Why not ask that question in a non-anonymous post?
But I'll answer it anyway. Because it's not worth the effort. I believe the assertions -- I've seen it happen. I could cite examples, but I won't, because I just don't care anymore. Including not caring about whether or not you believe a word of this post (whoever you are).
The Wikipedia moderation^Wedit system is broken. Fuck it, drive on.
With the probable exception of spam, anything posted was obviously notable enough to somebody to warrant the post in the first place.
More and more, huge tracts of Wikipedia make it look like the online compendium of popular culture, rather than a place to find out about possibly obscure but real world topics, inventions or discoveries.
Or further away with a more powerful transmitter and a directional antenna. Of course at the limit the attacker does away with the subtle apporach and just blasts the device with an EMP (or you with a shotgun). Depends on how "accidental" he wants it to look.
A couple of blocks from where I work, there's a parking lot roofed over (carport-style) with solar panels. (Part of a government demo project, the power is fed to the grid.) I could easily see these becoming charging stations as e-cars become more prevalent. Has the nice side effect of keeping the cars shaded and cool, so less need for car A/C in summer, at least for short commutes.
(Guesstimating the numbers -- 2m by 6m of panel per vehicle, panel efficiency <10%, so maybe 1.5 kW per vehicle? 12 kWh for a workday charge?)
My local power company pays me (or rather, discounts my bill slightly) to let them mount a remote switch on my house A/C unit. This lets them shut it off for short periods during peak demand.
Installing a similar circuit on e-vehicle charging systems would take care of oddly-timed peaks if everyone in the neighborhood is charging their car at the same time.
Unless there are a bunch of these closer than the nearest stars we can see, they'd make poor stepping stones. However, their existence suggests that other cold objects (icy, not pizza-oven hot like these things -- think Oort cloud or Kuiper belt objects like Sedna and Eris) may be more prevalent than previously thought. Those would make good stepping stones.
The stepping-stone concept assumes we'll never have FTL transport or even significant-fraction-of-lightspeed transport. (Bussard ramjets may be harder than we think.) However, given fusion power and something like universal assembler or replicator technology, we could imagine humanity slowly spreading from one interstellar "island" object to another like Polynesian islanders colonzing the Pacific by dugout canoe, ultimately arriving at the "mainland" of another star system with habitable planets. (Whether the descendants who reach another star would have any interest in living on planets at that point is an interesting question, worthy of a few novels.)
The idea has been around for a while (see also 'spome' - space home). My friend Brad Torgersen had a well-received novelette "Outbound" in an issue of Analog last year which used the concept.
And Westmoreland was pretty much right. For all the publicity, the actual outcome of the Tet Offensive was pretty much a disaster for the insurgents.
The Viet Cong lost badly, overall. The war was won by the North Vietnam (regular) Army, not the Viet Cong guerrillas -- and that because the US got tired of playing, gathered up their marbles, and went home. (Although as Sun Tzu says, defeat occurs in the mind of the enemy. From that POV the US was defeated - but not by the VC).
That said, you raise some fair points about the ultimate outcome of the current conflict.
Denver scrapped their automated baggage system years ago. Among other things, it had a nasty habit of mangling bags which (partially) fell out of the carriers.
Good point, and I'm sure that flautist was performing for himself as well as the five. (And I agree with you on the software front too -- having done a couple of decades in software development myself.)
A fair point, and yes, I do it because I want to -- and readers like you who do appreciate the effort. I know there are other writers, some quite prolific, who take the attitude "it's fiction, for crying out loud, just make stuff up!". Yeah, no.
If I ever get that desperate it'll be under a pen-name.;-)
(Not that I'm above tweaking a detail for the sake of the story, but I'll try to keep that to the realm of "not proven" rather than "known false".)
Thanks for asking. I don't want to spam Slashdot, so I'll send you an email. Or search Amazon for my author page (Alastair Mayer). All short stuff and collections so far, a couple of novels are in the works.
My audience doesn't care whether I created perfectly clean code for my implementation, so why should I?
In your case presumably the audience can never see how clean (or not) your code is, so perhaps the point is moot. (Might be different if you're writing open source -- in which case most of the users will still never look at the code, but a few will.)
In the flute-player's case, it was all exposed for the audience. Sure, only a few appreciated it. But if you are truly skilled at something, don't you want to impress those who can appreciate it? It's like a master magician performing an old trick in a new way. Most of the audience won't know the difference -- yeah, cool trick -- but other magicians in the audience, who know what to look for or the 'usual' way to do the trick and not seeing that, they'll be impressed.
I write hard SF. I go to great effort to get details right, although I know most of my readers will neither notice nor care. As long as I entertain them, that's fine -- and it's important that the details don't get in the way of that entertainment. However there are a few who will notice, who may even do the math. They're the ones I take that extra effort for.
All small gizmos are converging and for some reason, whenever application X combines with application phonecall, we end up calling the device a phone rather than an X. Phone is the "top" app (even if some people don't use that part of the device, it's still called a "phone").
A snag I ran into when writing some SF stories and wanted such a gadget but didn't want to call it a phone (too mundane). I ended up calling it an "omniphone", or omni for short, because it does just about everything.
In my short story "Stone Age" in the current issue of Analog, in addition to ordinary uses like camera and recorder, it's used as a heads-up-display (unfold the screen and fade it to transparency), a navigation system (inertial, they're on a planet with no GPS deployed), and a radiation detector. Pretty much any of which could be built into a phone now, actually. The omni has other capabilities which show up as needed in other stories. (In one, a bad guy has "blackware" loaded that makes it a Taser-equivalent. That probably needs a hardware mod too.)
Remote sensing is not exploration, even if the remote sensors also have manipulators. It's close, but you're still left at the mercy of what you designed the system to do before it left Earth.
Humans on Mars, for example, could likely have fairly quickly settled the ambiguous answers that Viking returned -- 35 years ago and still not resolved -- to the question "is there life there?". Humans are more than mere sensor operators -- they're designers and improvisers.
Professional soldiers cost a lot to train, and are overqualified for simple guard duty. It's fine if there's a draft or you've got plenty of soldiers sitting around otherwise idle, but there are a couple of wars on: all those expensively trained soldiers have more important duties than guarding a gate, which can be done by (less expensive, when all costs are factored in) rent-a-cops.
(Nothing against rent-a-cops -- I used to be one.)
Consider: a good reason to dislike crosses, drinking from the Holy Grail (which contained Christ's blood) confers immortality, and the very phrase "this is my blood you drink".
I mean, it's obvious.
That and the whole Romans vs Christians thing. Rome was founded by Romulus and Remus, who were raised by a wolf. It's clearly the whole werewolves vs vampires feud.
If I want to read a copy of a book she already owns I have to buy another copy of it, or wait until she isn't using the Kindle... which is rare.
The big ebook distributers, including Amazon, are now making it possible to lend ebooks. Of course that has to be enabled by the publisher. (It makes most sense to enable it for newer authors -- the more new readers they can reach, the better.)
Mind, there's still the format problem if one of you has a Kindle and the other a Nook or whatever.
A mark is something I've seen discussed in some pro writers' circles. It's overhead, though, and trying to get a bunch of writers to agree on something is worse than herding cats.
Some suggestions: pay attention to who the author is -- if you've like what they've written before odds are you'll like them again. If you haven't read them, what credibility do they have? Have they also written traditionally published stuff? Are they members of a professional writers organization (MWA, HWA, RWA, SFWA, etc)? Reader reviews? Amazon references ("readers who bought X also bought Y")?
And, for what little consolation it might be, now you know what a slush reader goes through at a traditional publisher.;-)
If you're a Name, traditional publishing gets you more money faster -- for now. If you're unknown, it's a toss-up (and depends on how well you write and in what genre).
A number of best-selling traditional authors have made news lately by turning down publisher offers (in at least one case, a $500,000 advance) to go indie with ebooks. And one highly successful indie author (Amanda Hocking) just accepted a seven-figure deal from a traditional publisher.
I'm a relatively new author (I'm a SFWA pro based on short story sales, but no novels published yet). The advance I could reasonably expect on a first novel -- which would take a year or two to see print -- I could make in that same two years of e-book sales at 5 copies a day (at $2.99 list).
Mind, it takes a newbie quite a while to build up to 5 a day (and if you only have one title, you might never get there -- the more titles you have up, the easier it is for readers to find you, and the more potential reward for them in investing the time and money to see if they like your writing.)
Of course if you're good and prolific enough to hit JA Konrath or Amanda Hocking territory, you too can sell a thousand or more a day. But it takes years to get there.
Most of the money in writing goes to the publisher and the retailer, not the author.
Well, the retail money is spread over a lot of retailers (and distributers). Traditionally the publisher took most of the financial risk (advances, paying for the preparation and printing, accepting returns from bookstores), which justified taking a larger share of the money. (Overall, though, the biggest slice goes to the retailers, but they're not a single entity.)
Many smaller presses offer authors smaller advances for a larger royalty percentage. At the limit, an author can self-publish, taking on all the financial risk but keeping all the profit (less costs and retail mark-up). Technology (both e-books and POD) are making it easier for authors to do this, and a lot of them (myself included) are moving that way -- although many of us are still hedging our bets with traditional publishing (which is still where most of the money is, even at an authors' small share).
Slashdot Mirror
Why not ask that question in a non-anonymous post?
But I'll answer it anyway. Because it's not worth the effort. I believe the assertions -- I've seen it happen. I could cite examples, but I won't, because I just don't care anymore. Including not caring about whether or not you believe a word of this post (whoever you are).
The Wikipedia moderation^Wedit system is broken. Fuck it, drive on.
This.
With the probable exception of spam, anything posted was obviously notable enough to somebody to warrant the post in the first place.
More and more, huge tracts of Wikipedia make it look like the online compendium of popular culture, rather than a place to find out about possibly obscure but real world topics, inventions or discoveries.
Or further away with a more powerful transmitter and a directional antenna. Of course at the limit the attacker does away with the subtle apporach and just blasts the device with an EMP (or you with a shotgun). Depends on how "accidental" he wants it to look.
A couple of blocks from where I work, there's a parking lot roofed over (carport-style) with solar panels. (Part of a government demo project, the power is fed to the grid.) I could easily see these becoming charging stations as e-cars become more prevalent. Has the nice side effect of keeping the cars shaded and cool, so less need for car A/C in summer, at least for short commutes.
(Guesstimating the numbers -- 2m by 6m of panel per vehicle, panel efficiency <10%, so maybe 1.5 kW per vehicle? 12 kWh for a workday charge?)
My local power company pays me (or rather, discounts my bill slightly) to let them mount a remote switch on my house A/C unit. This lets them shut it off for short periods during peak demand.
Installing a similar circuit on e-vehicle charging systems would take care of oddly-timed peaks if everyone in the neighborhood is charging their car at the same time.
tl;dr - just make the grid smarter.
Unless there are a bunch of these closer than the nearest stars we can see, they'd make poor stepping stones. However, their existence suggests that other cold objects (icy, not pizza-oven hot like these things -- think Oort cloud or Kuiper belt objects like Sedna and Eris) may be more prevalent than previously thought. Those would make good stepping stones.
The stepping-stone concept assumes we'll never have FTL transport or even significant-fraction-of-lightspeed transport. (Bussard ramjets may be harder than we think.) However, given fusion power and something like universal assembler or replicator technology, we could imagine humanity slowly spreading from one interstellar "island" object to another like Polynesian islanders colonzing the Pacific by dugout canoe, ultimately arriving at the "mainland" of another star system with habitable planets. (Whether the descendants who reach another star would have any interest in living on planets at that point is an interesting question, worthy of a few novels.)
The idea has been around for a while (see also 'spome' - space home). My friend Brad Torgersen had a well-received novelette "Outbound" in an issue of Analog last year which used the concept.
And Westmoreland was pretty much right. For all the publicity, the actual outcome of the Tet Offensive was pretty much a disaster for the insurgents.
The Viet Cong lost badly, overall. The war was won by the North Vietnam (regular) Army, not the Viet Cong guerrillas -- and that because the US got tired of playing, gathered up their marbles, and went home. (Although as Sun Tzu says, defeat occurs in the mind of the enemy. From that POV the US was defeated - but not by the VC).
That said, you raise some fair points about the ultimate outcome of the current conflict.
I think yesterday's installment of Schlock Mercenary is apropos regarding the military use of jetpacks.
Denver scrapped their automated baggage system years ago. Among other things, it had a nasty habit of mangling bags which (partially) fell out of the carriers.
Heh, I first misread this as "Alien structures have been detected from space".
But then I am in the middle of working on a sequel to "Stone Age" in the June issue of Analog.
Good point, and I'm sure that flautist was performing for himself as well as the five. (And I agree with you on the software front too -- having done a couple of decades in software development myself.)
A fair point, and yes, I do it because I want to -- and readers like you who do appreciate the effort. I know there are other writers, some quite prolific, who take the attitude "it's fiction, for crying out loud, just make stuff up!". Yeah, no.
If I ever get that desperate it'll be under a pen-name. ;-)
(Not that I'm above tweaking a detail for the sake of the story, but I'll try to keep that to the realm of "not proven" rather than "known false".)
Thanks for asking. I don't want to spam Slashdot, so I'll send you an email. Or search Amazon for my author page (Alastair Mayer). All short stuff and collections so far, a couple of novels are in the works.
My audience doesn't care whether I created perfectly clean code for my implementation, so why should I?
In your case presumably the audience can never see how clean (or not) your code is, so perhaps the point is moot. (Might be different if you're writing open source -- in which case most of the users will still never look at the code, but a few will.)
In the flute-player's case, it was all exposed for the audience. Sure, only a few appreciated it. But if you are truly skilled at something, don't you want to impress those who can appreciate it? It's like a master magician performing an old trick in a new way. Most of the audience won't know the difference -- yeah, cool trick -- but other magicians in the audience, who know what to look for or the 'usual' way to do the trick and not seeing that, they'll be impressed.
I write hard SF. I go to great effort to get details right, although I know most of my readers will neither notice nor care. As long as I entertain them, that's fine -- and it's important that the details don't get in the way of that entertainment. However there are a few who will notice, who may even do the math. They're the ones I take that extra effort for.
Yeah, ditto that.
That, and wondering if "reliable, well-engineered commercial software" is an oxymoron or just missing a sarcasm tag.
All small gizmos are converging and for some reason, whenever application X combines with application phonecall, we end up calling the device a phone rather than an X. Phone is the "top" app (even if some people don't use that part of the device, it's still called a "phone").
A snag I ran into when writing some SF stories and wanted such a gadget but didn't want to call it a phone (too mundane). I ended up calling it an "omniphone", or omni for short, because it does just about everything.
In my short story "Stone Age" in the current issue of Analog, in addition to ordinary uses like camera and recorder, it's used as a heads-up-display (unfold the screen and fade it to transparency), a navigation system (inertial, they're on a planet with no GPS deployed), and a radiation detector. Pretty much any of which could be built into a phone now, actually. The omni has other capabilities which show up as needed in other stories. (In one, a bad guy has "blackware" loaded that makes it a Taser-equivalent. That probably needs a hardware mod too.)
Remote sensing is not exploration, even if the remote sensors also have manipulators. It's close, but you're still left at the mercy of what you designed the system to do before it left Earth.
Humans on Mars, for example, could likely have fairly quickly settled the ambiguous answers that Viking returned -- 35 years ago and still not resolved -- to the question "is there life there?". Humans are more than mere sensor operators -- they're designers and improvisers.
Professional soldiers cost a lot to train, and are overqualified for simple guard duty. It's fine if there's a draft or you've got plenty of soldiers sitting around otherwise idle, but there are a couple of wars on: all those expensively trained soldiers have more important duties than guarding a gate, which can be done by (less expensive, when all costs are factored in) rent-a-cops.
(Nothing against rent-a-cops -- I used to be one.)
Happy Zombie Jesus day to you too...
Not zombie, vampire.
Consider: a good reason to dislike crosses, drinking from the Holy Grail (which contained Christ's blood) confers immortality, and the very phrase "this is my blood you drink".
I mean, it's obvious.
That and the whole Romans vs Christians thing. Rome was founded by Romulus and Remus, who were raised by a wolf. It's clearly the whole werewolves vs vampires feud.
by having multiple beams pulse such that they intersect on one spot
The next step is to replace the gasoline with tiny deuterium pellets...
Not in the music biz they haven't.
Apple (the computer company) has been somewhat restrained in that area by an old lawsuit by Apple Records (the Beatles-founded music company).
If I want to read a copy of a book she already owns I have to buy another copy of it, or wait until she isn't using the Kindle ... which is rare.
The big ebook distributers, including Amazon, are now making it possible to lend ebooks. Of course that has to be enabled by the publisher. (It makes most sense to enable it for newer authors -- the more new readers they can reach, the better.)
Mind, there's still the format problem if one of you has a Kindle and the other a Nook or whatever.
A mark is something I've seen discussed in some pro writers' circles. It's overhead, though, and trying to get a bunch of writers to agree on something is worse than herding cats.
Some suggestions: pay attention to who the author is -- if you've like what they've written before odds are you'll like them again. If you haven't read them, what credibility do they have? Have they also written traditionally published stuff? Are they members of a professional writers organization (MWA, HWA, RWA, SFWA, etc)? Reader reviews? Amazon references ("readers who bought X also bought Y")?
And, for what little consolation it might be, now you know what a slush reader goes through at a traditional publisher. ;-)
If you're a Name, traditional publishing gets you more money faster -- for now. If you're unknown, it's a toss-up (and depends on how well you write and in what genre).
A number of best-selling traditional authors have made news lately by turning down publisher offers (in at least one case, a $500,000 advance) to go indie with ebooks. And one highly successful indie author (Amanda Hocking) just accepted a seven-figure deal from a traditional publisher.
I'm a relatively new author (I'm a SFWA pro based on short story sales, but no novels published yet). The advance I could reasonably expect on a first novel -- which would take a year or two to see print -- I could make in that same two years of e-book sales at 5 copies a day (at $2.99 list).
Mind, it takes a newbie quite a while to build up to 5 a day (and if you only have one title, you might never get there -- the more titles you have up, the easier it is for readers to find you, and the more potential reward for them in investing the time and money to see if they like your writing.)
Of course if you're good and prolific enough to hit JA Konrath or Amanda Hocking territory, you too can sell a thousand or more a day. But it takes years to get there.
Most of the money in writing goes to the publisher and the retailer, not the author.
Well, the retail money is spread over a lot of retailers (and distributers). Traditionally the publisher took most of the financial risk (advances, paying for the preparation and printing, accepting returns from bookstores), which justified taking a larger share of the money. (Overall, though, the biggest slice goes to the retailers, but they're not a single entity.)
Many smaller presses offer authors smaller advances for a larger royalty percentage. At the limit, an author can self-publish, taking on all the financial risk but keeping all the profit (less costs and retail mark-up). Technology (both e-books and POD) are making it easier for authors to do this, and a lot of them (myself included) are moving that way -- although many of us are still hedging our bets with traditional publishing (which is still where most of the money is, even at an authors' small share).