The article is very informative - thanks. Always interested in history - the more so computing hsitory.
Thanks for the complient.
If you're interested in a more detailed history of the invention and development of the ARPAnet, you might want to check out Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's book Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Taylor was a prime source of information for them.
Robert W. Taylor was never the head of DARPA. He was, however, the guy who proposed and ran the ARPAnet for DARPA, under Director Charles Herzfeld, until he left to become head of Xerox PARC. (Although he got the idea while J.C.R. Licklider was head of DARPA, Taylor didn't pitch it as an actual, fundable project until Herzfeld took over.)
Taylor absolutely does NOT credit Robert Metcalfe (developer of Ethernet) for the invention of the Internet. Instead, he reserves the lion's share of the credit for himself. I know this, because he called me in 1994 to lecture me about what he felt were inaccuracies in a column I wrote for LAN Times about the origins of the Internet. (Specifically, he objected to my statement that the earlier RAND thought experiment on a nuclear-war-survivable, peer-based, packet-switched network was the basis for the development of the Internet.)
You can read more about Licklider, Taylor, and others who were responsible for the devleopment of the Internet in my December 2000 Boardwatch cover story "They Might Be Giants", if you're interested in the real story, as opposed to the WSJ's warm, stinky piece of journalistic shit.
Almost sounds like someone should write a dystopian Foundation book, where the mathematicians race to predict each others' predictive abilities (and of course, stop them!)
Fifty square meters of space is utterly insufficient to grow enough food for 4 people, regardless of whether you stack "some" plants four units high. Period, end of discussion.
I'd say this plan is a long way from sufficiently baked. Much as I'd like to see it succeed, Lansdorp's response on the subject of food production makes it clear that this is, in fact, a scam.
Too bad. I'd've loved to live long enough to see a permanent colony on Mars.
Mr. Stark apparently doesn't know much about Japanese culture. "Sasuke" is a rather straightfroward reference to Sarutobi Sasuke [wikipedia.org], and the name has been used to invoke the idea of ninjas since at least the 1920's.
I sit corrected. My Japanese is a little rusty these days - it's been more than fifty years since I lived there.
But I do have to ask, how on-point can a review be if the reviewer didn't even watch the show enough to notice it didn't actually go to the end?
TFA (The Fucking Author) here. Two points in response:
1. It's an editorial, not a review.
2. I finished writing the piece two hours before Monday night's episode of "American Ninja Warrior" began its broadcast. Obviously I didn't then know that NBC would choose to spread the finals out over three broadcast weeks. And that's really beside the point, now isn't it?
Does anybody think a McSame presidency would have been any different from a Nobama?
I do.
If McLame had been elected, there'd have been no auto industry bailout, and most of the American automakers would have gone the way of the dodo - taking with them all their employees' jobs, plus those of their parts and raw materials suppliers, and their dealerships (think "service departments", not just salemen). Plus their credit acceptance organizations would have gone with 'em, and that would have added more tens of billions in bad debt to the meltdown, and greatly contributed to the credit crunch. Plus, no consumer credit protection agency, for sure, because McLame would have vetoed it. Plus no healthcare reform of any kind, so people like my wife and I - both of whom have pre-existing medical conditions - would have remained locked out of any possibility of obtaining medical insurance. Plus Osama bin Laden would still be alive.
Oh, and when McLame keeled over dead from the pressures of the job, we'd be stuck with Sarah "I can see Russia from my house" Palin as Commander in Chief.
So, yeah, as disappointing as Obama's first term has been in many ways, I think there'd be significant differences in the current state of affairs had McLame been elected, instead. And not, you know, in a good way...
So from the viewpoint of someone reading a rant from a writer who is despairing the fall of grammar, your point also seems a bit self-serving. "You need good writers because, well, I'm a writer!"...
Is the value of good grammar strictly aesthetic?
I was merely clarifying that I'm a writer, not an engineer. As for my preference for good grammar being self-serving - I don't get that at all. In fact, it seems to me that self-service would argue in favor of extreme permissivism (i.e. - "HA! When they need good grammar, they'll now be forced to come to ME! Mu-HU-haha!").
And, no, the value of good grammar goes far beyond the aesthetic. To employ proper grammar, the writer must think through what he wishes to say, organize his thoughts so that they conform to accepted grammatical style, and carefully choose his phrasing for clarity and comprehensibility. In other words, the use of proper grammar requires thoughtful communication. It is essentially aerobics for correspondence, and it benefits the intellectual muscles of both the writer and his reader.
Perhaps you are looking at this from an engineer's point of view instead of a manager's?
Actually, I'm looking at it from a writer's viewpoint.
But thanks for giving me the opportunity to say, "Fuck managers in the ass. Sideways. With a chainsaw." Because I could not possibly care less about their concerns if they were so many dung beetles.
As I'm an engineer, though, I completely agree with you. I just wanted to point out that there is an alternative viewpoint.
I'm quite aware that my point of view is not shared by everyone. I am, however, reminded of something my sainted mother used to say to me when I was just a lad, "If everyone else runs down the street with their pants down, does that mean you have to, as well?"
Of course, given the hip-hop fashion trend of walking around with your pants down, that question is now a good deal less rhetorical than it once was...
The rules for language are, or at least began as, descriptive rules. They tell us what the language was doing at the time. If people are no longer following the now-prescribed rules, and are doing so in a fairly consistent manner, I think it points not to their stupidity but to a semi-conscious decision that they don't care about the classical English rules and aesthetics, and are going to instead use what is convenient for them to use.
With all due respect to Benchley's Law of Distinction, there are two kinds of grammarian: the prescriptive kind, who takes up cudgels to defend the rules of language as defined by manuals of style (often derided as a "grammar Nazi"), and the descriptive kind, who observes the roles as they are employed in the current cultural context, and accepts their changes as evidence of the evolutionary nature of language (frequently scorned by the prescriptives as a "pantywaist permissivist" who is actively contributing to the seemingly-inevitable decline into the cultural dark ages).
I am neither entirely the former, nor altogether the latter. I tend cheerfully to disregard the stylebooks' ukases when they seem arbitrary and illogical to me, but hew to their wisdom as a general rule. For instance, I think the dictate that quotation marks must invariably enclose punctuation is wrongheaded, so, when I'm actually QUOTING someone, I follow the rule, but when I employ quotes merely to set off a word or phrase (think "air quotes" here), I put the punctuation on the outside of the quotation marks. Likewise, when writing formal documents, I am careful not to split infinitives, but in more causal writing, I ignore the rule and split 'em anyway, because violations of that rule are so ubquitous that it has become the "new normal" - and failing to split the infinitive therefore comes across as fustian and quaint. (Of course, when writing dialogue, I almost always split infinitives, because that's the way people speak. In fact, I only forbear from splitting infinitives when the line is spoken by a character who is not a native English speaker - because my observation has been that those folks almost always obey the rule.)
But this is Slashdot, and overheated polemic is an integral part of the sport in these parts. So, yeah, idiocracy.
I don't like it either, but it's a leap to go from "this person does not write with care like I do" to "this person is an idiot."
'Tis. Still, it provokes thoughtful responses from people like you, and that's a net plus, n'est ce pas?
For example, "To boldly go where no man has gone before" (Split infinitive) vs. "To go boldly go where no man has gone before" (Equally bombastic, but grammatically correct).
Er... not really.
Itiym: "To go boldly where no man has gone before."
You may be one of the rare few that can truly tax Word's grammar checker but the overwhelming majority of people who believe that it's useless are flat wrong. I see this at work basically every day. I work with people who have degrees and should be able to write fairly well (at least well enough to not lose a grade on grammar) but neither properly capitalize nor know the common homonyms. There is also the unnecessary capitalization of words because people think they're acronyms: I see "WEB" and "FOB" (access tokens) all the time. That the lose/loose problem is spilling into the workplace is an even bigger sign of the problem. I'd love to be able to blame it on the new Internet generation, but as I see it among older professionals who don't really spend much time online, I suspect it's just something working its way through the culture.
The thing is, none of the errors you list are mistakes of GRAMMAR. Instead, each of them is a USAGE error, as distinct from a grammatical one.
Grammar, per se, is structural in nature: basically, it's the rules of sentence construction. In common usage, grammar is often conflated with such topics as spelling, usage, capitalization, and punctuation, but they are, in fact separate issues. Tthe fact that you, yourself, conflate them is an indication of the size of the gap between what "everybody knows" about language, and what the technical terms they bandy about actually mean.
Those of us who care about such distinctions are vastly outnumbered by those who don't - and the disparity in numbers is growing. Texting is a contributor to the problem, as is the dismal state of public "education" in the U.S. So is the perceived casual nature of email and blog commenting, where errors of grammar, usage, spelling, punctuation and capitalization are so commonplace that they have become the new norm - and fuddy-duddies like me, who insist on employing grammatically-correct, properly-spelled-and-punctuated Engilsh, paying careful attention to usage, are looked at as dinosaurs, at best, or, less charitably, as elitist snobs.
There's no reason to be so hostile. I'm not saying that I have some special plan to bring about global capitalism, I'm simply pointing out that when people say this system is it that they're confusing it for something else. It's not really different from those people who mistakenly say Barack Obama is a socialist. He isn't — for example his health care plan isn't socialist, it's decidedly corporatist. If it were socialist it would be a proposal to make U.S. healthcare like the UK system.
What? Reasoned and objective analysis, rather than flame-spouting invective and hysterical self-righteousness?
Too many people on all sides of the ideological map don't understand there's a gigantic difference between capitalism and corporatism. In one, you actually have free markets, and inefficient businesses actually lose money and go under. But in the corporatist system we have, executives of giant corporations (which rely on limited liability that couldn't even exist in a real free market) cozy up to policy makers for mutual advantage. They're as different from each other as either is from socialism.
Man, am I sick of this argument.
"I fiercely defend free-market capitalism! But we don't actually HAVE free-market capitalism... we have corporatism, instead. And, er, Ludwig Von Mises!"
Give to me a break.
We will NEVER have free-market capitalism. It's a mythical state of being, like pure communism. We will always have a tilted playing field, because human beings are not perfectable. People are crooked - or, at least, enough of them are that any economic system that depends on "fair play" to work WON'T.
Full stop.
The libertarian utopia is as much a pipe dream as the communist one, and for the same reason: both depend on humans to act in perfectly logical, reasonable, and predictable ways. They won't. They can't. Humans are irrational, short-sighted, emotional beings, not robots. Just as they're not content with "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," they're not willing to compete without seeking an edge, literally by hook or by crook. YOU may be willing to compete on a level playing field - but it only takes a few scammers and con artists to upend that field to the point where EVERYONE starts scrambling for an unfair advantage.
That's why regulated markets exist. Because humans lie, steal, and cheat - predictably so. Regulators come into being in an attempt to address those problems. Do the regulators get coopted, or misidentify problems and therefore apply inappropriate strategies to correct them? Oh, hell yes. That's because those regulators are themselves human beings, for which see above.
And around and around and around it goes.
FUCK Ludwig Von Mises. He isn't talking about the real world. The real world is crooked, unfair, and messy - and it's never magically going to change into the ideal, free-market condition about which libertarians, Randroids, and other such shut-ins so endlessly hyperventilate. Pull your collective heads out of your determinedly-individualistic asses, and DEAL WITH IT. There IS no ideal free market economy. There never WILL be an ideal free-market economy. And any philosophy that depends on the existence of an ideal free-market economy is a PIPE DREAM.
I did not argue with you. you arguesd with someone else, and I made supposdly funny comment: "perhaps it was SF when it was published and is fantasy now".
Perhaps the humor in your ACTUAL comment, "At the point you read the stories they may have appeared to you as fantasy, at the point he wrote them it was SF," (note the difference between your portrayal of your comment, and your actual statement: in the original, there is no "perhaps," and you make an entirely unwarranted assumption about the context in which I read Bradbury's work) is obvious to you - but you're the only one. "Perhaps" that's because your comment wasn't funny at all - it was strictly argumentative.
Regarding "official" last time I checked imdb about star wars it was rated as sciense fantasy.
IMDB is hardly an authority on science fiction. This is a fundamental logical error on your part, of the type known as "appeal to authority".
Also I would not take one interview (which you seem to refer to) as a definition for his whole work
Again, what part of "I'm not a science fiction writer" IN BRADBURY'S OWN WORDS is unclear to you? Once again, fingers in ears, eyes screwed shut, and shouting, "No, no, no, NO!" at the top of your lungs, you continue to wade deeper into denial OF THE FACTS.
This: Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 â" June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer.
Is the first line of his page on Wikipedia. If you know better, then please go there, make an account and fix the page.
Again with the appeal to authority. Wikipedia is NOT an authority. The fact that any idiot can alter a Wikipedia entry to include personal opinion, counterfactual statements, and/or whole-cloth inventions makes it profoundly worthless as a citable source.
And I have neither the obligation nor the inclination to waste my energy correcting every mistake in the multi-terabyte Wikipediaverse.
Regadring your repeating of "kiddo", if that is the nick name for kid as I suppose, then please grow up, I'm roughly 5 years younger than you
"Kiddo" is a an English idiom. Like "pal" or "buddy", it's a placeholder for the name of a person being addressed. It CAN carry a connotation that the person being addressed is younger, but it does not necessarily imply an age difference. I explain this, because it's clear that English is not your native language, and I don't want you to mistake my meaning. What is important for you to understand about my use of the term is that, most frequently, the word "kiddo" is used to imply either a familiar, affectionate relationship between the speaker and the person being addressed, OR it is used to imply that the person being addressed is less knowlegeable about the subject under discussion than is the speaker. It is the latter context in which I employed it in my exchange with you.
Now kindly take your fingers out of your ears, open your eyes, and quit denying the facts. And, next time you're tempted to jump into a discussion with what you believe to be a humorous remark, either restrain yourself, or have the sense to stick a smiley on the end of it, to make your intent clear.
I recommend the former course, btw. Humor is clearly not your strong suit.
Fahrenheit 451 was science-fiction, as was the short story "A rolling thunder" and some (very few, I reckon) of others.
Bradbury himself said that Fahrenheit 451 was his only SF novel. I'll give you A Rolling Thunder, as well. That makes them exceptions to the vast majority of Bradbury's works, so my point stands. (And I suspect, from your, "very few, I reckon," that you agree with that point.)
Not being hard SF does not prevent a story from being SF...
Absolutely correct. Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold and Asimov's Foundation series both spring to mind as exemplars of "soft" science fiction from contemporaries of Bradbury. Likewise the stories of Clifford Simak, and a lot of Fredrik Pohl's early work. And so on.
But Bradbury, on the whole, was a fantasist and horror fiction writer, not a science fiction writer. I reached that conclusion when I was eight years old, and have never had reason to change my mind about it.
Again, I _like_ Bradbury's stuff. I just don't think it belongs in the science fiction section of the library. It's a way more comfortable fit over there on the horror/fantasy shelf with Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Whitley Streiber.
angel'o'sphere persisted in displaying his ignorance thusly:
Sorry, the official definition of star wars is "sciense fantasy".
Space opera is a secondary category, e.g. you couild consider battle star galactica also a space opera.
"Official" according to whom?
And, no, space opera is a category all its own, going back to the late, great E.E. Smith and Edmund Hamilton - and far pre-dating the term "space fantasy"."
You really don't know ANYTHING about the history of science fiction, do you?
Also I don't really get why you arguing with me and even are insulting me, because I'm only a fan and not a how would you call it? A disciple of Bradbury? Why should I be oblieged to know his interviews or the man in person? I read his books, that is enough for me. After all I'm not a literture student or proffesor.
I'm arguing with YOU? Put down the crack pipe, Angelo. YOU took issue with my statement that Bradbury was a fantasist, not a science fiction writer. The way I see it, YOU are arguing with ME.
Oh, and your arguments are pure tantrum - you WANT Bradbury to have been a science fiction author, so you ignore HIS OWN WORDS to insist that he WAS a science fiction writer. And now you're whinging, because you've lost that argument.
Learn to lose gracefully, kiddo. From what I've seen here, you'll be doing a lot of it.
Again, what part of "Ray Bradbury always referred to HIMSELF as a fantasist, not a science fiction writer" is unclear to you?"
Unlear for me is that he did that:D
Because you don't know anything about the man. Here's just one (hint: try the second-to-last paragraph on for size) of many citations of his description of his own work as fantasy, not science fiction.
And clear for me is that mars chronicals is SF.
See above.
OTOH most of the categories are not well defined. And frankly I'm a bit tired about this. Is star wars fantasy or SF or is it science fantasy (what ever that is supposed to mean)?
You consider the categories of sf vs. fantasy ill-defined because you're an ignoramous.
Star Wars falls within the subset of sf called "Space Opera". It misses being fantasy by grace of the pseudo-scientific explanation of The Force being a product of midichlorians.
A 3-D video-wall with Smell-O-Vision that somehow magically transforms into the actual African veldt is NOT science fiction,
Sorry this makes not much sense. Wether it is SF or fantasy can not be decided on this single sentence, but only in context.
Horseshit, sailor.
Bradbury proposes no mechanism by which the veldt display becomes an actual veldt. That's because it's a horror story, not sf.
You are a nincompoop, Angelo. Your argumentum consists exclusively of sticking your fingers in your ears, firmly shutting your eyes, and screaming, "No, no, no, no, NO!" at the top of your lungs.
At the point you read the stories they may have appeared to you as fantasy, at the point he wrote them it was SF.
Uh... no. No, they weren't. I read the majority of his stories AT THE TIME THEY WERE PUBLISHED.
Again, what part of "Ray Bradbury always referred to HIMSELF as a fantasist, not a science fiction writer" is unclear to you?"
A 3-D video-wall with Smell-O-Vision that somehow magically transforms into the actual African veldt is NOT science fiction, regardless of how you slice it. It's Stephen King-style horror fantasy. That's true of the vast majority of Bradbury's so-called "science fiction" stories, including the entirety of The Martian Chronicles.
Re:The most human side of scifi...
on
Ray Bradbury Has Died
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Art Popp commented::
...is found in that man's works. He is the reason my Mom understands the wonder of extraterrestrial life, the temptations and costs of technological solutions to social problems, and has any clue as to what her son is thinking.
I owe that man a great deal more than I've spent on his books.
No, no, NO. Ray Bradbury was a great, poetic writer, but he was NOT a science fiction writer. Period. He, himself, always characterized his work as fantasy, and I couldn't more enthusiastically agree.
I've been reading science fiction since I was six years old, and I never considered Bradbury as an sf writer, even when I was a child. Mainly, that's because there's NO science in his fiction. Poetry, yes. Horror? Plenty of that. Magic? It's ubiquitous in Bradbury. But science? Uh, uh.
Take "The Veldt", for instance, where a 3-D immersive wall display somehow turns into a portal into an actual African veldt, complete with a pride of hungry lions. Horripilating fiction, yes - but not SCIENCE fiction. It -like pretty much all of Bradbury's work - is fantasy dressed up in science fiction clothes.
I always resented the goddamned media portraying Ray Bradbury as a science fiction author, all the while ignoring his contemporaries (Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Anderson, etc.) who actually WERE science fiction authors. Back in the 60's, whenever there was some major science-y news story, they'd trot poor old Ray out, and present him to the unwashed masses as "science fiction author Ray Bradbury". And Bradbury, of course, would have noting of value to say about the science aspect of the story, because HE WASN'T A SCIENCE FICTION AUTHOR. In fact, one of my absolute fondest memories was the extended conversation between Walter Cronkhite, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur Clarke during the wee hours of the morning on July 21, 1969, while the Apollo 11 astronauts spent 6 hours sleeping prior to that first, historic step onto the Moon. One of the things that I most appreciated about that redeye special was the fact that RAY BRADBURY WASN'T PART OF IT. It increased my already considerable respect for Uncle Walter by a non-trivial margin, let me tell you.
Don't get me wrong, here. I enjoyed Ray Bradbury's work. He was an engaging writer, whose prose style often read like blank verse. I just never considered him to be a science fiction writer - AND NEITHER DID HE.
And, btw, if you want to read the work of a master of the human side of science fiction, try the late, great Theodore Sturgeon. HE was an amazing science fiction writer, whose work often reads like poetry, but, unlike Bradbury's, it was ACTUAL science fiction, not fantasy dressed up in scifi clothes...
First they complained because of "suburb flight" where affluent persons moved to the suburbs and left-behind a poor base in the city.
Now they are complaining that the affluent people are moving back in.
I wish they'd make up their mind.
Do they want the upper/middle incomes to leave the city, or stay in the city? Either way, it appears they will wine about it.
First of all, San Franciscans have NEVER complained about suburban flight. It isn't, and never has been an issue there.
Secondly, of COURSE they'll "wine" about it. The only real question is whether it will be a Merlot or a Cabernet.
Public performance of copyrighted works, even legal recordings, is forbidden in the U.S. and the RIAA expects other countries to have similar laws.
Absolutely, totally, completely, and utterly incorrect.
Covering another songwriter's material is perfectly legal, whether you record it or perform it live - as long as the orginal recording has been in release for at least one calendar year. HOWEVER, if you cover a song, you MUST pay what's known as a "mechanical license fee" of 9.10 cents per copy for songs 5 minutes or less or 1.75 cents per minute or fraction thereof, per copy for songs over 5 minutes to the author or authors of the material (fee schedule courtesy Harry Fox Agency). That royalty rate is set by Congress, per international treaties.
I understand that talking out your ass is a favorite/. exercise, but... really?
(o) So those trapped gases must have been in the air at some point, millions of years ago, and then planet did just fine. So what's there to worry about? Uh.....
The carbon component of "those trapped gases" (i.e. - methane) may well have been "in the air" at some point in the past - but likely not as part of a methane molecule. Methane is a gas mainly produced by the decomposition of organic material. When the last ice age descended (most likely because of a meteorite or cometary impact event), it swiftly buried boreal forests in ice, and Arctic temperatures have kept the ground that they're now buried under frozen solid (which is why it's called "permafrost"). As the temperature warms, and that permafrost thaws, the decay process that the ice suspended will restart, and cause the dead and buried plant life to rot, producing very large quantities of methane gas from the carbon that used to be part of that plant life.
As for how methane clathrates (the other very large source of methane gas releases) are formed, I have yet to see a convincing explanation of the mechanism. That notwithstanding, the fact that they DO exist is indisputable - and, when deepwater temperatures rise far enough, they definitely will melt, releasing their cargo of methane into the atmosphere (the so-called "methane clathrate gun" effect) more-or-less all at once.
The current consensus is that it was the global release of large volumes of methane in the transition from the Permian to the Triassic Periods that caused the extremely large (20+ degrees Fahrenheit) increase in global temperatures that resulted in what is known as the Permian Extinction - an event that resulted in the extinction of more than 90% of all then-extant species on Earth. What is particularly scary about that event - the worst mass extinction since the Oxygen Catastrophe - is that the release of all that methane seems to have been initiated by a sharp increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. In the Permian, that surge of CO2 was caused by a huge, long-lasting basalt flow event (a kind of large-scale volcanic eruption) called the Siberian Traps.
Today, however, the increase in atmospheric CO2 is largely manmade. Regardless of its source, the marginal warming effect of all that CO2 our electric power generation, heating, combustion engine-based transportation, and large-scale deforestation is producing will, without question, eventually result in a massive methane release, just as happened in the Permian. Our atmospheric CO2 levels are already very close to those that triggered the methane releases that resulted in the Permain Extinction, and there's no technolgy currently in existence that will allow us to "scrub" that CO2 out of our atmosphere. That, in turn, means that we're pretty much stuck with a future in which the planet warms suffiiciently to melt the polar and Greenland icecaps - and all the world's glaciers, as well - and release the methane clathrate deposits, too. How long this will take is the main unanswered question, now. The international consensus is that it will be on the order of a millenium before the planetary warming process reaches its peak, but there's some reason to believe that the icecaps are what used to be known as "chaotic systems" (i.e. - systems whose existing state is highly unstable, and subject to very rapid change if the conditions under which they are maintained change in relatively modest ways), and, if so, the collapse of the world's ice sheets could happen in as little as a century or so.
This is the problem with the plea for "simple answers". The systems we're talking about aren't simple - they're vast, complex, and (by the timescale of a single human life) slow-moving. The time to get out ahead of global warming was the 1970's. It's far too late now to prevent the planet from warming enough to melt the icecaps and change the climate sufficiently to result in another mass extinction event. At this point, we can only try to slow the process down, not stop
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InfoJunkie commented:
The article is very informative - thanks. Always interested in history - the more so computing hsitory.
Thanks for the complient.
If you're interested in a more detailed history of the invention and development of the ARPAnet, you might want to check out Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's book Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Taylor was a prime source of information for them.
The poster has it wrong.
Surprise!
Robert W. Taylor was never the head of DARPA. He was, however, the guy who proposed and ran the ARPAnet for DARPA, under Director Charles Herzfeld, until he left to become head of Xerox PARC. (Although he got the idea while J.C.R. Licklider was head of DARPA, Taylor didn't pitch it as an actual, fundable project until Herzfeld took over.)
Taylor absolutely does NOT credit Robert Metcalfe (developer of Ethernet) for the invention of the Internet. Instead, he reserves the lion's share of the credit for himself. I know this, because he called me in 1994 to lecture me about what he felt were inaccuracies in a column I wrote for LAN Times about the origins of the Internet. (Specifically, he objected to my statement that the earlier RAND thought experiment on a nuclear-war-survivable, peer-based, packet-switched network was the basis for the development of the Internet.)
You can read more about Licklider, Taylor, and others who were responsible for the devleopment of the Internet in my December 2000 Boardwatch cover story "They Might Be Giants", if you're interested in the real story, as opposed to the WSJ's warm, stinky piece of journalistic shit.
Narrowband proposed:
Almost sounds like someone should write a dystopian Foundation book, where the mathematicians race to predict each others' predictive abilities (and of course, stop them!)
It's been done by Donald Kingsbury
Good read, too.
Fifty square meters of space is utterly insufficient to grow enough food for 4 people, regardless of whether you stack "some" plants four units high. Period, end of discussion.
I'd say this plan is a long way from sufficiently baked. Much as I'd like to see it succeed, Lansdorp's response on the subject of food production makes it clear that this is, in fact, a scam.
Too bad. I'd've loved to live long enough to see a permanent colony on Mars.
seibai reproved:
Mr. Stark apparently doesn't know much about Japanese culture. "Sasuke" is a rather straightfroward reference to Sarutobi Sasuke [wikipedia.org], and the name has been used to invoke the idea of ninjas since at least the 1920's.
I sit corrected. My Japanese is a little rusty these days - it's been more than fifty years since I lived there.
YesIAmAScript complained:
But I do have to ask, how on-point can a review be if the reviewer didn't even watch the show enough to notice it didn't actually go to the end?
TFA (The Fucking Author) here. Two points in response:
1. It's an editorial, not a review.
2. I finished writing the piece two hours before Monday night's episode of "American Ninja Warrior" began its broadcast. Obviously I didn't then know that NBC would choose to spread the finals out over three broadcast weeks. And that's really beside the point, now isn't it?
hairyfeet inquired:
Does anybody think a McSame presidency would have been any different from a Nobama?
I do.
If McLame had been elected, there'd have been no auto industry bailout, and most of the American automakers would have gone the way of the dodo - taking with them all their employees' jobs, plus those of their parts and raw materials suppliers, and their dealerships (think "service departments", not just salemen). Plus their credit acceptance organizations would have gone with 'em, and that would have added more tens of billions in bad debt to the meltdown, and greatly contributed to the credit crunch. Plus, no consumer credit protection agency, for sure, because McLame would have vetoed it. Plus no healthcare reform of any kind, so people like my wife and I - both of whom have pre-existing medical conditions - would have remained locked out of any possibility of obtaining medical insurance. Plus Osama bin Laden would still be alive.
Oh, and when McLame keeled over dead from the pressures of the job, we'd be stuck with Sarah "I can see Russia from my house" Palin as Commander in Chief.
So, yeah, as disappointing as Obama's first term has been in many ways, I think there'd be significant differences in the current state of affairs had McLame been elected, instead. And not, you know, in a good way ...
plover responded:
So from the viewpoint of someone reading a rant from a writer who is despairing the fall of grammar, your point also seems a bit self-serving. "You need good writers because, well, I'm a writer!" ...
Is the value of good grammar strictly aesthetic?
I was merely clarifying that I'm a writer, not an engineer. As for my preference for good grammar being self-serving - I don't get that at all. In fact, it seems to me that self-service would argue in favor of extreme permissivism (i.e. - "HA! When they need good grammar, they'll now be forced to come to ME! Mu-HU-haha!").
And, no, the value of good grammar goes far beyond the aesthetic. To employ proper grammar, the writer must think through what he wishes to say, organize his thoughts so that they conform to accepted grammatical style, and carefully choose his phrasing for clarity and comprehensibility. In other words, the use of proper grammar requires thoughtful communication. It is essentially aerobics for correspondence, and it benefits the intellectual muscles of both the writer and his reader.
plover proposed:
Perhaps you are looking at this from an engineer's point of view instead of a manager's?
Actually, I'm looking at it from a writer's viewpoint.
But thanks for giving me the opportunity to say, "Fuck managers in the ass. Sideways. With a chainsaw." Because I could not possibly care less about their concerns if they were so many dung beetles.
As I'm an engineer, though, I completely agree with you. I just wanted to point out that there is an alternative viewpoint.
I'm quite aware that my point of view is not shared by everyone. I am, however, reminded of something my sainted mother used to say to me when I was just a lad, "If everyone else runs down the street with their pants down, does that mean you have to, as well?"
Of course, given the hip-hop fashion trend of walking around with your pants down, that question is now a good deal less rhetorical than it once was ...
FiloEleven remonstrated:
The rules for language are, or at least began as, descriptive rules. They tell us what the language was doing at the time. If people are no longer following the now-prescribed rules, and are doing so in a fairly consistent manner, I think it points not to their stupidity but to a semi-conscious decision that they don't care about the classical English rules and aesthetics, and are going to instead use what is convenient for them to use.
With all due respect to Benchley's Law of Distinction, there are two kinds of grammarian: the prescriptive kind, who takes up cudgels to defend the rules of language as defined by manuals of style (often derided as a "grammar Nazi"), and the descriptive kind, who observes the roles as they are employed in the current cultural context, and accepts their changes as evidence of the evolutionary nature of language (frequently scorned by the prescriptives as a "pantywaist permissivist" who is actively contributing to the seemingly-inevitable decline into the cultural dark ages).
I am neither entirely the former, nor altogether the latter. I tend cheerfully to disregard the stylebooks' ukases when they seem arbitrary and illogical to me, but hew to their wisdom as a general rule. For instance, I think the dictate that quotation marks must invariably enclose punctuation is wrongheaded, so, when I'm actually QUOTING someone, I follow the rule, but when I employ quotes merely to set off a word or phrase (think "air quotes" here), I put the punctuation on the outside of the quotation marks. Likewise, when writing formal documents, I am careful not to split infinitives, but in more causal writing, I ignore the rule and split 'em anyway, because violations of that rule are so ubquitous that it has become the "new normal" - and failing to split the infinitive therefore comes across as fustian and quaint. (Of course, when writing dialogue, I almost always split infinitives, because that's the way people speak. In fact, I only forbear from splitting infinitives when the line is spoken by a character who is not a native English speaker - because my observation has been that those folks almost always obey the rule.)
But this is Slashdot, and overheated polemic is an integral part of the sport in these parts. So, yeah, idiocracy.
I don't like it either, but it's a leap to go from "this person does not write with care like I do" to "this person is an idiot."
'Tis. Still, it provokes thoughtful responses from people like you, and that's a net plus, n'est ce pas?
gestalt_n_pepper proposed:
For example, "To boldly go where no man has gone before" (Split infinitive) vs. "To go boldly go where no man has gone before" (Equally bombastic, but grammatically correct).
Er ... not really.
Itiym: "To go boldly where no man has gone before."
Martin Blank opined:
You may be one of the rare few that can truly tax Word's grammar checker but the overwhelming majority of people who believe that it's useless are flat wrong. I see this at work basically every day. I work with people who have degrees and should be able to write fairly well (at least well enough to not lose a grade on grammar) but neither properly capitalize nor know the common homonyms. There is also the unnecessary capitalization of words because people think they're acronyms: I see "WEB" and "FOB" (access tokens) all the time. That the lose/loose problem is spilling into the workplace is an even bigger sign of the problem. I'd love to be able to blame it on the new Internet generation, but as I see it among older professionals who don't really spend much time online, I suspect it's just something working its way through the culture.
The thing is, none of the errors you list are mistakes of GRAMMAR. Instead, each of them is a USAGE error, as distinct from a grammatical one.
Grammar, per se, is structural in nature: basically, it's the rules of sentence construction. In common usage, grammar is often conflated with such topics as spelling, usage, capitalization, and punctuation, but they are, in fact separate issues. Tthe fact that you, yourself, conflate them is an indication of the size of the gap between what "everybody knows" about language, and what the technical terms they bandy about actually mean.
Those of us who care about such distinctions are vastly outnumbered by those who don't - and the disparity in numbers is growing. Texting is a contributor to the problem, as is the dismal state of public "education" in the U.S. So is the perceived casual nature of email and blog commenting, where errors of grammar, usage, spelling, punctuation and capitalization are so commonplace that they have become the new norm - and fuddy-duddies like me, who insist on employing grammatically-correct, properly-spelled-and-punctuated Engilsh, paying careful attention to usage, are looked at as dinosaurs, at best, or, less charitably, as elitist snobs.
Welcome to Idiocracy.
SteveFoerster explained:
There's no reason to be so hostile. I'm not saying that I have some special plan to bring about global capitalism, I'm simply pointing out that when people say this system is it that they're confusing it for something else. It's not really different from those people who mistakenly say Barack Obama is a socialist. He isn't — for example his health care plan isn't socialist, it's decidedly corporatist. If it were socialist it would be a proposal to make U.S. healthcare like the UK system.
What? Reasoned and objective analysis, rather than flame-spouting invective and hysterical self-righteousness?
Have you no shame? This is /., sir! How DARE you!
SteveFoerster opined:
Too many people on all sides of the ideological map don't understand there's a gigantic difference between capitalism and corporatism. In one, you actually have free markets, and inefficient businesses actually lose money and go under. But in the corporatist system we have, executives of giant corporations (which rely on limited liability that couldn't even exist in a real free market) cozy up to policy makers for mutual advantage. They're as different from each other as either is from socialism.
Man, am I sick of this argument.
"I fiercely defend free-market capitalism! But we don't actually HAVE free-market capitalism ... we have corporatism, instead. And, er, Ludwig Von Mises!"
Give to me a break.
We will NEVER have free-market capitalism. It's a mythical state of being, like pure communism. We will always have a tilted playing field, because human beings are not perfectable. People are crooked - or, at least, enough of them are that any economic system that depends on "fair play" to work WON'T.
Full stop.
The libertarian utopia is as much a pipe dream as the communist one, and for the same reason: both depend on humans to act in perfectly logical, reasonable, and predictable ways. They won't. They can't. Humans are irrational, short-sighted, emotional beings, not robots. Just as they're not content with "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," they're not willing to compete without seeking an edge, literally by hook or by crook. YOU may be willing to compete on a level playing field - but it only takes a few scammers and con artists to upend that field to the point where EVERYONE starts scrambling for an unfair advantage.
That's why regulated markets exist. Because humans lie, steal, and cheat - predictably so. Regulators come into being in an attempt to address those problems. Do the regulators get coopted, or misidentify problems and therefore apply inappropriate strategies to correct them? Oh, hell yes. That's because those regulators are themselves human beings, for which see above.
And around and around and around it goes.
FUCK Ludwig Von Mises. He isn't talking about the real world. The real world is crooked, unfair, and messy - and it's never magically going to change into the ideal, free-market condition about which libertarians, Randroids, and other such shut-ins so endlessly hyperventilate. Pull your collective heads out of your determinedly-individualistic asses, and DEAL WITH IT. There IS no ideal free market economy. There never WILL be an ideal free-market economy. And any philosophy that depends on the existence of an ideal free-market economy is a PIPE DREAM.
Grow the fuck up.
angel'o'sphere whinged:
I did not argue with you. you arguesd with someone else, and I made supposdly funny comment: "perhaps it was SF when it was published and is fantasy now".
Perhaps the humor in your ACTUAL comment, "At the point you read the stories they may have appeared to you as fantasy, at the point he wrote them it was SF," (note the difference between your portrayal of your comment, and your actual statement: in the original, there is no "perhaps," and you make an entirely unwarranted assumption about the context in which I read Bradbury's work) is obvious to you - but you're the only one. "Perhaps" that's because your comment wasn't funny at all - it was strictly argumentative.
Regarding "official" last time I checked imdb about star wars it was rated as sciense fantasy.
IMDB is hardly an authority on science fiction. This is a fundamental logical error on your part, of the type known as "appeal to authority".
Also I would not take one interview (which you seem to refer to) as a definition for his whole work
Again, what part of "I'm not a science fiction writer" IN BRADBURY'S OWN WORDS is unclear to you? Once again, fingers in ears, eyes screwed shut, and shouting, "No, no, no, NO!" at the top of your lungs, you continue to wade deeper into denial OF THE FACTS.
This: Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 â" June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer.
Is the first line of his page on Wikipedia. If you know better, then please go there, make an account and fix the page.
Again with the appeal to authority. Wikipedia is NOT an authority. The fact that any idiot can alter a Wikipedia entry to include personal opinion, counterfactual statements, and/or whole-cloth inventions makes it profoundly worthless as a citable source.
And I have neither the obligation nor the inclination to waste my energy correcting every mistake in the multi-terabyte Wikipediaverse.
Regadring your repeating of "kiddo", if that is the nick name for kid as I suppose, then please grow up, I'm roughly 5 years younger than you
"Kiddo" is a an English idiom. Like "pal" or "buddy", it's a placeholder for the name of a person being addressed. It CAN carry a connotation that the person being addressed is younger, but it does not necessarily imply an age difference. I explain this, because it's clear that English is not your native language, and I don't want you to mistake my meaning. What is important for you to understand about my use of the term is that, most frequently, the word "kiddo" is used to imply either a familiar, affectionate relationship between the speaker and the person being addressed, OR it is used to imply that the person being addressed is less knowlegeable about the subject under discussion than is the speaker. It is the latter context in which I employed it in my exchange with you.
Now kindly take your fingers out of your ears, open your eyes, and quit denying the facts. And, next time you're tempted to jump into a discussion with what you believe to be a humorous remark, either restrain yourself, or have the sense to stick a smiley on the end of it, to make your intent clear.
I recommend the former course, btw. Humor is clearly not your strong suit.
LienRag objected:
Fahrenheit 451 was science-fiction, as was the short story "A rolling thunder" and some (very few, I reckon) of others.
Bradbury himself said that Fahrenheit 451 was his only SF novel. I'll give you A Rolling Thunder, as well. That makes them exceptions to the vast majority of Bradbury's works, so my point stands. (And I suspect, from your, "very few, I reckon," that you agree with that point.)
Not being hard SF does not prevent a story from being SF...
Absolutely correct. Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold and Asimov's Foundation series both spring to mind as exemplars of "soft" science fiction from contemporaries of Bradbury. Likewise the stories of Clifford Simak, and a lot of Fredrik Pohl's early work. And so on.
But Bradbury, on the whole, was a fantasist and horror fiction writer, not a science fiction writer. I reached that conclusion when I was eight years old, and have never had reason to change my mind about it.
Again, I _like_ Bradbury's stuff. I just don't think it belongs in the science fiction section of the library. It's a way more comfortable fit over there on the horror/fantasy shelf with Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Whitley Streiber.
angel'o'sphere persisted in displaying his ignorance thusly:
Sorry, the official definition of star wars is "sciense fantasy". Space opera is a secondary category, e.g. you couild consider battle star galactica also a space opera.
"Official" according to whom?
And, no, space opera is a category all its own, going back to the late, great E.E. Smith and Edmund Hamilton - and far pre-dating the term "space fantasy"."
You really don't know ANYTHING about the history of science fiction, do you?
Also I don't really get why you arguing with me and even are insulting me, because I'm only a fan and not a how would you call it? A disciple of Bradbury? Why should I be oblieged to know his interviews or the man in person? I read his books, that is enough for me. After all I'm not a literture student or proffesor.
I'm arguing with YOU? Put down the crack pipe, Angelo. YOU took issue with my statement that Bradbury was a fantasist, not a science fiction writer. The way I see it, YOU are arguing with ME.
Oh, and your arguments are pure tantrum - you WANT Bradbury to have been a science fiction author, so you ignore HIS OWN WORDS to insist that he WAS a science fiction writer. And now you're whinging, because you've lost that argument.
Learn to lose gracefully, kiddo. From what I've seen here, you'll be doing a lot of it.
angel'o'sphere blathered:
Again, what part of "Ray Bradbury always referred to HIMSELF as a fantasist, not a science fiction writer" is unclear to you?" Unlear for me is that he did that :D
Because you don't know anything about the man. Here's just one (hint: try the second-to-last paragraph on for size) of many citations of his description of his own work as fantasy, not science fiction.
And clear for me is that mars chronicals is SF.
See above.
OTOH most of the categories are not well defined. And frankly I'm a bit tired about this. Is star wars fantasy or SF or is it science fantasy (what ever that is supposed to mean)?
You consider the categories of sf vs. fantasy ill-defined because you're an ignoramous.
Star Wars falls within the subset of sf called "Space Opera". It misses being fantasy by grace of the pseudo-scientific explanation of The Force being a product of midichlorians.
A 3-D video-wall with Smell-O-Vision that somehow magically transforms into the actual African veldt is NOT science fiction, Sorry this makes not much sense. Wether it is SF or fantasy can not be decided on this single sentence, but only in context.
Horseshit, sailor.
Bradbury proposes no mechanism by which the veldt display becomes an actual veldt. That's because it's a horror story, not sf.
You are a nincompoop, Angelo. Your argumentum consists exclusively of sticking your fingers in your ears, firmly shutting your eyes, and screaming, "No, no, no, no, NO!" at the top of your lungs.
I think you need a time-out.
angel'o'sphere posited:
At the point you read the stories they may have appeared to you as fantasy, at the point he wrote them it was SF.
Uh ... no. No, they weren't. I read the majority of his stories AT THE TIME THEY WERE PUBLISHED.
Again, what part of "Ray Bradbury always referred to HIMSELF as a fantasist, not a science fiction writer" is unclear to you?"
A 3-D video-wall with Smell-O-Vision that somehow magically transforms into the actual African veldt is NOT science fiction, regardless of how you slice it. It's Stephen King-style horror fantasy. That's true of the vast majority of Bradbury's so-called "science fiction" stories, including the entirety of The Martian Chronicles.
Art Popp commented::
...is found in that man's works. He is the reason my Mom understands the wonder of extraterrestrial life, the temptations and costs of technological solutions to social problems, and has any clue as to what her son is thinking.
I owe that man a great deal more than I've spent on his books.
No, no, NO. Ray Bradbury was a great, poetic writer, but he was NOT a science fiction writer. Period. He, himself, always characterized his work as fantasy, and I couldn't more enthusiastically agree.
I've been reading science fiction since I was six years old, and I never considered Bradbury as an sf writer, even when I was a child. Mainly, that's because there's NO science in his fiction. Poetry, yes. Horror? Plenty of that. Magic? It's ubiquitous in Bradbury. But science? Uh, uh.
Take "The Veldt", for instance, where a 3-D immersive wall display somehow turns into a portal into an actual African veldt, complete with a pride of hungry lions. Horripilating fiction, yes - but not SCIENCE fiction. It -like pretty much all of Bradbury's work - is fantasy dressed up in science fiction clothes.
I always resented the goddamned media portraying Ray Bradbury as a science fiction author, all the while ignoring his contemporaries (Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Anderson, etc.) who actually WERE science fiction authors. Back in the 60's, whenever there was some major science-y news story, they'd trot poor old Ray out, and present him to the unwashed masses as "science fiction author Ray Bradbury". And Bradbury, of course, would have noting of value to say about the science aspect of the story, because HE WASN'T A SCIENCE FICTION AUTHOR. In fact, one of my absolute fondest memories was the extended conversation between Walter Cronkhite, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur Clarke during the wee hours of the morning on July 21, 1969, while the Apollo 11 astronauts spent 6 hours sleeping prior to that first, historic step onto the Moon. One of the things that I most appreciated about that redeye special was the fact that RAY BRADBURY WASN'T PART OF IT. It increased my already considerable respect for Uncle Walter by a non-trivial margin, let me tell you.
Don't get me wrong, here. I enjoyed Ray Bradbury's work. He was an engaging writer, whose prose style often read like blank verse. I just never considered him to be a science fiction writer - AND NEITHER DID HE.
And, btw, if you want to read the work of a master of the human side of science fiction, try the late, great Theodore Sturgeon. HE was an amazing science fiction writer, whose work often reads like poetry, but, unlike Bradbury's, it was ACTUAL science fiction, not fantasy dressed up in scifi clothes ...
cpu6502 sneered:
First they complained because of "suburb flight" where affluent persons moved to the suburbs and left-behind a poor base in the city.
Now they are complaining that the affluent people are moving back in. I wish they'd make up their mind. Do they want the upper/middle incomes to leave the city, or stay in the city? Either way, it appears they will wine about it.
First of all, San Franciscans have NEVER complained about suburban flight. It isn't, and never has been an issue there.
Secondly, of COURSE they'll "wine" about it. The only real question is whether it will be a Merlot or a Cabernet.
Here's hoping that these EU parliamentary committees can make their objections stick.
And Anonymous Coward asked:
Who validates such bullcrap to be published on slashdot ? There is not even a single argument or anything, just FUD and buzzword.
In this case? Samzenpus.
cpu6502 blathered:
Public performance of copyrighted works, even legal recordings, is forbidden in the U.S. and the RIAA expects other countries to have similar laws.
Absolutely, totally, completely, and utterly incorrect.
Covering another songwriter's material is perfectly legal, whether you record it or perform it live - as long as the orginal recording has been in release for at least one calendar year. HOWEVER, if you cover a song, you MUST pay what's known as a "mechanical license fee" of 9.10 cents per copy for songs 5 minutes or less or 1.75 cents per minute or fraction thereof, per copy for songs over 5 minutes to the author or authors of the material (fee schedule courtesy Harry Fox Agency). That royalty rate is set by Congress, per international treaties.
I understand that talking out your ass is a favorite /. exercise, but ... really?
gregmark mused:
(o) So those trapped gases must have been in the air at some point, millions of years ago, and then planet did just fine. So what's there to worry about? Uh.....
The carbon component of "those trapped gases" (i.e. - methane) may well have been "in the air" at some point in the past - but likely not as part of a methane molecule. Methane is a gas mainly produced by the decomposition of organic material. When the last ice age descended (most likely because of a meteorite or cometary impact event), it swiftly buried boreal forests in ice, and Arctic temperatures have kept the ground that they're now buried under frozen solid (which is why it's called "permafrost"). As the temperature warms, and that permafrost thaws, the decay process that the ice suspended will restart, and cause the dead and buried plant life to rot, producing very large quantities of methane gas from the carbon that used to be part of that plant life.
As for how methane clathrates (the other very large source of methane gas releases) are formed, I have yet to see a convincing explanation of the mechanism. That notwithstanding, the fact that they DO exist is indisputable - and, when deepwater temperatures rise far enough, they definitely will melt, releasing their cargo of methane into the atmosphere (the so-called "methane clathrate gun" effect) more-or-less all at once.
The current consensus is that it was the global release of large volumes of methane in the transition from the Permian to the Triassic Periods that caused the extremely large (20+ degrees Fahrenheit) increase in global temperatures that resulted in what is known as the Permian Extinction - an event that resulted in the extinction of more than 90% of all then-extant species on Earth. What is particularly scary about that event - the worst mass extinction since the Oxygen Catastrophe - is that the release of all that methane seems to have been initiated by a sharp increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. In the Permian, that surge of CO2 was caused by a huge, long-lasting basalt flow event (a kind of large-scale volcanic eruption) called the Siberian Traps.
Today, however, the increase in atmospheric CO2 is largely manmade. Regardless of its source, the marginal warming effect of all that CO2 our electric power generation, heating, combustion engine-based transportation, and large-scale deforestation is producing will, without question, eventually result in a massive methane release, just as happened in the Permian. Our atmospheric CO2 levels are already very close to those that triggered the methane releases that resulted in the Permain Extinction, and there's no technolgy currently in existence that will allow us to "scrub" that CO2 out of our atmosphere. That, in turn, means that we're pretty much stuck with a future in which the planet warms suffiiciently to melt the polar and Greenland icecaps - and all the world's glaciers, as well - and release the methane clathrate deposits, too. How long this will take is the main unanswered question, now. The international consensus is that it will be on the order of a millenium before the planetary warming process reaches its peak, but there's some reason to believe that the icecaps are what used to be known as "chaotic systems" (i.e. - systems whose existing state is highly unstable, and subject to very rapid change if the conditions under which they are maintained change in relatively modest ways), and, if so, the collapse of the world's ice sheets could happen in as little as a century or so.
This is the problem with the plea for "simple answers". The systems we're talking about aren't simple - they're vast, complex, and (by the timescale of a single human life) slow-moving. The time to get out ahead of global warming was the 1970's. It's far too late now to prevent the planet from warming enough to melt the icecaps and change the climate sufficiently to result in another mass extinction event. At this point, we can only try to slow the process down, not stop