one problem with advanced technology is that it is often indistinguishable from magic as every SF reader knows. The downside is how people respond to magic with awe and fear.
ugh, radiation bad, me no like radiation. it heap bad juju; it give Grog cancer.
Meanwhile, Grog likes woodstove and fireplace. Note that the pleasure of such heat sources is infrared radiation. There is a lot of difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.
the article says these devices would use BETA radiation. Whazzat? fast electrons. If they won't penetrate skin, they won't cause mutations, they won't give Grog cancer.
Slashdotters SHOULD know better. If we're half as smart as we think ourselves, then we ought to be able to distinguish between beta radiation, infrared radiation, etc. and also the safe energy levels of each type of radiation
Folks, we have a leadership role here. If we know the techie background to say whether something is safe or not, we ought to apply it to this kind of stuff.
An optical mouse does not require special proprietary paper. Long, long ago optical mice used special silver plates with printed gridwork thereon, but now optical mousies work anywhere. As I understand it, an optical mouse differences two images deducing motion without bothering with proprietary paper.
Why couldn't a motivated hacker kludge together a Cross pen and the guts of an optical mouse together to accomplish the same thing? Add a little switch on the ink refill that closes when you push down and this will work just like a mouse. Software? Any mouse driver.
For bonus points, use a wireless optical mouse in this franken-pen.
If some hacker demonstrates this and gets it into the public domain, we'll be able to buy these gizmos from all over.
This may be a place of unintended consequences. If the market is denied sanitized versions of films, then there will be more pressure placed upon the studios to sanitize those films upstream.
This is a market solution to the problem of objectionable speech. The Supreme Court has observed that community standards vary. With censored and uncensored versions of the same films, clearly marked, the market can choose freely.
Nobody wants to subject the filmmakers to prior restraint on what they can say. However, if i want freedom FROM objectionable speech and i'm denied a bowlderized version, I'll apply pressure and more readily accept censorship to start getting "clean" films again.
There is a fear that religious types will impose their moral standards on everyone else. In this case, the religious types are trying to get "clean" movies without bugging everyone else.
Disclaimer: I'm a Fundamentalist Baptist Deacon. I have no desire to mess with how you you live. What I want most is to live peaceably according to my own moral standards. How you live is between you and God--and i'm not God.
I think the only way that western civilization can survive the monopolists is for the marketplace to reject Censorchips from Intel, AMD and whoever else wants to produce them.
One good thing is that the US market is not the entire world. If China and the 3rd world has any smarts at all, they'll reject Palladium and related technologies.
The issue is trust. I think it unwise to trust Bill Gates or George Bush or even Richard Stallman with the power to decide which programs I can run and which files I can view.
We are part of the marketplace and we have to make sure censorchips fail in the marketplace.
my "WARNING: a Christian topic follows" was not intended as whining about being persecuted. Some people are bothered by religious topics, I am sensitive to this, and I invite them to skip to the next message.
Slashdot is News for Nerds, not Novinas for Nazarenes, so the topic might be inappropriate. My question should be moderated up/down accordingly.
I find it amusing that someone who goesn't give an excrement on a topic should bother to post an announcement of this disinterest.
Incidentally, I just learned that "bias" should be used when you unfairly favor something, and that "prejudice" should be used when you unfairly disfavor something. Ergo, everyone should whine about "prejudice" (not bias) when we feel persecuted. (Everyone should feel free to feel persecuted for other stuff than just religion.)
Missionaries
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
WARNING: a Christian topic follows. Close your eyes and stop your ears if that bothers you.
I hear that Mr. Wall once wanted to be a missionary translator but that a chronic health problem prevented him from going someplace foreign. I further hear that missionary translators use Perl a lot.
Has he heard any cool stories about how missionaries use Perl?
Would he ever want to do a short-term missionary gig?
I think testing should considered at the very beginning of the software development cycle. When we decide "what" the software should do, we need to identify a way to prove to ourselves it happened and it was right. (Requirements.) When we decide "how" we'll implement our requirements, we need to identify a way to prove that design is working. (Design.) When we code, we need to identify the procedure we'll follow to make sure all of the above is proved correct.
Personally, I prefer automated tests because testing always occurs at the end of the test cycle when deadlines are bearing down, and the pressure to put a fork in it is high. People under pressure are wont to do the least possible to get the job done. If testing is automated, it's relatively painless and quick, thus more testing occurs for unit time.
Of course, if you want to automate testing of some GUI oriented program, you have to think about how you'll do that (scripting anyone?) at the early requirements and design phases. I try to put a scripting interface in every app I write so I can run a test batch file.
If my characterization of the s/w devel process sounds too waterfallish, I'm sorry, I've been doing this for 20 years and I'm stuck in a rut.
One of the things i've noticed is that good authors are "packaged" as non-SF writers by their publishers to reach out to a wider audience.
Good example is Neal Stephenson whose _Cryptonomicon_ is sorta SF, but it is also sorta historical what with that parallel thread that shows WW2 and the Japanese gold. And even Stephenson's contemporary-near-future thread is more science-fact than SF.
I can only hope that SF will be released from its "ghetto" status and get the same respect as other genres. I'm skeptical, but hopeful.
This is more than just SF. Publishers have been criticized for only supporting blockbusters. And that focus causes them to do stupid things, like pay Hillary Clifton millions for a book that sells a few thousand copies. With better instrumentation, the value of mid-list titles may be enhanced. Let's hope someone other than rich white guy names (Clancy, King, etc.) will get good book deals. Of course, when The Rock can make the bestseller lists, I get really depressed.
Now, if i were to have my pay cut in half, i'd say nothing, cut my effort in half and use the spare time to get a moonlighting gig. if my boss found out about my respone, he'd blow a fuse and maybe fire me. SO WHAT. I live on less than I make and thus have a war chest that I can use to keep me afloat during transition.
If you know who Dave Ramsey is, you have heard that savings accounts and paid off mortages are a Good Thing. As geeks, we generally have a good enough market position to command salaries with room for some discretionary funds.
Now, what if all the geeks at that company had war chests and budgets that allowed them to live for the next six months without a paycheck. Six months would allow you to start your own company and then you could get successful and subject your employees to a 50% pay cut.
This is sucky advice if you've been pinched by your employer in this way. What you'll do is tighten your belt and get through the hard times. I did it when i was laid off a decade ago. AFTER I started working again, i continued to live in skinflint mode for several months. AFTER I paid off all my mortgages, I loosened up again and started buying toys again.
Incidentally, back in '80 when i got my first credit card, i vowed that the month I carried forward a balance, that month I'd cut up all the credit cards. Credit Card debt, like the Lotto, is a voluntary tax on people who are bad at math.
My advice is to live on 80% of what you make and then bank & give away the rest.
I read "May Be Some Time" and i think Brenda Clough was ripped off. She was amazing reproducing the "turn of the last century" voice of the protagonist. i really thought i was seeing through the eyes of a officer the British Empire. If she did anything inaccurately, she made him too PC. Voice, concept, plot, characterization were all first rate.
(Poling's postulate of the Past: if you ever meet a person from the past, you'll think, "that barbarian" while s/he's thinking, "that flake.")
I looked at the hawkstein/lkaos debate and believe two smart guys are looking at the same dataset through two different paradigms.
Back in the C days, you could do major heap big juju with the preprocessor. It was hard to understand, but it was cool. Nowadays we have C++ and the bright boys who understand the language best are doing things in c-front that i used to do in the preprocessor.
It is a completely different paradigm.
Is the C++ a code generator that generates C++ code that, oh by the way, is in turn transformed into runtime opcodes? (i grokked this in chapter 2 & 3 of _Modern C++ Design_)
I'll wager that lkaos is a really good programmer who doesn't use templates or typedef statements very much. And if he's old enough to precede C++, he probably viewed the preprocessor with suspicion. Probably with good reason.
I think that when we say "generic programming" two different ideas are in play. i believe hawkstein thinks that generic programming means rely on mr. template author to come up with a generic way to express an algorithm so that once you supply particulars like int, float, & myclass, then mr. compiler will generate optimized code better implementing that algorithm than you could do by hand. (i'm not asserting that's true, i'm asserting that's the rationale.)
my suggestion to lchaos is to spend a few hours with _Modern C++ Design_ by Andrei Alexandrescu and grok the alternate way of thinking about typedefs, templates, and generic programming. You may still think it is still evil, but you'll understand better how it IS evil. And if you don't, you'll see where hawkstein is coming from.
btw, i love hawksteins' shy tenative way of hinting at what he thinks is best. < grin > i wish he wouldn't hold back so and tell us what he really thinks.
i've used STL and i love and have hated it. you do it right, and walla, all kinds of jizzy things are easy. OR make some teeny mistake and you get 5 lines of extremely dense and unhelpful error messages.
I've found that the STL learning curve is steep at the outset. BUT if you've got some teammates who can help you along, good: get a copy of the Effective STL books and _Modern C++ Design_, and take a peek at the boost library.
Once i started reading _Modern C++ Design_ and I started grokking "generic programming" better, funky games with templates, and the mindset of library designers, i mean GOOD library designers, woah! suddenly i got to understand *why* i'd see those 5 lines of unhelpful error/warning messages.
When i taught C/C++, one of the least PC things I say is that the compiler issuing error/warning messages is like a girl saying "no when she means yes." The compiler will say one thing when it means another thing. Thus the ugly error messages. The coolest things in boost/loki/STL are done in spite of the language/compiler, thus when you get off track, you'll see goofball error messages because of those workarounds.
Recently, we had a program that was running slowly. But a key data structure doing a linear search of a big array was done in STL. We changed 5 lines and suddenly a different more efficient search algorithm went in and walla, we saw a big speedup. if we had NOT used STL, we would have gone 'oh shoot, we picked the wrong data structure.' Just changing a vector to a multimap did all that.
Flush from this success, we tackled another problem that was jsut perfectly solved by a functor object. Heck, i couldn't even spell functor 6 months ago, and i've been hacking C/C++ since 1984 and I think that getting into STL has opened up a whole new set of paradigms that every C/C++ programmer should have.
In the old C days, i was a total weasel with the preprocessor, and that became wicked under C++. With templates, generic programming, and all those STL paradigms, you're exercizing the C-front parts of the C++ compiler, which may explain why I like STL weaselology.
If you're unwilling to learn STL and climb that learning curve, pick up VB and wrastle with getting the right VBX/OCX components installed, OR sell your soul to the Dark Lord and use.NET components, C# and/or "managed C++."
Or you could do Java. but i don't know how to do "generic programming" in Java.
Books, music, software have common elements with respect to distribution. Who is hurt by free copying of these products? I don't think authors are hurt.
What's the difference between me and Erik Flint and Robert Heinlein? EVERYBODY THE HECK KNOWS WHO HEINLEIN IS. (Other differences include having a book deal and writing talent. Look at the New York Times Bestseller lists and you'll see books written by professional wrestlers. So, I presume that writing talent isn't everyting.)
Let's go back to KNOWING who Erik Flint is. The more his books are copied, the more people are reading him. The more people who read him, the more people who might send some sheckles his way. If everyone in the free world reads Erik Flint, he'll be a bigger deal than Heinlein, or Clancy, or friggin' Faulkner.
For this reason, I don't think "illegal" copying hurts the artist, author, or programmer. Now, it can hurt the publisher, since the publisher's pricing strategy is based upon the artificial scarcity it creates.
The artist, author, and programmer are in a schitzo position: On one hand, we want EVERYONE to see our deathless prose. On the other hand, we want MAXIMUM payment for our work.
They needn't be contradictory if we can come up with a way to allow unlimited copies at very low cost. What I think we'll eventually have is a tiered pricing scheme. The kids (like me) who haunted public libraries and checked out all the Heinlein books will pay with mindshare only. The poor college students who haunt used books stores (like me) will pay a little more. When they graduate, they'll start buying paperbacks. The professionals with good paying jobs (like me) will pay full price for the hardbook books.
Conversely, the buying public may look at what appears to be greedy money grubbers, and say screw you. That's why I haven't bought any CDs lately.
i'm writing a SF story...
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 1
...about a Lunar Power Station. I think it is riduculous to suppose anyone would transport solar cells to the moon.
The raw materials are there to build the solar cells. There's a lot of vacuum that simplifies vapor deposition of surface coatings. My SF story has humans on site to install solar cells churned out by a small solar cell factory. A lot of automation and use of on site materials would reduce launch costs.
As for microwave power transmission, a few thousand watts is lot when its in a teeny metal box holding my coffee. But when its distributed over several square miles, the power is greatly diffused. A rectenna covering that space will concentrate the energy quite nicely. if you're still worried, may I suggest a tin-foil hat?
Nevertheless, i think the news story is exaggerated. We're more likely to only see Lunar Power Stations in science fiction stories. But hey, i write science fiction stories.
why not put a 802.11b transciever in a weather balloon and run netstumbler on it?
A little more seriously, why not buy a surplus weather balloon, tether it over your house and put a passive microwave repeater on it like John Dvorak did for his "bank shot?" Might make for a nifty way to get community wireless broadband out to the suburbs.
Just because Algore has an idea for a satellite doesn't mean it's a good idea. Questioning the scientific credentials of a wooden political hack is not necessarily politically inspired.
This does tell us something profoundly bad about state-sponsored research. 1) it can be misallocated to satisfy political dogmas (e.g. Hitler's eugeneics, and Stalin's Lysenko biology). 2) it perpetuates errors, demonizing attempts by scientists to pull the plug as politically motivated.
Two years ago, I wrote a novel. Then I entered the magical mystery world of trying to get the thing published. I could self-publish, but I want to write stories, not do marketing and distribution. I could also web-publish, but how'd anyone find out about it? (Well, you could probably follow this link.) So, I sought an agent. I got ahold of a reference book that listed literary agents and sent a query letter to the 30 most likely to like my book. I got a response back, inked a deal and waited 6 months while he tried to sell my book unsuccessfully.
There are zillions of authors like Clive Cussler or Tom Clancy who slave away for years just trying to get that first book deal. Most drop out for lack of perseverence. Some drop out for lack of talent. Some only sell a few books because of the vagaries of the marketplace.
Why? Because editors are too busy to read many novels and quit reading at the first excuse. Or they hire undergrad english majors to read for them and report back. Nobody ever got fired for not finding the best-seller in the slush pile. The author shows the manuscript around to a few friends and a dozen people total read the novel.
My Recommendation: e-books should be freely distributable. Napster them early and often. That increases the number of eyes looking at them from a dozen to a few hundred. If it sucks, those bits can sit untouched on a server somewhere forever. If it rocks, those hundreds of people will want a paper copy. It's hard to read an e-book on the toilet, in a hot-tub, on the beach, or in bed.
How many of you would prefer a hardcopy listing to a bound book? So, count on freely circulating and copying e-books, and plan on getting paid when folks buy it in dead-tree format. This also allows the purchaser to choose how much to pay for his book. Suppose I'm old and my eyesight is bad, I get the large-print edition that's one-off printed. Suppose I don't want to lug around 800 pages of Stephenson's _Cryptonomicon_ or Clancy's _Bear and the Dragon_, I buy the 5 or 10 volume set. Suppose I want the book bound in leather... The technology allows all these things.
The wider the novel is freely circulated, the more free advertising it gets, and the more marketing data the publishing data have as to whether the story will be a best-seller or a flop. The publisher loses e-control over e-titles, but those e-dollars are an e-illusion. Name one non-lawyer who's gotten rich in e-publishing.
I read with interest your column on how the human genome proves "Darwin vindicated." However, I found more restatements of your conclusion and distractions than I found statements supporting your conclusion.
Half your article dealt with statements irrelevant to the conclusion:
reporters flubbed
missed headlines
ballyhooed competition
pause giving medical privacy considerations
genecount envy
I waded thru this to find words that support your headline's premise.
"The genome reveals, indisputably and beyond any serious doubt, that Darwin was right -- mankind evolved over a long period of time from primitive animal ancestors." This does a good job of repeating the original formula "Darwin vindicated," but I fail to see how it advances the argument beyond clarifying what "vindicated" means. Then you say, "Our genes show that scientific creationism cannot be true," which is another restatement of your conclusion.
Then you quote Eric Lander saying "evolution... must make new genes from old parts." But you don't say how the genome indicates this necessity.
I PRESUME that your unstated premise is that designs coming out of an evolutionary process will be characterized by a more "jumbled together"-ness, and that designs coming out of a creator's design bureau will look much more like Bishop Paley's watch found on the heath (with every element of the design contributing to the overall goal of the cosmic watchmaker's design).
If this is the case, and I may have misunderstood your argument, wouldn't the evidence support an alternate formulation: "If humanity were created, then the genome shows us the creator tossed together a horridly kludged design?" This moves the argument from one of what's possible, necessary, and/or sufficient, to the aesthetics of design.
Don't we see the same phenomena in other human designs? Consider the cam-operated push-rod valve lifter in your car's engine. It's a design concept lifted from the pre-electronic machine age--an idea used in steam-operated looms. But you find it in an internal combustion engine adjacent to a computer-controlled fuel-air emissions computer. These similar solutions to an engine's timing/regulatory problems use radically different technologies. This juxtapose of technologies is analogous to finding bacterial genes in the human genome. Can we draw analogical inferences about how engines are designed?
You wrote, "The core recipe of humanity carries clumps of genes that show we are descended from bacteria." This sentence assumes its conclusion. Is it more accurate to say that the human genome shares clumps of genes with bacteria? This states the facts without imposing an interpretation on the reader.
If I understand correctly, the human genome uses design elements drawn from much much lower forms of life. A bit of DNA that solves a bacterium's problems gets reused solving the same problem for humans. (apologies if my term "design element" seems to assume a creator/designer. I only mean by that term a "clump of genes solving a specific problem" without intending to imply how that clump came together. Saying "design element" is less wordy.)
You write, "No one can look at how the book of life is written and not come away fully understanding that our genetic instructions have evolved from the same programs that guided the development of earlier animals." But isn't this just a restatement of your earlier interpretation of the genome "showing we are descended from bacteria"? Repeating the conclusion is less satisfying than trotting out the data that support the conclusion.
You make another interpretation that I don't quite follow. Namely that the genome shows "slow" transformation from one form to another. Is there some time-code attached to elements of the human genome that you didn't tell us about? Does this "slow" transformation between forms throw the "Punctuated Equilibrium" formulation of evolutionary theory into doubt? Does the genome support Darwinian evolutionary thinking and undermine neo-Darwinian theories such as punky e?
Now, I'm not saying you aren't right in saying that the human genome vindicates Darwin. What I'm having difficulty with is connecting the dots between the data "here's this genome with a lot of cruft and a lot of reused bacterial code" and the interpretation "Darwin was right."
That's where the creationist/darwinist argument gets so damned annoying. Partisans are so busy restating their interpretations of the phenomena that the phenomena themselves are lost.
what we need to do is put together a pseudorandom anticorporate speech generator and then have it generate a few gigs of messages that'll generate false hits for eWatch's trolling code.
General relativity ("go fast, get heavy") is pretty ridiculous on the surface.
That's Special Relativity, not General Relativity. General Relativity has its own weirdness: "sit at the bottom of a gravity well and time goes slower." Counter-intuitive as heck, but I seem to recall that it's been verified with atomic clocks at sea level and a mile high.
The relevant sections in the sci.skeptic faq aren't as harsh as depicted. The bit about vibration and stiction of scales causing vibrating objects to "lose weight" was quite reasonable.
Are the theoretical underpinnings of the BAe spinning superconductor experiments mentioned in the news article is the same as that provided by the gyro anti-grav folks? If that's the case, skepticism is indeed called for. however, I didn't pick up on any necessary connection between the gyro claims and the BAe stuff.
The bare statement "anti-grav would violate the laws of physics" bothers me. It presumes that some involate principle of physics is incompatible with anti-grav. (The sci.skeptic FAQ does not elaborate such a principle. To be fair, they didn't make that assertion.) IMHO blanket statements that something/anything is impossible risk crossing the line from healthy skepticism into unhealthy dogmatism.
If anyone can state a basic principle of physics that makes anti-grav a theoretical impossiblity, please state it.
Slashdot Mirror
one problem with advanced technology is that it is often indistinguishable from magic as every SF reader knows. The downside is how people respond to magic with awe and fear.
ugh, radiation bad, me no like radiation. it heap bad juju; it give Grog cancer.
Meanwhile, Grog likes woodstove and fireplace. Note that the pleasure of such heat sources is infrared radiation. There is a lot of difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.
the article says these devices would use BETA radiation. Whazzat? fast electrons. If they won't penetrate skin, they won't cause mutations, they won't give Grog cancer.
Slashdotters SHOULD know better. If we're half as smart as we think ourselves, then we ought to be able to distinguish between beta radiation, infrared radiation, etc. and also the safe energy levels of each type of radiation
Folks, we have a leadership role here. If we know the techie background to say whether something is safe or not, we ought to apply it to this kind of stuff.
An optical mouse does not require special proprietary paper. Long, long ago optical mice used special silver plates with printed gridwork thereon, but now optical mousies work anywhere. As I understand it, an optical mouse differences two images deducing motion without bothering with proprietary paper.
Why couldn't a motivated hacker kludge together a Cross pen and the guts of an optical mouse together to accomplish the same thing? Add a little switch on the ink refill that closes when you push down and this will work just like a mouse. Software? Any mouse driver.
For bonus points, use a wireless optical mouse in this franken-pen.
If some hacker demonstrates this and gets it into the public domain, we'll be able to buy these gizmos from all over.
Why can't this work?
almost as ironic as how RIAA companies (whose artists gleefully trash the Ten Commandments) whine, "thou shalt not steal copyrighted tunes."
This is a market solution to the problem of objectionable speech. The Supreme Court has observed that community standards vary. With censored and uncensored versions of the same films, clearly marked, the market can choose freely.
Nobody wants to subject the filmmakers to prior restraint on what they can say. However, if i want freedom FROM objectionable speech and i'm denied a bowlderized version, I'll apply pressure and more readily accept censorship to start getting "clean" films again.
There is a fear that religious types will impose their moral standards on everyone else. In this case, the religious types are trying to get "clean" movies without bugging everyone else.
Disclaimer: I'm a Fundamentalist Baptist Deacon. I have no desire to mess with how you you live. What I want most is to live peaceably according to my own moral standards. How you live is between you and God--and i'm not God.
I think the only way that western civilization can survive the monopolists is for the marketplace to reject Censorchips from Intel, AMD and whoever else wants to produce them.
One good thing is that the US market is not the entire world. If China and the 3rd world has any smarts at all, they'll reject Palladium and related technologies.
The issue is trust. I think it unwise to trust Bill Gates or George Bush or even Richard Stallman with the power to decide which programs I can run and which files I can view.
We are part of the marketplace and we have to make sure censorchips fail in the marketplace.
Suggest a cool story by Vernor Vinge on this topic.
Apologies.
my "WARNING: a Christian topic follows" was not intended as whining about being persecuted. Some people are bothered by religious topics, I am sensitive to this, and I invite them to skip to the next message.
Slashdot is News for Nerds, not Novinas for Nazarenes, so the topic might be inappropriate. My question should be moderated up/down accordingly.
I find it amusing that someone who goesn't give an excrement on a topic should bother to post an announcement of this disinterest.
Incidentally, I just learned that "bias" should be used when you unfairly favor something, and that "prejudice" should be used when you unfairly disfavor something. Ergo, everyone should whine about "prejudice" (not bias) when we feel persecuted. (Everyone should feel free to feel persecuted for other stuff than just religion.)
WARNING: a Christian topic follows. Close your eyes and stop your ears if that bothers you.
I hear that Mr. Wall once wanted to be a missionary translator but that a chronic health problem prevented him from going someplace foreign. I further hear that missionary translators use Perl a lot.
Has he heard any cool stories about how missionaries use Perl?
Would he ever want to do a short-term missionary gig?
How is his health nowadays?
I think testing should considered at the very beginning of the software development cycle. When we decide "what" the software should do, we need to identify a way to prove to ourselves it happened and it was right. (Requirements.) When we decide "how" we'll implement our requirements, we need to identify a way to prove that design is working. (Design.) When we code, we need to identify the procedure we'll follow to make sure all of the above is proved correct.
Personally, I prefer automated tests because testing always occurs at the end of the test cycle when deadlines are bearing down, and the pressure to put a fork in it is high. People under pressure are wont to do the least possible to get the job done. If testing is automated, it's relatively painless and quick, thus more testing occurs for unit time.
Of course, if you want to automate testing of some GUI oriented program, you have to think about how you'll do that (scripting anyone?) at the early requirements and design phases. I try to put a scripting interface in every app I write so I can run a test batch file.
If my characterization of the s/w devel process sounds too waterfallish, I'm sorry, I've been doing this for 20 years and I'm stuck in a rut.
steve poling
grand rapids, MI
One of the things i've noticed is that good authors are "packaged" as non-SF writers by their publishers to reach out to a wider audience.
Good example is Neal Stephenson whose _Cryptonomicon_ is sorta SF, but it is also sorta historical what with that parallel thread that shows WW2 and the Japanese gold. And even Stephenson's contemporary-near-future thread is more science-fact than SF.
I can only hope that SF will be released from its "ghetto" status and get the same respect as other genres. I'm skeptical, but hopeful.
This is more than just SF. Publishers have been criticized for only supporting blockbusters. And that focus causes them to do stupid things, like pay Hillary Clifton millions for a book that sells a few thousand copies. With better instrumentation, the value of mid-list titles may be enhanced. Let's hope someone other than rich white guy names (Clancy, King, etc.) will get good book deals. Of course, when The Rock can make the bestseller lists, I get really depressed.
Now, if i were to have my pay cut in half, i'd say nothing, cut my effort in half and use the spare time to get a moonlighting gig. if my boss found out about my respone, he'd blow a fuse and maybe fire me. SO WHAT. I live on less than I make and thus have a war chest that I can use to keep me afloat during transition.
If you know who Dave Ramsey is, you have heard that savings accounts and paid off mortages are a Good Thing. As geeks, we generally have a good enough market position to command salaries with room for some discretionary funds.
Now, what if all the geeks at that company had war chests and budgets that allowed them to live for the next six months without a paycheck. Six months would allow you to start your own company and then you could get successful and subject your employees to a 50% pay cut.
This is sucky advice if you've been pinched by your employer in this way. What you'll do is tighten your belt and get through the hard times. I did it when i was laid off a decade ago. AFTER I started working again, i continued to live in skinflint mode for several months. AFTER I paid off all my mortgages, I loosened up again and started buying toys again.
Incidentally, back in '80 when i got my first credit card, i vowed that the month I carried forward a balance, that month I'd cut up all the credit cards. Credit Card debt, like the Lotto, is a voluntary tax on people who are bad at math.
My advice is to live on 80% of what you make and then bank & give away the rest.
I read "May Be Some Time" and i think Brenda Clough was ripped off. She was amazing reproducing the "turn of the last century" voice of the protagonist. i really thought i was seeing through the eyes of a officer the British Empire. If she did anything inaccurately, she made him too PC. Voice, concept, plot, characterization were all first rate.
(Poling's postulate of the Past: if you ever meet a person from the past, you'll think, "that barbarian" while s/he's thinking, "that flake.")
I looked at the hawkstein/lkaos debate and believe two smart guys are looking at the same dataset through two different paradigms.
Back in the C days, you could do major heap big juju with the preprocessor. It was hard to understand, but it was cool. Nowadays we have C++ and the bright boys who understand the language best are doing things in c-front that i used to do in the preprocessor.
It is a completely different paradigm.
Is the C++ a code generator that generates C++ code that, oh by the way, is in turn transformed into runtime opcodes? (i grokked this in chapter 2 & 3 of _Modern C++ Design_)
I'll wager that lkaos is a really good programmer who doesn't use templates or typedef statements very much. And if he's old enough to precede C++, he probably viewed the preprocessor with suspicion. Probably with good reason.
I think that when we say "generic programming" two different ideas are in play. i believe hawkstein thinks that generic programming means rely on mr. template author to come up with a generic way to express an algorithm so that once you supply particulars like int, float, & myclass, then mr. compiler will generate optimized code better implementing that algorithm than you could do by hand. (i'm not asserting that's true, i'm asserting that's the rationale.)
my suggestion to lchaos is to spend a few hours with _Modern C++ Design_ by Andrei Alexandrescu and grok the alternate way of thinking about typedefs, templates, and generic programming. You may still think it is still evil, but you'll understand better how it IS evil. And if you don't, you'll see where hawkstein is coming from.
btw, i love hawksteins' shy tenative way of hinting at what he thinks is best. < grin > i wish he wouldn't hold back so and tell us what he really thinks.
smiles and cheers,
steve poling
grand rapids, MI
i've used STL and i love and have hated it. you do it right, and walla, all kinds of jizzy things are easy. OR make some teeny mistake and you get 5 lines of extremely dense and unhelpful error messages.
.NET components, C# and/or "managed C++."
I've found that the STL learning curve is steep at the outset. BUT if you've got some teammates who can help you along, good: get a copy of the Effective STL books and _Modern C++ Design_, and take a peek at the boost library.
Once i started reading _Modern C++ Design_ and I started grokking "generic programming" better, funky games with templates, and the mindset of library designers, i mean GOOD library designers, woah! suddenly i got to understand *why* i'd see those 5 lines of unhelpful error/warning messages.
When i taught C/C++, one of the least PC things I say is that the compiler issuing error/warning messages is like a girl saying "no when she means yes." The compiler will say one thing when it means another thing. Thus the ugly error messages. The coolest things in boost/loki/STL are done in spite of the language/compiler, thus when you get off track, you'll see goofball error messages because of those workarounds.
Recently, we had a program that was running slowly. But a key data structure doing a linear search of a big array was done in STL. We changed 5 lines and suddenly a different more efficient search algorithm went in and walla, we saw a big speedup. if we had NOT used STL, we would have gone 'oh shoot, we picked the wrong data structure.' Just changing a vector to a multimap did all that.
Flush from this success, we tackled another problem that was jsut perfectly solved by a functor object. Heck, i couldn't even spell functor 6 months ago, and i've been hacking C/C++ since 1984 and I think that getting into STL has opened up a whole new set of paradigms that every C/C++ programmer should have.
In the old C days, i was a total weasel with the preprocessor, and that became wicked under C++. With templates, generic programming, and all those STL paradigms, you're exercizing the C-front parts of the C++ compiler, which may explain why I like STL weaselology.
If you're unwilling to learn STL and climb that learning curve, pick up VB and wrastle with getting the right VBX/OCX components installed, OR sell your soul to the Dark Lord and use
Or you could do Java. but i don't know how to do "generic programming" in Java.
Books, music, software have common elements with respect to distribution. Who is hurt by free copying of these products? I don't think authors are hurt.
What's the difference between me and Erik Flint and Robert Heinlein? EVERYBODY THE HECK KNOWS WHO HEINLEIN IS. (Other differences include having a book deal and writing talent. Look at the New York Times Bestseller lists and you'll see books written by professional wrestlers. So, I presume that writing talent isn't everyting.)
Let's go back to KNOWING who Erik Flint is. The more his books are copied, the more people are reading him. The more people who read him, the more people who might send some sheckles his way. If everyone in the free world reads Erik Flint, he'll be a bigger deal than Heinlein, or Clancy, or friggin' Faulkner.
For this reason, I don't think "illegal" copying hurts the artist, author, or programmer. Now, it can hurt the publisher, since the publisher's pricing strategy is based upon the artificial scarcity it creates.
The artist, author, and programmer are in a schitzo position: On one hand, we want EVERYONE to see our deathless prose. On the other hand, we want MAXIMUM payment for our work.
They needn't be contradictory if we can come up with a way to allow unlimited copies at very low cost. What I think we'll eventually have is a tiered pricing scheme. The kids (like me) who haunted public libraries and checked out all the Heinlein books will pay with mindshare only. The poor college students who haunt used books stores (like me) will pay a little more. When they graduate, they'll start buying paperbacks. The professionals with good paying jobs (like me) will pay full price for the hardbook books.
Conversely, the buying public may look at what appears to be greedy money grubbers, and say screw you. That's why I haven't bought any CDs lately.
...about a Lunar Power Station. I think it is riduculous to suppose anyone would transport solar cells to the moon.
The raw materials are there to build the solar cells. There's a lot of vacuum that simplifies vapor deposition of surface coatings. My SF story has humans on site to install solar cells churned out by a small solar cell factory. A lot of automation and use of on site materials would reduce launch costs.
As for microwave power transmission, a few thousand watts is lot when its in a teeny metal box holding my coffee. But when its distributed over several square miles, the power is greatly diffused. A rectenna covering that space will concentrate the energy quite nicely. if you're still worried, may I suggest a tin-foil hat?
Nevertheless, i think the news story is exaggerated. We're more likely to only see Lunar Power Stations in science fiction stories. But hey, i write science fiction stories.
why not put a 802.11b transciever in a weather balloon and run netstumbler on it?
A little more seriously, why not buy a surplus weather balloon, tether it over your house and put a passive microwave repeater on it like John Dvorak did for his "bank shot?" Might make for a nifty way to get community wireless broadband out to the suburbs.
why not have macafee and norton simply install FBI snitch-ware in its next update and cut out the middle-man?
Just because Algore has an idea for a satellite doesn't mean it's a good idea. Questioning the scientific credentials of a wooden political hack is not necessarily politically inspired.
This does tell us something profoundly bad about state-sponsored research. 1) it can be misallocated to satisfy political dogmas (e.g. Hitler's eugeneics, and Stalin's Lysenko biology). 2) it perpetuates errors, demonizing attempts by scientists to pull the plug as politically motivated.
There are zillions of authors like Clive Cussler or Tom Clancy who slave away for years just trying to get that first book deal. Most drop out for lack of perseverence. Some drop out for lack of talent. Some only sell a few books because of the vagaries of the marketplace.
Why? Because editors are too busy to read many novels and quit reading at the first excuse. Or they hire undergrad english majors to read for them and report back. Nobody ever got fired for not finding the best-seller in the slush pile. The author shows the manuscript around to a few friends and a dozen people total read the novel.
My Recommendation: e-books should be freely distributable. Napster them early and often. That increases the number of eyes looking at them from a dozen to a few hundred. If it sucks, those bits can sit untouched on a server somewhere forever. If it rocks, those hundreds of people will want a paper copy. It's hard to read an e-book on the toilet, in a hot-tub, on the beach, or in bed.
How many of you would prefer a hardcopy listing to a bound book? So, count on freely circulating and copying e-books, and plan on getting paid when folks buy it in dead-tree format. This also allows the purchaser to choose how much to pay for his book. Suppose I'm old and my eyesight is bad, I get the large-print edition that's one-off printed. Suppose I don't want to lug around 800 pages of Stephenson's _Cryptonomicon_ or Clancy's _Bear and the Dragon_, I buy the 5 or 10 volume set. Suppose I want the book bound in leather... The technology allows all these things.
The wider the novel is freely circulated, the more free advertising it gets, and the more marketing data the publishing data have as to whether the story will be a best-seller or a flop. The publisher loses e-control over e-titles, but those e-dollars are an e-illusion. Name one non-lawyer who's gotten rich in e-publishing.
sounds to me like the good Senator has a bit too much bandwidth on his hands.
What follows is what I wrote to the columnist:
... must make new genes from old parts." But you don't say how the genome indicates this necessity.
Hi,
I read with interest your column on how the human genome proves "Darwin vindicated." However, I found more restatements of your conclusion and distractions than I found statements supporting your conclusion.
Half your article dealt with statements irrelevant to the conclusion:
reporters flubbed
missed headlines
ballyhooed competition
pause giving medical privacy considerations
genecount envy
I waded thru this to find words that support your headline's premise.
"The genome reveals, indisputably and beyond any serious doubt, that Darwin was right -- mankind evolved over a long period of time from primitive animal ancestors." This does a good job of repeating the original formula "Darwin vindicated," but I fail to see how it advances the argument beyond clarifying what "vindicated" means. Then you say, "Our genes show that scientific creationism cannot be true," which is another restatement of your conclusion.
Then you quote Eric Lander saying "evolution
I PRESUME that your unstated premise is that designs coming out of an evolutionary process will be characterized by a more "jumbled together"-ness, and that designs coming out of a creator's design bureau will look much more like Bishop Paley's watch found on the heath (with every element of the design contributing to the overall goal of the cosmic watchmaker's design).
If this is the case, and I may have misunderstood your argument, wouldn't the evidence support an alternate formulation: "If humanity were created, then the genome shows us the creator tossed together a horridly kludged design?" This moves the argument from one of what's possible, necessary, and/or sufficient, to the aesthetics of design.
Don't we see the same phenomena in other human designs? Consider the cam-operated push-rod valve lifter in your car's engine. It's a design concept lifted from the pre-electronic machine age--an idea used in steam-operated looms. But you find it in an internal combustion engine adjacent to a computer-controlled fuel-air emissions computer. These similar solutions to an engine's timing/regulatory problems use radically different technologies. This juxtapose of technologies is analogous to finding bacterial genes in the human genome. Can we draw analogical inferences about how engines are designed?
You wrote, "The core recipe of humanity carries clumps of genes that show we are descended from bacteria." This sentence assumes its conclusion. Is it more accurate to say that the human genome shares clumps of genes with bacteria? This states the facts without imposing an interpretation on the reader.
If I understand correctly, the human genome uses design elements drawn from much much lower forms of life. A bit of DNA that solves a bacterium's problems gets reused solving the same problem for humans. (apologies if my term "design element" seems to assume a creator/designer. I only mean by that term a "clump of genes solving a specific problem" without intending to imply how that clump came together. Saying "design element" is less wordy.)
You write, "No one can look at how the book of life is written and not come away fully understanding that our genetic instructions have evolved from the same programs that guided the development of earlier animals." But isn't this just a restatement of your earlier interpretation of the genome "showing we are descended from bacteria"? Repeating the conclusion is less satisfying than trotting out the data that support the conclusion.
You make another interpretation that I don't quite follow. Namely that the genome shows "slow" transformation from one form to another. Is there some time-code attached to elements of the human genome that you didn't tell us about? Does this "slow" transformation between forms throw the "Punctuated Equilibrium" formulation of evolutionary theory into doubt? Does the genome support Darwinian evolutionary thinking and undermine neo-Darwinian theories such as punky e?
Now, I'm not saying you aren't right in saying that the human genome vindicates Darwin. What I'm having difficulty with is connecting the dots between the data "here's this genome with a lot of cruft and a lot of reused bacterial code" and the interpretation "Darwin was right."
That's where the creationist/darwinist argument gets so damned annoying. Partisans are so busy restating their interpretations of the phenomena that the phenomena themselves are lost.
smiles and cheers,
steve
what we need to do is put together a pseudorandom anticorporate speech generator and then have it generate a few gigs of messages that'll generate false hits for eWatch's trolling code.
That's Special Relativity, not General Relativity. General Relativity has its own weirdness: "sit at the bottom of a gravity well and time goes slower." Counter-intuitive as heck, but I seem to recall that it's been verified with atomic clocks at sea level and a mile high.
Are the theoretical underpinnings of the BAe spinning superconductor experiments mentioned in the news article is the same as that provided by the gyro anti-grav folks? If that's the case, skepticism is indeed called for. however, I didn't pick up on any necessary connection between the gyro claims and the BAe stuff.
The bare statement "anti-grav would violate the laws of physics" bothers me. It presumes that some involate principle of physics is incompatible with anti-grav. (The sci.skeptic FAQ does not elaborate such a principle. To be fair, they didn't make that assertion.) IMHO blanket statements that something/anything is impossible risk crossing the line from healthy skepticism into unhealthy dogmatism.
If anyone can state a basic principle of physics that makes anti-grav a theoretical impossiblity, please state it.
I'd love to write a SF story using anti-grav...