prevent those abuses, too - laws with big, sharp teeth. A balance has to be struck between anonymity and verifiability, and how to weight that balance is neither as simple nor straightforward as you would like to believe.
To quote the Bard of Baltimore: "For every complex human problem, there is one simple, easy-to-understand solution: and it is always wrong."
Ballots that can be traced to a voter, or where the voter can be watched filling in the ballot paper, can be bought. This way elections can be bought. And that alone is enough reason to not have any identifying mark on any ballot.
In the USA, it is a violation of Federal election law to offer any consideration in money or goods in exchange for a vote. If they catch you buying votes, you go to prison.
In fact, this law has been repeatedly used to stop merchants from offering incentives such as free beers, coupons, or even bumper stickers to citizens merely for showing the (incredibly easy to obtain) "I Voted" sticker that is handed out in every polling place I've ever visited. Note that it's forbidden, even though the giver does not request ANY information on HOW the voter cast his/her ballot.
Methinks you know not whereof you speak.
<full disclosure>I am and have been a local elections official for the past 7 election cycles.</full disclosure>
Gaiman is British, and Doctor Who is truly an icon of British SF. Just about every SF fan, and writer, was weaned on it and feels deep affection for it.I've been watching it since 1964 myself. Doctor Who is very soft core SF, but still tries to be SF.
I remember when the first Doctor Who paperback novel came out (yes, I'm that old). Even though I was only ten years old, the back cover blurb alone was enough to convince me that this was not science fiction - and any discriminating sf fan of the time would have reached the same conclusion.
Flash forward nearly fifty years: last night, the Mrs. and I finished watching the premiere episode of season seven of the Dr. Who reboot with great satisfaction and kudos to Stephen Moffat, who continues to crank out immensely entertaining scripts at a Straczynskian pace. And we're very much looking forward to seeing what he's got up his writerly sleeve over the course of the rest of the season, too.
The difference? Back then, I was a hard-sf purist, who disdained anything that smacked of fantasy dressed up in science fiction clothes. What changed my mind about the Dr. Who reboot (besides my tastes becoming less rigidly defined with the passage of time, I mean) was that, first and foremost, the new Dr. Who is based on good storytelling. The Gaiman-penned The Doctor's Wife episode is a good case in point, but Moffat (who writes most of the episodes, as well as being the showrunner) is a consistently excellent writer, too.
The thing about Dr. Who both then and now is that you just have to accomodate yourself as a viewer/reader to the fact that there's essentially no actual science in this nominally-science-fictional series. Oh, they'll throw in sf buzzwords, but, as for any real science content? Don't get your hopes up. But, as long as you're content to discard any expectation you might have of ACTUAL sf in this so-called "science fiction" show, and content yourself with mere crackin' entertainment, Dr. Who - especially the latest version - can be a mightily pleasurable indulgence.
If you held to strict definitions of SF, you'd hardly ever give out any awards for TV or movies. Game of Thrones is pure fantasy, for instance. "Gritty" fantasy, but still has magic, zombies, dragons, etc. I'm just glad it didn't go to a comic book superhero "franchise". Leave that stuff to Comicon.
The Hugos are awarded based on voting by the fans that attend (or at least pay to support) the WorldCon. Some of 'em are purists, but many are not.
Otherwise, how to account for the presence of so many of Anne McCaffrey's seemingly-endless procession of Pern novels on Hugo finalist ballots over the years?
However, I take issue with the notion that, barring fantasy entries, "you'd hardly ever give out any awards for TV or movies." Over the years, there's been a steady, if admittedly thin, stream of "hard" sf TV series, and a thinner, but still steady stream of movies: Joss Whedon's Firefly and Dollhouse, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Cattlecar Galaxia, Andromeda, Babylon 5, and the various incarnations of Star Trek all spring immediately to mind in the TV category, and Syfy's current Alphas certainly qualifies, as well (and it has a kickin' theme song, to boot). As for movies, there's been plenty of those, too - far too many to list here - with Bruce Willis's upcoming Loopers being the latest. And there's some really good smaller, indie movies, too (Moon and Timecrimes, for instance).
The good stuff - the pure quill, to quote a Smithism - is out there. Certainly there's been enough of it to make an award every year (although the number of choices in any given year might well be pretty limited), even with the entrants limited to "hard" sf stories. And remember, ever since Judy Merrill coined the term back in the 60's, "sf" has stood for "speculative fiction" - and, in the long run, that's probably all to the good for the relentless expansion of the brand into the mainstream.
Believe me when I say that's something I never expected to happen, back when I picked up Tom Swift Jr. and the Caves of Nuclear Fire at the age of six, and began my lifelong love affair with sf.
If you want to call it cheating, that's fine, if you want to call it copyright infringement, that's fine too.
...
The problem with your cheating argument is, who are people cheating? The artist? Or the studios? Good luck trying to convince people that copying a CD is cheating from an artist...
The songwriters get mechanical royalties from each song on a purchased CD. Although some new artists do bargain away some portion of those royalties in exchange for recording contracts, they AUTOMATICALLY get the remainder, regardless of recording company accounting practices, and third-party songwriters get the entire amount. That's a matter of law. Artists also get contracted royalties for each CD sold, and that income is critical to their ability to continue to be recording artists. That's a matter of fact.
Because selfish, simplistic torrenters stick their fingers in their ears and chant, "No, no, no, no, no!" when confronted with these arguments in no way invalidates them. They are still cheating the artists whose work they download without recompense - the same artists whom they profess to "love".
Will that argument change the behavior of those who have accustomed themselves to unethically obtaining for free artistic works that an ethical person would be forced to pay for? Probably not. That doesn't change the fact that they're cheating the artists out of income upon which those artists depend - and which they need in order to continue to make their recorded art.
"Because I can," is an excuse - not a justification.
I think it might be called fair use; but whatever it is, it's not stealing.
I point out the examples of small children understanding this because it really is very simple. IP lawyers have tried to make a simple concept seem complicated by equating the two, but the vast majority of Americans know that making a copy of a cassette tape or CD just is simply, fundamentally not the same as walking into a supermarket and ripping off a candy bar, no matter how they try to spin it.
You're correct that it's not stealing.
It's cheating.
When you anonymously download a copyrighted work, you cheat the copyright owner out of fair recompense for your use of his work. You're not stealing from him - you're cheating him.
You can wave your hands all you like, and scream about how broken the copyright system is until you're blue in the face, but what you are doing by pirating movies and music is fundamentally unethical. Full stop.
Even a small child recognizes craven, self-serving rationalization when he hears it.
The man was a word wizard, not a character conjurer.
As such, he could squeeze art into and out of even the most prosaic stories, but his heroes all look alike.
There is some truth to what you say - but only some. I think Sam's character in Lord of Light definitely evolves over the course of the novel, starting right at the beginning, where the attempt to stick him with a damaged corpus stirs him out of his self-satisfied self-absorption into open rebellion against a system he has tacitly supported since the end of the conquest phase of the colonization process. Likewise, his friendship with Death, and many of his other relationship changes represent character evolution. Same thing with Francis Sandow in Isle of the Dead - by the end of the book he becomes less self-involved, and he develops a sense of empathy with others that he almost entirely lacked at its beginning.
Und so weiter.
And my only problem with his work is the same problem I have with his collaborations - not enough Zelazny.
And of those, Deus Irae makes me most... irate. Damn, are those bits by P.K. Dick clashing with those by Zelazny.
With Dick winning, as it's the only Zelazny book that left me depressed in the end.
I kinda had the same reaction. Of all Zelazny's collaborations, that one was the least interesting/satisfying. However, in his prefatory note to his short story A Hand Across the Galaxay, he confesses, "I was privileged to do a book in collaboration with the late Philip K. Dick - having long admired his ability to run reality through a wringer, a paper shredder and a high-speed blender in rapid succession, and then to reassemble the results into things rare and strange." That clarified for me that Zelazny was as much of a fanboy where PKD was concerned as the fat kid in the pizza-stained tee shirt at Octocon II was of his - so it's a little less surprising to me now that Zelazny took such a back seat to Dick in writing Deus Irae. Being awestruck by someone is a poor psychological starting point for collaborating with him. It starts the relationship off on a footing so unequal that it's likely never to achieve anything like a real peer basis.
Or, at least, that's my take.
Regarding your encounter with Zelazny and a fan, I am again having a feeling that you are projecting a bit there.
With all due respect, I was there. You were not. And I definitely was not projecting. Zelazny spent a good twenty continuous minutes behaving like a man being tortured - and the more that ur-Comic Book Guy piled on the praise, the more tormented he looked. I'll stipulate that suffering the praise of an obvious fool is an ordeal in itself, but there was clearly more to his reaction than that.
I never did have a chance to meet him in person, years, oceans an wars got in the way, but I can't help to notice that the man reading from "Blood of Amber" here is having fun.
Clearly Zelazny is enjoying both his own cleverness, and the audience's unrestrained and obvious enjoyment of that cleverness. And, yes, the excerpt he's reading is very funny and slyly self-referential (which could only have added to his enjoyment of reading it to his public). However, public performance provides unique pleasures to the performer that need not necessarily be credited to the source material. Applause is a highly addictive drug - as a long-time performing musician, I can attest to that personally. That Zelazny reveled in it, is unsurprising, particularly in view of his background as a teaching professor and a sensei.
As for Lord of Light...
I know, I know... I should be smarter than that.
But there is a 12-year-old me somewhere in the back of my mind simply wanting "More!". That's what I meant with that "trilogy".
As for his opus... if you're looking for different, you've clearly not read enough of Zelazny.
The man put out three books of poetry while he wrote those Amber books you mention, did a dozen collaborations with other SF writers, won 4 Hugos (and other awards) from '76 to '87 alone, developed a video game, did ~20 other books, edited over half a dozen others... leaving 2 unfinished books at the time of his death. He clearly had decades of books left in him when he died.
Sure, his opus revolves around mythologies, gods and immortals a lot but he didn't dwell on a single myth in his explorations, always going to the next one.
And I don't see what is your problem with series. A long story is long. Particularly if it is loaded with characters.
Personally, I would have loved if he had done a trilogy around the Lord of Light.
As for why I find him to be underrated despite all those awards - the man wrote in so many references and subtext into his stories, years later you can find in them something you didn't know was there first couple of times you've read them.
Plus, being a poet, he knew how to set up those little ambushes mid-paragraph where you least expected them.
And you can tell that he had so much fun writing. His stories are full of tongue-in-cheek wordplay and jokes.
Without trying to be funny, like sat, Harry Harrison.
I've read most of Zelazny's work - and he is one of my favorite authors, sf or not. That doesn't change the fact that the Amber series was purely him milking a franchise for all it was (financially) worth. In my view, it just doesn't stand up to his real masterpieces, like Lord of Light.
I would have HATED a Lord of Light trilogy. He said what he had to say in that towering novel, and the damned thing climaxes with a Hindu version of Gotterdammerung. What the hell more do you want?
The thing that's consistently great about Zelazny is his verbal pyrotechnics. The man loved language - it was his favorite toy, and he played with it at master level throughout his career. And, despite all the pretension of the sf New Wave in the 60's, the only writer who could really stand up to him and give as good as he got on that front was Alfred Bester - another chronically underappreciated sf writer.
I'm extremely grateful that I got to meet Zelazny, however briefly, at Octocon II. He walked into a room party I was attending, and was immediately cornered by a fat, overbearingly earnest fanboy - pizza-stained tee shirt and all - who spent close to twenty minutes lavishing Zelazny with increasingly-frantic, fulsome praise (all of it for the Amber series, of course), while the great man winced at every compliment, as if it were a burning lash, until, at last, with pure desperation in his voice, Fanboy announced, "Oh, MAN, I have to pee! Stay right there - I'll be right back!" So, naturally, the instant the bathroom door closed, Zelazny was out the door as if he'd been shot there by a cannon.
And I remember thinking to myself at the time, "Well, Roger, you pretty much brought that on yourself!"
Zelazny was a wonderful and uniquely talented writer. The Amber series, unfortunately, was pure, cold-blooded, commercial pandering, not art. It's entertaining, but it lacks the hell out of the thematic and character explorations of his truly great works.
Which brings me to the topic of his collaborations in the last decade or so of his life. Most of them seemed to me to be distinctly inferior on every level to pure, uncut Zelazny (although I admit I enjoyed his collaborations with Robert Sheckley - another greatly underappreciated sf writer). Again, they were often entertaining, but never truly great writing. Like the Amber series, they struck me as fluff by comparison with Zelazny in his prime. That saddens me.
Again, I'm a Zelazny fan. I regularly recommend Lord of Light to people who are just becoming acquainted with sf, and I re-read that and some of his other work from time to time, just because they're
This is the first Slashdot in ages in which the comments are hitting almost uniform high quality.
Brunner, LeGuin, Lem, and the Brothers Strugatsky. All great SciFi in terms of ideas above technological opera.
I hope to see Yevgeny Zamyatin, maybe even Jack Vance and Zelazny mentioned.
All these guys are on par with the standard "canon of important literature you should know, Mr college graduate."
I'm not familiar with Zamyatin, but the others are all first-rate writers.
I'd especially like to recommend Brunner, if you can find his books. Stand on Zanzibar, which deservedly won the Hugo, introduced a form of storytelling to sf that attempted (pretty successfully in my estimation) to invoke a multi-media experience via prose, and was, AFAIK, the first sf book to use the device of following a very large cast of characters, each of whose stories seem to be separate narratives, but which converge at the novel's climax to reveal the web of coincidence and connection that brings them together at last. It's a masterpiece, in the traditional sense of the term (i.e. - a piece created by a journeyman craftsman that embodies every aspect of the craft at its highest level of expression, which stands as a token of the creator's worthiness to be acknowledged as a master of his craft). It's also a quite wonderful story.
Brunner also wrote The Shockwave Rider, which (if you discount Thomas P. Ryan's The Adolescence of P-! - which I do) is really THE seminal cyberpunk novel (it predates Gibson, et al, by a half-a-decade or more), and, moreover, predicts the advent of the commercial Internet at a time when the ARPAnet was still government-controlled, and restricted to university computer labs, and a handful of chipmakers and defense contractors. Wonderful, wonderful book.
Brunner's work, even in the early days, was really head-and-shoulders above most of the sf his contemporaries churned out. He failed from time to time, but he always aimed for actual literature. Beginning with Stand on Zanzibar, he regularly produced exactly that: richly imaginative, wildly entertaining, literature. And one of the things I most respect about him is that every book is different. Unlike, for instance, Zelazny, who started out so brilliantly, but who turned into the Amber Corporation after his divorce (yes, I know they're very popular books - and I don't care - try reading his fabulous Hugo/Nebula winner Lord of Light, or his little remembered Isle of the Dead, or his novelette The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth and see if you don't agree that the Amber series is really pretty dismal stuff by comparison), Brunner never compromised or sold out. He never wrote a series, never pandered, and never repeated himself.
In fact, I think one of Brunner's greatest novels is The Crucible of Time. It's an epic tale that covers thousands of years (and the rise and fall of several civilizations) on a planet inhabited by a truly ALIEN species - essentially intelligent gastropods - who slowly develop technologically to the point that their senior scientists finally realize the danger of planetary extinction with which they are faced, and begin a desperate race to launch a starship in an attempt to save at least a viable sample of their species. You really come to care about the individual characters, despite the fact that they're not a thing like human beings, and the story as a whole is tremendously gripping. Find it. Read it. You won't be disappointed.
However, my own nominee for this list of the undeservedly obscure is Raymond Z. Gallun. His output wasn't very large, but, again, every novel was different, and every novel was good. My favorite of his works is The Planet Strappers, a novel about the wildcat colonization of the asteroid belt by low-budget entrepreneurs. Just wonderful stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Under Steve Jobs, Apple always was litigious. Tim Cook is just continuing the same strategy - and, long-term, that's pretty much the problem Apple faces.
What I mean by that is that Jobs, whatever you might think of him as a person, was clearly a visionary. He envisioned products for needs that people didn't even know they had, until Apple produced them - and thereby created markets that hadn't previously existed. The problem Apple faces is that Cook is not Jobs. Not even, not by a long stretch. Jobs was a conceptual thinker and a design maven. Cook is a bean counter. His vision is strictly limited to cost control and supply-line dynamics.
So Apple now faces the same problem it had when its Board of Directors kicked Jobs to the curb in the late 1980's, and handed control of the company over to a series of bean-counting "business leaders", instead: a complete lack of product vision on the part of management led to technological stagnation and chronic laurel-resting on the part of the company. Sure, they retained their profit margins ... but their market share and total sales first stagnated, then started dwindling away. By the time the Board hired egomaniac Gilbert Amelio to run the company and HE hired Ellen Hancock (the woman who previously had single-handedly destroyed IBM's PC software division) as Apple's CTO, the best minds at Apple were diving overboard in lemming-like droves.
And it sure looks like that same cycle of stagnation and decline is facing the latter-day Apple Corp. Sure, the i-Stuff is selling really well now - but there are NO new breakthrough products on Apple's horizon, and my bet is that there aren't going to be. Steve Jobs was pretty much the avatar of the modern Key Man Problem, and, in order to replace him, Apple's Board first would have to FIND the next Jobs, and then would have to push Tim Cook aside and entrust the company to Jobs II. My bet is that that just ain't gonna happen. Ever.
So Apple's riding high on a mountain of cash right now, and the i-Stuff is deluging its coffers with more money every quarter - but the end of that ride is in sight, and it won't be much more than a decade before litigation is ALL the company has left - because Steve Jobs, the technological Elvis, has left the buidling for good.
Montezuma blathered:
There are no known threats. The FBI has laughed off the bullshit claims by the idiots that posted people's information. The newspaper is looking to demonize people exercising their rights. Fuck them.
The "idiots" in question exercised their 1st Amendment right to publish data that, by New York state law, is public information. Which is to say that their readers have a legal right to this information. It could be argued (I'd argue it, for one - and I'll bet you a shiny, new quarter that H. L. Menchken, who famously stated it is the job of journalists, "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," would have, too) that The Journal News has an actual duty to publish the map in question.
Of course, the hypocritic idiots who love the 2nd Amendment, but disdain the 1st are looking to demonize journalists exercising their rights ...
The irony is extremely thick.
The irony - which is that your dogmatic drivel was modded +5 Insightful - is not the only thing that's thick.
mcgrew bloviated:
I've never read any of your work and I'm not likely to, as I've never heard of you and never seen if your work is exceptional or crap. You expect me to buy your work sight-unseen? If so, you're a fool.
Nobody ever lost money from piracy, but many an author has starved in obscurity. If you're talented, your greed will guarantee your failure.
I guess you're all for shutting down the public libraries, too? Damn, dude, nice job shooting yourself in the foot.
So you only read books by authors with whom you're already familiar?
Like Mr. T, I pity the fool.
As for my "greed" - I make my old Boardwatch columns and articles freely available on my web site. I also make a 38,000-word preview of my novel available there, in a variety of ebook formats. And I permit no ads on my site.
Oh, and I'm the former president of the Friends of the El Cerrito Library.
Three strikes - and you're stupid.
I posited:
So: no more Jules Vernes, no more Robert Heinleins, no more Iain M. Banks, and no more consistently high-quality streams of work from writers who are free to concentrate on writing, because their writing pays the bills, instead of being forced to focus on plumbing, or selling cars, or doing double-entry accounting, because the bills MUST be paid.
Prompting hazah to blather:
Verne: born into a wealthy family
Heinleins: navy
Iain M. Banks: he eludes me for the time being but I'll dig his orgins up too.
2 of 3 of your examples had a means to support their hobbies outside of strict sales of their material. Pretty much the OPPOSITE of what you're trying to say.
In fact, Verne's father was an attorney (i.e. - middle class, not wealthy), and he DISOWNED Jules when he learned he was writing, rather than studying law.
Heinlein was medically discharged from the Navy in 1934, BEFORE THERE WAS A G.I. BILL. So, NO NAVY PENSION.
Thus, neither man had an outside source of income to support them. They both made their livings BY WRITING. Period.
FWIW, Iain Banks' father was a Navy officer. His mother was an ice skater. Neither one was wealthy.
Banks has made his living as a writer since the 1970's - when his first (mainstream) book won the Whitbread Prize.
I then mentioned Theodore Sturgeon, prompting hazah to again quote Wikipedia:
As an adolescent, he wanted to be a circus acrobat; an episode of rheumatic fever prevented him from pursuing this.
From 1935 (aged 17) to 1938, he was a sailor in the merchant marine, and elements of that experience found their way into several stories.
He sold refrigerators door to door.
He managed a hotel in Jamaica around 1940–1941, worked in several construction and infrastructure jobs (driving a bulldozer in Puerto Rico, operating a gas station and truck lubrication center, work at a drydock) for the US Army in the early war years, and by 1944 was an advertising copywriter.
In addition to freelance fiction and television writing, he also operated a literary agency (which was eventually transferred to Scott Meredith), worked for
I think I see a trend here... I wonder if you do.
Indeed. I see a professional writer's typical career arc: a seemingly random series of jobs that create a fund of experience that provide the writer with a well of knowledge and incident on which he will later draw when he finally settles on WRITING as a profession.
I see another trend as well: a fucking imbecile who quotes blindly from Wikipedia without ever understanding the implications of the factoids which he selects in a desperate (and doomed) attempt to prop up his ethically and intellectually bankrupt pretext for piracy.
The rest of your response is similarly lame - and for identical reasons. You have the intellectual depth of a Kleenex, you grasp at straws, in the futile hope that no one will notice, and your defensiveness precludes any useful introspection. In short, you're a swine.
Ergo, I will be damned if I will continue to cast pearls before you.
So, get lost, little girl. Go play in traffic.
I contended:
That somehow that implies that copyright itself should be abolished is idiocy, promoted exclusively by selfish fools, and it should be rejected by anyone with a particle of sense.
Prompting Omestes to respond:
Its a good thing I didn't espouse this, then. And I doubt it is really a very common view among the non /. crowd. I bet even most of them would shut up if we had something sane, like 30 years, with a 15 year extension, or limiting transferability, or just expanding and protecting fair-use. Though I'd probably still be a pirate, for the reasons I stated (try before you buy), but I view this as ethical piracy, as long as you purchase it, or delete it once sampled.
I doubt most of the yammerheads who currently employ pretzel logic to defend their UNethical piracy would reduce the volume of their bullshit by a single decibel, even if a sane a copyright law revision was implemented. When satisfying your greed depends on ethical blindness, the wise man invests in dark glasses and white canes.
I actually have no problem at all with "try before you buy". No one should be asked to blindly invest his hard-earned money in bad writing. That's why I make a 38,000-word excerpt of my novel freely available for download in a number of ereader-friendly formats (see my .sig for a link). I'm confident that anyone who likes the disaster/thriller genre and reads the excerpt will gladly pay for the full novel.
And, no, I don't think we're far apart on copyright law, at all. Others, however, are badly in need of a one-eyed king.
Omestes demanded:
And what makes you think you can be one, or be professional?
Because I've made my living as a writer since 1995?
Also, as a tangent, their might be more Jules Vernes out there if we let copyrights lapse again. When he was writing, copyright existed a mere 28 years after the works creation, with a chance at a further 14 renewal. Just think if this was true still, we'd have everything up to the early '80s to inspire us.
I am convinced that copyright law, as it currently exists, is badly broken, and is contrary to the best interests of civilization. I support a return to strict limits on copyright length and renewability. At the same time, I am unshakably convinced that authors MUST have the right to control the dissemination of their own work. That copyright law is in dire need of major reform is, I think, established beyond debate. That somehow that implies that copyright itself should be abolished is idiocy, promoted exclusively by selfish fools, and it should be rejected by anyone with a particle of sense.
ifiwereasculptor theorized:
If you take out profit as a motivation, we'll still have new books. Better books, probably, because then only truly passionate people will write.
Passion alone is insufficient to produce great literature. With VERY few exceptions, it takes lots and lots of time for a talented writer to hone his skills sufficiently to become great. Having to make a living doing something other than writing drastically reduces the time available in which to write.
Try taking a look at Authonomy.com. You will find there THOUSANDS of writers who are passionate about their writing. At best, there are mere hundreds whose work is actually any good.
Writing is a skill. Anyone can learn to do it well enough to achieve some level of competence - but even achieving mere competence is a lot of hard work. Achieving greatness? Like any skill, very few will ever become truly great at it. And next to none of them will do so without the ability to essentially devote their entire lives to the effort.
Even if we banished writing altogether, we'd still have so many great classics that we could spent our whole lives reading only amazing, ageless books that have already been written.
And there are currently more movies available than any one person, no matter how dedicated, can watch in one lifetime. Should we then simply accept that there will be no more movies made? Ever? How about software? Millions of programs have been written to date. Why would we need any new ones?
If you're that willing to sacrifice an entire realm of human endeavor - not to mention an art form that's been evolving since the Epic of Gilgamesh - you are certainly no friend of civilization. To dispense with the aspiration to create greatness is only to ensure decay. To consign that aspiration entirely to the hands of amateurs is to relegate it to the status of mere hobby. Either mistake would be a disservice to humanity of the very worst, and most pernicious kind.
hazah blurted:
Holy crap, batman.. Does it ever occur to you that if you don't have a clear path to income from your work, is that your work is absolutely worthless to everyone but you? You are not entitled. In fact, if you ever want me to read your crap, I'm going to go ahead and ask that you pay me for my time.
THIS crap is modded "interesting"?
Look - professional writers need to make income from their work. Period.
In the absence of income from their work, there will be no professional writers. Period.
I realize that most idiots sincerely believe that professional-quality writing is something that "anybody can do." Being idiots, they are, of course, completely, utterly, and profoundly wrong about that. In fact, there is only a relatively small percentage of the population who have the inherent talent to write well enough to eventually become professionals at it. Idiots like hazah are almost certainly not among them.
And yet hazah has the chutzpah to proclaim, ex cathedra from his asshole, that Belial6 - with whose work he is almost unquestionably totally unfamiliar - has no right to profit from his hard work. Instead, presumably, hazah believes HE has a right to make Belial6 his entertainment slave. "Amuse me, vassal," he demands, from his lofty position atop Selfish Cunt Mountain.
Fuck you, hazah. YOU are the one claiming an unearned privilege, not Belial6. If you don't want to read his work, then don't fucking read it - but don't claim that somehow he has an obligation to provide you with free entertainment. Because he doesn't. Period.
Writing is not easy. It is hard, hard work. The more effortless prose appears to be to the reader, nearly without exception, the more that prose has required long hours of drafting, re-drafting, and polishing to seem to flow that freely. Writing fiction at a professional level is an art form which requires a combination of creativity, vision, persistence, judgement, and stringent self-discipline. Any aspiring professional writer must have the right to charge his audience for the pleasure of reading his work, or there will BE no professional writers. Only amateurs. And what you will quickly create, in a world without professional writers, is a world without professional-quality writing.
So: no more Jules Vernes, no more Robert Heinleins, no more Iain M. Banks, and no more consistently high-quality streams of work from writers who are free to concentrate on writing, because their writing pays the bills, instead of being forced to focus on plumbing, or selling cars, or doing double-entry accounting, because the bills MUST be paid.
The late, great, professional science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon pointed out that 90% of science fiction is utter, irredeemable crap. It is worth noting that he was talking about 90% of published science fiction. If hazah's vision of how the world ought to work were to become reality, that percentage would increase to more like 99.9% - and idiots like hazah would be justly punished by being forced to choke down a steady diet of utter, irredeemable crap, with only the most infrequent relief of merely competent writing to mitigate the ordeal.
Want to prove me wrong? Go ahead, hazah - dazzle us with your authorial brilliance.
C'mon. Whip it out - or else shut the fuck up and go the fuck away.
Headline and summary are both misleading.
The exploit demonstrated is specific to Cisco VOIP phones. No other manufacturer's devices are affected.
Voted absentee a week ago.
That went fine.
FictionPimp opined:
It's really no different than making a programming tutorial site and calling it code university or.
Well ... no.
As someone who is currently enrolled in a Coursera class in Greek and Roman Mythology - which is taught by Dr. Peter Struck of the University of Pennsylvania, perhaps THE premiere college for students of ancient history and the classics in the USA - I think I can speak with a certain degree (pun intended) of authority on this question.
Dr. Struck's course demands the same amount of reading from a student as he would be required to do in a class for which he would receive university credit. It also includes approximately two hours of video lectures per week, and a weekly quiz, as well. There are two, short writing assignments (350-450 word essays) over the 10-week course, one of which is due this Sunday. (Unlike a for-credit class, these assignments are peer-graded - a necessity when there are over 50,000 students registered for this particular course.) There's also a final exam. Students with questions regarding the lectures or the reading are encouraged to take them to peer forums, where there are, in fact, some extremely knowlegeable participants who seem eager to provide explanations. Those who successfully complete the course will receive a certificate of completion - which is meaningless to me, because I'm taking the class strictly for the content.
Are there shortcomings to this model? Yes, indeed. I'm dubious about the utility of peer grading of essays, for instance, and I think that, in general 350-450 words is nowhere near enough space to propose, explain, and defend an academic thesis. At least one of the weekly exams thus far has included a question derived from the reading for the FOLLOWING week - which hardly seems fair, and indicates to me that Professor Struck is not paying as much attention to coordinating his test questions with his course material as we students deserve. And, for my own tastes, I think Professor Struck's lectures focus too much on the narrative content of our reading, and not enough on the actual mythology it presents and illuminates, given that the course is supposed to be about Greek and Roman mythology. And, while I understand his desire to make the reading material as accessible as possible, I think the students would be better served if the texts on which his lectures are based were open-access versions (such as those on Perseus), rather than on texts that the student has to purchase. (Having said that, I hasten to add that students are free to USE the open-access editions, if they prefer, but Professor Struck's lectures are still based on closed-access versions.)
Anyhow, despite those issues, I think the quality of the information conveyed is at least equal to what a community college student could expect - assuming, of course, that you could even FIND a community college course on Greek and Roman mythology. It might even be as good as a state university's satellite campus offering.
And it's free. As in "beer."
AmiMoJo marveled:
Frankly I'm amazed the law in the US even allows them to do this. In the UK contracts cannot take away your legal rights, including the right to take legal action.
Remember, as Mitt Romney said, "Corporations are people, my friend."
As for me, I mailed PayPal's legal department my opt-out letter yesterday - and included a demand that they acknowledge its receipt in writing.
I took chemistry AND physics in high school. That's because I entered my senior year with more than enough credits to graduate - except that the state of Ohio required me to have a half-semester in an Ohio-mandated civics course (I moved here from Florida after my junior year). No exceptions, thank you very much.
I could have decided to take only half-semester courses (or, for that matter, only THAT half-semester course) and graduate mid-year, but that didn't appeal to me, for various reasons. Instead, I decided to take both full-semester science courses, along with various other subjects that interested me, because wtf.
Ohio offers achievement tests in assorted subjects. I took both the chem and the physics tests. I came in first in my school by a fairly hefty margin, and tied with my lab partner for third in physics.
Forty years later, I retain very little of what I was taught in chemistry, and even less of that physics class - but I continue to be interested in science in general, and my physics lab partner went on to be the best man at my wedding, and is now my oldest friend (as in "the one who's been my friend for the longest period"). I was never interested in becoming a scientist, but I've been a professional writer (defined as "one who gets paid for it") since 1994, and one of the things I enjoy most about that career is the opportunity to research myriads of fields, and to continuously add to my knowledge base.
As it turns out, I'm also an excellent - and quite experienced - public speaker, songwriter, and HTML hand-coder. I've run twice for public office - alas, unsucessfully - and I'm nearly two-thirds of the way through writing a novel that other authors have praised:
So, fuck David Bernstein. High school chemistry isn't going to hurt his Precious Little Boy.
Randle_Revar protested:
"a couple" is not always a synonym for two
I see that Merriam-Webster agrees with you: "4: an indefinite small number : few <a couple of days ago>
Shame on them.
MyLongNickName complained:
There are a couple problems with your story
1. $50,000 is not a high amount and doesn't require corporate donations. I've seen missionaires collect more money from friends and family than that.
2. Why are you posting to Slashdot about this? I may not like ABC's position, but have no control over it.
3. Why did Slashdot accept this? They aren't even close to their mission statement on this
That's not "a couple problems". It's THREE problems.
That's the problem with /. Apparently even nerds can't do math ...
artor3 inquired:
Wouldn't calling a religion "batshit crazy" qualify as both vulgar and profane? Or is "profanity" specific to using religious words (e.g. damn, hell, etc.) as curses?
Since the "simple" definition of profanity is irreverance, then, yes: vulgar and profane.
Cursing is yet another form of malediction, the specific meaning of which is "to place a curse on [a person, place, or thing]."
i.e. - "Damn you," or "To Hell with you," or "May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits," etc.
Technically speaking, the poster is incorrect in referring to Linus Torvalds's comments as "profanity". They are, instead, vulgarity (common or coarse language), rather than profanity (language which demeans the sacred).
Hey ... I'm a writer. I can't help myself.
wvmarle opined:
Buying votes is forbidden. Just putting in the law "forbidden" is not enough: people will try to find ways around it, they always do.
Putting measures in place to make breaking the law easier is always a bad thing, as it will result in more people breaking these laws. Prevention is always better than curing, and prosecution for vote fraud is just a cure - the votes have been casted, damage has been done.
Nonsense. That's the exact same argument the U.S. drug warriors employ against decriminalizing possesion of scheduled substances, and it is demonstrably wrong (i.e.: Holland's experience with decriminalizing the possession of heroin).
Insofar as voting is concerned, one of the principle objections to purely-electronic voting is the lack of a paper trail that can be audited to determine whether votes were properly recorded. Here in Ohio, we've used touch-screen voting for a while now. As an election official (currently a Presiding Judge - not as impressive as it sounds, but the person who is responsible for opening and closing voting machines, and preserving the trail of custody between the polling place and the country election commission headquarters, where they are officially tallied), I can tell you that we have pretty stringent measures in place to make sure that, in primary elections, the number of partisan ballots recorded in our logbooks as cast for any given party matches the machine totals EXACTLY. This Spring, my crew spent more than an hour tracking down ONE erroneously-recorded vote, correcting the logbook, and fully notating the changes - and I'm the one who signed the report.
The thing is, at that same election, I had a Republican voter object to being asked publicly to state which ballot he wished to vote (there were four partisan and one non-partisan "issues-only" ballots from which to choose). The law states that we pollworkers have to ask, and we are required by law to challenge voters who claim a party affiliation we have cause to suspect they don't actually hold.
That's nonsensical, of course. Any voter should be free to vote any ballot he/she chooses. But the point is that that requirement was put into law by Republican lawmakers, ostensibly to prevent voter fraud. The bar code mechanism (in an entirely different state, I hasten to add) was emplaced for the same reason - to provide an audit trail in order to reduce the chances of voter fraud.
The fact is that there is always going to be tension between the tradition of anonymous voting and the need to prevent fraud - whether it's vote-buying, or hijacking ballots, electronically or otherwise. That anonymity is a tradition that goes back to the Athenian democracy doesn't in any way make it sacrosanct. It's just a tradition. Yes, I understand the argument that a public vote subjects the voter to pressure and retaliation. There are laws to prevent those abuses, too - laws with big, sharp teeth. A balance has to be struck between anonymity and verifiability, and how to weight that balance is neither as simple nor straightforward as you would like to believe.
To quote the Bard of Baltimore: "For every complex human problem, there is one simple, easy-to-understand solution: and it is always wrong."
wvmarle posited:
Ballots that can be traced to a voter, or where the voter can be watched filling in the ballot paper, can be bought. This way elections can be bought. And that alone is enough reason to not have any identifying mark on any ballot.
In the USA, it is a violation of Federal election law to offer any consideration in money or goods in exchange for a vote. If they catch you buying votes, you go to prison.
In fact, this law has been repeatedly used to stop merchants from offering incentives such as free beers, coupons, or even bumper stickers to citizens merely for showing the (incredibly easy to obtain) "I Voted" sticker that is handed out in every polling place I've ever visited. Note that it's forbidden, even though the giver does not request ANY information on HOW the voter cast his/her ballot.
Methinks you know not whereof you speak.
<full disclosure>I am and have been a local elections official for the past 7 election cycles.</full disclosure>
1u3hr opined:
Gaiman is British, and Doctor Who is truly an icon of British SF. Just about every SF fan, and writer, was weaned on it and feels deep affection for it.I've been watching it since 1964 myself. Doctor Who is very soft core SF, but still tries to be SF.
I remember when the first Doctor Who paperback novel came out (yes, I'm that old). Even though I was only ten years old, the back cover blurb alone was enough to convince me that this was not science fiction - and any discriminating sf fan of the time would have reached the same conclusion.
Flash forward nearly fifty years: last night, the Mrs. and I finished watching the premiere episode of season seven of the Dr. Who reboot with great satisfaction and kudos to Stephen Moffat, who continues to crank out immensely entertaining scripts at a Straczynskian pace. And we're very much looking forward to seeing what he's got up his writerly sleeve over the course of the rest of the season, too.
The difference? Back then, I was a hard-sf purist, who disdained anything that smacked of fantasy dressed up in science fiction clothes. What changed my mind about the Dr. Who reboot (besides my tastes becoming less rigidly defined with the passage of time, I mean) was that, first and foremost, the new Dr. Who is based on good storytelling. The Gaiman-penned The Doctor's Wife episode is a good case in point, but Moffat (who writes most of the episodes, as well as being the showrunner) is a consistently excellent writer, too.
The thing about Dr. Who both then and now is that you just have to accomodate yourself as a viewer/reader to the fact that there's essentially no actual science in this nominally-science-fictional series. Oh, they'll throw in sf buzzwords, but, as for any real science content? Don't get your hopes up. But, as long as you're content to discard any expectation you might have of ACTUAL sf in this so-called "science fiction" show, and content yourself with mere crackin' entertainment, Dr. Who - especially the latest version - can be a mightily pleasurable indulgence.
If you held to strict definitions of SF, you'd hardly ever give out any awards for TV or movies. Game of Thrones is pure fantasy, for instance. "Gritty" fantasy, but still has magic, zombies, dragons, etc. I'm just glad it didn't go to a comic book superhero "franchise". Leave that stuff to Comicon.
The Hugos are awarded based on voting by the fans that attend (or at least pay to support) the WorldCon. Some of 'em are purists, but many are not.
Otherwise, how to account for the presence of so many of Anne McCaffrey's seemingly-endless procession of Pern novels on Hugo finalist ballots over the years?
However, I take issue with the notion that, barring fantasy entries, "you'd hardly ever give out any awards for TV or movies." Over the years, there's been a steady, if admittedly thin, stream of "hard" sf TV series, and a thinner, but still steady stream of movies: Joss Whedon's Firefly and Dollhouse, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Cattlecar Galaxia, Andromeda, Babylon 5, and the various incarnations of Star Trek all spring immediately to mind in the TV category, and Syfy's current Alphas certainly qualifies, as well (and it has a kickin' theme song, to boot). As for movies, there's been plenty of those, too - far too many to list here - with Bruce Willis's upcoming Loopers being the latest. And there's some really good smaller, indie movies, too (Moon and Timecrimes, for instance).
The good stuff - the pure quill, to quote a Smithism - is out there. Certainly there's been enough of it to make an award every year (although the number of choices in any given year might well be pretty limited), even with the entrants limited to "hard" sf stories. And remember, ever since Judy Merrill coined the term back in the 60's, "sf" has stood for "speculative fiction" - and, in the long run, that's probably all to the good for the relentless expansion of the brand into the mainstream.
Believe me when I say that's something I never expected to happen, back when I picked up Tom Swift Jr. and the Caves of Nuclear Fire at the age of six, and began my lifelong love affair with sf.
xevioso responded:
If you want to call it cheating, that's fine, if you want to call it copyright infringement, that's fine too.
...
The problem with your cheating argument is, who are people cheating? The artist? Or the studios? Good luck trying to convince people that copying a CD is cheating from an artist...
The songwriters get mechanical royalties from each song on a purchased CD. Although some new artists do bargain away some portion of those royalties in exchange for recording contracts, they AUTOMATICALLY get the remainder, regardless of recording company accounting practices, and third-party songwriters get the entire amount. That's a matter of law. Artists also get contracted royalties for each CD sold, and that income is critical to their ability to continue to be recording artists. That's a matter of fact.
Because selfish, simplistic torrenters stick their fingers in their ears and chant, "No, no, no, no, no!" when confronted with these arguments in no way invalidates them. They are still cheating the artists whose work they download without recompense - the same artists whom they profess to "love".
Will that argument change the behavior of those who have accustomed themselves to unethically obtaining for free artistic works that an ethical person would be forced to pay for? Probably not. That doesn't change the fact that they're cheating the artists out of income upon which those artists depend - and which they need in order to continue to make their recorded art.
"Because I can," is an excuse - not a justification.
xevioso argued:,/p>
I think it might be called fair use; but whatever it is, it's not stealing.
I point out the examples of small children understanding this because it really is very simple. IP lawyers have tried to make a simple concept seem complicated by equating the two, but the vast majority of Americans know that making a copy of a cassette tape or CD just is simply, fundamentally not the same as walking into a supermarket and ripping off a candy bar, no matter how they try to spin it.
You're correct that it's not stealing.
It's cheating.
When you anonymously download a copyrighted work, you cheat the copyright owner out of fair recompense for your use of his work. You're not stealing from him - you're cheating him.
You can wave your hands all you like, and scream about how broken the copyright system is until you're blue in the face, but what you are doing by pirating movies and music is fundamentally unethical. Full stop.
Even a small child recognizes craven, self-serving rationalization when he hears it.
denzacar commented:
The man was a word wizard, not a character conjurer.
As such, he could squeeze art into and out of even the most prosaic stories, but his heroes all look alike.
There is some truth to what you say - but only some. I think Sam's character in Lord of Light definitely evolves over the course of the novel, starting right at the beginning, where the attempt to stick him with a damaged corpus stirs him out of his self-satisfied self-absorption into open rebellion against a system he has tacitly supported since the end of the conquest phase of the colonization process. Likewise, his friendship with Death, and many of his other relationship changes represent character evolution. Same thing with Francis Sandow in Isle of the Dead - by the end of the book he becomes less self-involved, and he develops a sense of empathy with others that he almost entirely lacked at its beginning.
Und so weiter.
And my only problem with his work is the same problem I have with his collaborations - not enough Zelazny.
And of those, Deus Irae makes me most... irate. Damn, are those bits by P.K. Dick clashing with those by Zelazny.
With Dick winning, as it's the only Zelazny book that left me depressed in the end.
I kinda had the same reaction. Of all Zelazny's collaborations, that one was the least interesting/satisfying. However, in his prefatory note to his short story A Hand Across the Galaxay, he confesses, "I was privileged to do a book in collaboration with the late Philip K. Dick - having long admired his ability to run reality through a wringer, a paper shredder and a high-speed blender in rapid succession, and then to reassemble the results into things rare and strange." That clarified for me that Zelazny was as much of a fanboy where PKD was concerned as the fat kid in the pizza-stained tee shirt at Octocon II was of his - so it's a little less surprising to me now that Zelazny took such a back seat to Dick in writing Deus Irae. Being awestruck by someone is a poor psychological starting point for collaborating with him. It starts the relationship off on a footing so unequal that it's likely never to achieve anything like a real peer basis.
Or, at least, that's my take.
Regarding your encounter with Zelazny and a fan, I am again having a feeling that you are projecting a bit there.
With all due respect, I was there. You were not. And I definitely was not projecting. Zelazny spent a good twenty continuous minutes behaving like a man being tortured - and the more that ur-Comic Book Guy piled on the praise, the more tormented he looked. I'll stipulate that suffering the praise of an obvious fool is an ordeal in itself, but there was clearly more to his reaction than that.
I never did have a chance to meet him in person, years, oceans an wars got in the way, but I can't help to notice that the man reading from "Blood of Amber" here is having fun.
Clearly Zelazny is enjoying both his own cleverness, and the audience's unrestrained and obvious enjoyment of that cleverness. And, yes, the excerpt he's reading is very funny and slyly self-referential (which could only have added to his enjoyment of reading it to his public). However, public performance provides unique pleasures to the performer that need not necessarily be credited to the source material. Applause is a highly addictive drug - as a long-time performing musician, I can attest to that personally. That Zelazny reveled in it, is unsurprising, particularly in view of his background as a teaching professor and a sensei.
As for Lord of Light...
I know, I know... I should be smarter than that.
But there is a 12-year-old me somewhere in the back of my mind simply wanting "More!". That's what I meant with that "trilogy".
Though...
A prequel is basically already
denzacar commented:
As for his opus... if you're looking for different, you've clearly not read enough of Zelazny. The man put out three books of poetry while he wrote those Amber books you mention, did a dozen collaborations with other SF writers, won 4 Hugos (and other awards) from '76 to '87 alone, developed a video game, did ~20 other books, edited over half a dozen others... leaving 2 unfinished books at the time of his death. He clearly had decades of books left in him when he died. Sure, his opus revolves around mythologies, gods and immortals a lot but he didn't dwell on a single myth in his explorations, always going to the next one.
And I don't see what is your problem with series. A long story is long. Particularly if it is loaded with characters. Personally, I would have loved if he had done a trilogy around the Lord of Light.
As for why I find him to be underrated despite all those awards - the man wrote in so many references and subtext into his stories, years later you can find in them something you didn't know was there first couple of times you've read them. Plus, being a poet, he knew how to set up those little ambushes mid-paragraph where you least expected them. And you can tell that he had so much fun writing. His stories are full of tongue-in-cheek wordplay and jokes. Without trying to be funny, like sat, Harry Harrison.
I've read most of Zelazny's work - and he is one of my favorite authors, sf or not. That doesn't change the fact that the Amber series was purely him milking a franchise for all it was (financially) worth. In my view, it just doesn't stand up to his real masterpieces, like Lord of Light.
I would have HATED a Lord of Light trilogy. He said what he had to say in that towering novel, and the damned thing climaxes with a Hindu version of Gotterdammerung. What the hell more do you want?
The thing that's consistently great about Zelazny is his verbal pyrotechnics. The man loved language - it was his favorite toy, and he played with it at master level throughout his career. And, despite all the pretension of the sf New Wave in the 60's, the only writer who could really stand up to him and give as good as he got on that front was Alfred Bester - another chronically underappreciated sf writer.
I'm extremely grateful that I got to meet Zelazny, however briefly, at Octocon II. He walked into a room party I was attending, and was immediately cornered by a fat, overbearingly earnest fanboy - pizza-stained tee shirt and all - who spent close to twenty minutes lavishing Zelazny with increasingly-frantic, fulsome praise (all of it for the Amber series, of course), while the great man winced at every compliment, as if it were a burning lash, until, at last, with pure desperation in his voice, Fanboy announced, "Oh, MAN, I have to pee! Stay right there - I'll be right back!" So, naturally, the instant the bathroom door closed, Zelazny was out the door as if he'd been shot there by a cannon.
And I remember thinking to myself at the time, "Well, Roger, you pretty much brought that on yourself!"
Zelazny was a wonderful and uniquely talented writer. The Amber series, unfortunately, was pure, cold-blooded, commercial pandering, not art. It's entertaining, but it lacks the hell out of the thematic and character explorations of his truly great works.
Which brings me to the topic of his collaborations in the last decade or so of his life. Most of them seemed to me to be distinctly inferior on every level to pure, uncut Zelazny (although I admit I enjoyed his collaborations with Robert Sheckley - another greatly underappreciated sf writer). Again, they were often entertaining, but never truly great writing. Like the Amber series, they struck me as fluff by comparison with Zelazny in his prime. That saddens me.
Again, I'm a Zelazny fan. I regularly recommend Lord of Light to people who are just becoming acquainted with sf, and I re-read that and some of his other work from time to time, just because they're
Gorobel enthused:
This is the first Slashdot in ages in which the comments are hitting almost uniform high quality.
Brunner, LeGuin, Lem, and the Brothers Strugatsky. All great SciFi in terms of ideas above technological opera.
I hope to see Yevgeny Zamyatin, maybe even Jack Vance and Zelazny mentioned.
All these guys are on par with the standard "canon of important literature you should know, Mr college graduate."
I'm not familiar with Zamyatin, but the others are all first-rate writers.
I'd especially like to recommend Brunner, if you can find his books. Stand on Zanzibar, which deservedly won the Hugo, introduced a form of storytelling to sf that attempted (pretty successfully in my estimation) to invoke a multi-media experience via prose, and was, AFAIK, the first sf book to use the device of following a very large cast of characters, each of whose stories seem to be separate narratives, but which converge at the novel's climax to reveal the web of coincidence and connection that brings them together at last. It's a masterpiece, in the traditional sense of the term (i.e. - a piece created by a journeyman craftsman that embodies every aspect of the craft at its highest level of expression, which stands as a token of the creator's worthiness to be acknowledged as a master of his craft). It's also a quite wonderful story.
Brunner also wrote The Shockwave Rider, which (if you discount Thomas P. Ryan's The Adolescence of P-! - which I do) is really THE seminal cyberpunk novel (it predates Gibson, et al, by a half-a-decade or more), and, moreover, predicts the advent of the commercial Internet at a time when the ARPAnet was still government-controlled, and restricted to university computer labs, and a handful of chipmakers and defense contractors. Wonderful, wonderful book.
Brunner's work, even in the early days, was really head-and-shoulders above most of the sf his contemporaries churned out. He failed from time to time, but he always aimed for actual literature. Beginning with Stand on Zanzibar, he regularly produced exactly that: richly imaginative, wildly entertaining, literature. And one of the things I most respect about him is that every book is different. Unlike, for instance, Zelazny, who started out so brilliantly, but who turned into the Amber Corporation after his divorce (yes, I know they're very popular books - and I don't care - try reading his fabulous Hugo/Nebula winner Lord of Light, or his little remembered Isle of the Dead, or his novelette The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth and see if you don't agree that the Amber series is really pretty dismal stuff by comparison), Brunner never compromised or sold out. He never wrote a series, never pandered, and never repeated himself.
In fact, I think one of Brunner's greatest novels is The Crucible of Time. It's an epic tale that covers thousands of years (and the rise and fall of several civilizations) on a planet inhabited by a truly ALIEN species - essentially intelligent gastropods - who slowly develop technologically to the point that their senior scientists finally realize the danger of planetary extinction with which they are faced, and begin a desperate race to launch a starship in an attempt to save at least a viable sample of their species. You really come to care about the individual characters, despite the fact that they're not a thing like human beings, and the story as a whole is tremendously gripping. Find it. Read it. You won't be disappointed.
However, my own nominee for this list of the undeservedly obscure is Raymond Z. Gallun. His output wasn't very large, but, again, every novel was different, and every novel was good. My favorite of his works is The Planet Strappers, a novel about the wildcat colonization of the asteroid belt by low-budget entrepreneurs. Just wonderful stuff.
I think Edmond Hamilton, who is ge