Alasdair Reynolds -- Revelation Space, Chasm City, Redemption Gap, Diamond Dogs/Turquoise Days
Ken MacLeod -- the Fall Revolution series, which go back a few years now (<cite>The Star Fraction</cite> was 1995) and his newer series, Engines of Light
Jon Courtenay Grimwood -- <cite>Pashazade</cite> and <cite>Effendi</cite>
Gwyneth Jones -- not exactly a new author, but I just finished <cite>Bold As Love</cite>, last year's Arthur C Clarke Award winner, and it's great.
Charles Stross -- mostly short stories so far, with one collection, <cite>Toast</cite>, from a small press, and one novel, <cite>The Atrocity Archive</cite> serialised in a British magazine.
John Meaney -- <cite>To Hold Infinity</cite>, <cite>Paradox</cite> and <cite>Context</cite>
You're a little out of step on those hardware costs. I bought my first PC in 1991, the year before -- a 25MHz 486SX with 100MB disk, well above the spec you quote, for about $1200.
They don't need more spectrum, they need more transmitters and more regulation of mobile phone companies. The UK is much more densely populated than the US, has much higher mobile phone usage per head and no more spectrum available for mobile phone use, but has generally excellent mobile phone service.
Remember, this is the man who is trying to remove the right to trial by jury.
Let us be fair to David Blunkett. There hasn't been a universal right to trial by jury for a long time, and few people think you should be able to demand a jury trial for littering or parking offences. Similarly, few people (not including David Blunkett) think that you shouldn't have the right to a jury trial for murder. So what he's proposing is moving the line -- I think he's moving it to far, but it's not "trying to remove the right to trial by jury".
Paperbacks are far from perfect. They're extremely bulky (I can fit over a hundred novels on a PDA that is much smaller than a single paperback of a short novel), they're not waterproof, they need two hands to read in anything approaching comfort, it's difficult and time-consuming to copy the data, and they're not searchable.
i thought that space was absolute zero for temperature, or at least something remarkably close. how in the world are they able to get something colder on earth than they can in space?
You thought wrong. "Space" doesn't have a temperature in any very meaningful sense, but if it did it would be 3K, from the cosmic microwave background radiation. In the vicinity of a star, however, objects will reach a thermal equilibrium where the energy they absorb from solar radiation matches the infrared they radiate away. This is a lot higher in the neighbourhood of Earth orbit -- the Earth, for example, has reached a thermal equilibrium of around 285K (complicated slightly by extra heat produced by radioactive decay).
Not true. The traditional XOR - OTP is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle active change attack. Picture a bank deposit protected with an XOR OTP. The MitM XORs the account number of the victim with (victim's account number ^ MitM's account number)
If the same chunk of OTP has been used to encrypt the victim's account number and the MitM's account number, then by definition it's not a one-time pad. If it hasn't (and the OTP is sufficiently random), then the XORs won't do you any good.
Referring to this as an "Anti-DRM" bill is not the way have any hope of getting it (or a similar bill) passed. Better to present it as a bill that supports DRM by clarifying consumer rights within a DRM regime.
You snipped the bit where I said there were exceptions. I'm in the UK too, and I know there are exceptions. The case in question may or may not be one of them, which doesn't change my basic point: you can normally sign away your legal rights.
The only time I signed one of these, it was actually a condition of the contract that I take legal advice before signing it, which the company paid for. I doubt it would have been legally binding otherwise. But that was in the UK, not Canada.
Of course, you can sign away legal rights, although there are exceptions. I have the legal right to stay in bed all day, but I have an employment contract that says otherwise, and if I exercise my legal right I won't get paid, and could in fact be sued for breach of contract.
I'm not in Canada, and I'm not a lawyer, but this is pretty basic in all legal jurisdictions derived from English law.
Does anyone know Nokia's position on warchalking to identify "community" wireless nodes that are intentionally open for all to use? Seems hard to equate that with theft.
Since when did it become that the consitution guarantees "...life,liberty, the pursuit of happyiness, and Hollywood producing content."
Since they inserted the bit in Article I Section 8 specifying that Congress shall have the power to "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;".
If the granting of copyright on their works is not promoting the progress of cinema arts by encouraging the wide distribution of movies, then it's clearly not doing its job and the studios should lose copyright protection for the movies that they're holding back.
Not that I care though. If it's good for safety it's beyond question.
It's certainly not beyond question just because it's good for safety. Safety at any price is a bad idea. If it costs $1 billion per life saved, you can save a lot more lives by spending the same money on preventive health care.
It amazes me how narrow-minded scifis are about what is pure and what is not.
American Gods is no closer to being "pure" science fiction (whatever that may be) than last year's winner, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. So it's possible that he just thinks it's a better book, and isn't pursuing some purist political agenda.
Creationism is annoying, but scientific elitism is worse. *If* you believe in god, then creationism is a much simpiler idea then evolution. Hence, if you believed in god and you acted scientifically, you *would* accept creationism.
Well, no. Even with a belief in God, creationism requires God to have planted massive amounts of deliberately misleading evidence for evolution. The simpler idea is that evolution happened just the way the evidence indicates.
As someone who considers himself, if not a creationist at least a skeptic about evolution, I was not aware of how Europeans see the issue. Is the difference cultural or philosophical? i.e. Is the lack of a phenomenon reflective of the protestant/evangelical movement in the USA or is it due to some element of philosophy unique to the American mind?
It's cultural. Biblical literalism is not a widely held belief in any Western country other than the US. And creationism is a desperate kludge intended to explain the natural world without having to give up biblical literalism -- without the pre-existing belief, it's no more likely that anyone will take creationism seriously than that they'll take phlogiston or epicycles seriously.
If you browse using your ISP's proxy servers, there are log files generated that can be retained. But I never do that. If you're going direct to the web, I don't think there are any logs generated, unless your ISP logs every packet. So I don't see how they can retain them.
It's not, technically, a tax. Money the government makes you pay to them is a tax. Money the government makes you pay to somebody else is not a tax. Or do you consider compulsory car insurance or employer's liability insurance to be taxes?
I pay my TV license fee, I get BBC 1, BBC 2, BBC 3, BBC 4, CBBC, BBC News 24, BBC Parliament, six national radio stations and a nationwide chain of regional stations. Since none of them carry advertisements, I don't think they'll be much affected by ad-stripping technologies.
It's the Internet, in case you hadn't noticed. What do you mean by a "local" band? Where would a non-local band be from -- Mars? No, wait, NASA is extending the Internet to the planets they have probes orbiting -- it'd have to be Pluto.
The calculation is easy if you assume the station at the south pole is exactly at the axial pole, the earth is a perfect sphere, and the station is on the surface of the sphere. It has to be infinitely deep. Those assumptions are all simplifications, but in fact they're all reasonably accurate.
I thought of this, too. But how are you going to power those wireless repeaters. Solar is a bit of a bust, since it's dark for five or six months of the year. Of course, you could always lay a power cable...
Slashdot Mirror
Alasdair Reynolds -- Revelation Space, Chasm City, Redemption Gap, Diamond Dogs/Turquoise Days
Ken MacLeod -- the Fall Revolution series, which go back a few years now (<cite>The Star Fraction</cite> was 1995) and his newer series, Engines of Light
Jon Courtenay Grimwood -- <cite>Pashazade</cite> and <cite>Effendi</cite>
Gwyneth Jones -- not exactly a new author, but I just finished <cite>Bold As Love</cite>, last year's Arthur C Clarke Award winner, and it's great.
Charles Stross -- mostly short stories so far, with one collection, <cite>Toast</cite>, from a small press, and one novel, <cite>The Atrocity Archive</cite> serialised in a British magazine.
John Meaney -- <cite>To Hold Infinity</cite>, <cite>Paradox</cite> and <cite>Context</cite>
Robert Reed -- <cite>Marrow<//cite>
You're a little out of step on those hardware costs. I bought my first PC in 1991, the year before -- a 25MHz 486SX with 100MB disk, well above the spec you quote, for about $1200.
They don't need more spectrum, they need more transmitters and more regulation of mobile phone companies. The UK is much more densely populated than the US, has much higher mobile phone usage per head and no more spectrum available for mobile phone use, but has generally excellent mobile phone service.
Let us be fair to David Blunkett. There hasn't been a universal right to trial by jury for a long time, and few people think you should be able to demand a jury trial for littering or parking offences. Similarly, few people (not including David Blunkett) think that you shouldn't have the right to a jury trial for murder. So what he's proposing is moving the line -- I think he's moving it to far, but it's not "trying to remove the right to trial by jury".
Paperbacks are far from perfect. They're extremely bulky (I can fit over a hundred novels on a PDA that is much smaller than a single paperback of a short novel), they're not waterproof, they need two hands to read in anything approaching comfort, it's difficult and time-consuming to copy the data, and they're not searchable.
i thought that space was absolute zero for temperature, or at least something remarkably close. how in the world are they able to get something colder on earth than they can in space?
You thought wrong. "Space" doesn't have a temperature in any very meaningful sense, but if it did it would be 3K, from the cosmic microwave background radiation. In the vicinity of a star, however, objects will reach a thermal equilibrium where the energy they absorb from solar radiation matches the infrared they radiate away. This is a lot higher in the neighbourhood of Earth orbit -- the Earth, for example, has reached a thermal equilibrium of around 285K (complicated slightly by extra heat produced by radioactive decay).
Not true.
The traditional XOR - OTP is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle active change attack.
Picture a bank deposit protected with an XOR OTP.
The MitM XORs the account number of the victim with (victim's account number ^ MitM's account number)
If the same chunk of OTP has been used to encrypt the victim's account number and the MitM's account number, then by definition it's not a one-time pad. If it hasn't (and the OTP is sufficiently random), then the XORs won't do you any good.
Geez, I wouldn't have thought an E15k could get slashdotted so quickly.
Referring to this as an "Anti-DRM" bill is not the way have any hope of getting it (or a similar bill) passed. Better to present it as a bill that supports DRM by clarifying consumer rights within a DRM regime.
You snipped the bit where I said there were exceptions. I'm in the UK too, and I know there are exceptions. The case in question may or may not be one of them, which doesn't change my basic point: you can normally sign away your legal rights.
The only time I signed one of these, it was actually a condition of the contract that I take legal advice before signing it, which the company paid for. I doubt it would have been legally binding otherwise. But that was in the UK, not Canada.
Of course, you can sign away legal rights, although there are exceptions. I have the legal right to stay in bed all day, but I have an employment contract that says otherwise, and if I exercise my legal right I won't get paid, and could in fact be sued for breach of contract.
I'm not in Canada, and I'm not a lawyer, but this is pretty basic in all legal jurisdictions derived from English law.
Does anyone know Nokia's position on warchalking to identify "community" wireless nodes that are intentionally open for all to use? Seems hard to equate that with theft.
Since when did it become that the consitution guarantees "...life,liberty, the pursuit of happyiness, and Hollywood producing content."
Since they inserted the bit in Article I Section 8 specifying that Congress shall have the power to "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;".
If the granting of copyright on their works is not promoting the progress of cinema arts by encouraging the wide distribution of movies, then it's clearly not doing its job and the studios should lose copyright protection for the movies that they're holding back.
It's certainly not beyond question just because it's good for safety. Safety at any price is a bad idea. If it costs $1 billion per life saved, you can save a lot more lives by spending the same money on preventive health care.
It amazes me how narrow-minded scifis are about what is pure and what is not.
American Gods is no closer to being "pure" science fiction (whatever that may be) than last year's winner, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. So it's possible that he just thinks it's a better book, and isn't pursuing some purist political agenda.
In fact, I think there are regulations governing the transport of most toxic substances across state lines...
Well, no. Even with a belief in God, creationism requires God to have planted massive amounts of deliberately misleading evidence for evolution. The simpler idea is that evolution happened just the way the evidence indicates.
As someone who considers himself, if not a creationist at least a skeptic about evolution, I was not aware of how Europeans see the issue. Is the difference cultural or philosophical? i.e. Is the lack of a phenomenon reflective of the protestant/evangelical movement in the USA or is it due to some element of philosophy unique to the American mind?
It's cultural. Biblical literalism is not a widely held belief in any Western country other than the US. And creationism is a desperate kludge intended to explain the natural world without having to give up biblical literalism -- without the pre-existing belief, it's no more likely that anyone will take creationism seriously than that they'll take phlogiston or epicycles seriously.
If you browse using your ISP's proxy servers, there are log files generated that can be retained. But I never do that. If you're going direct to the web, I don't think there are any logs generated, unless your ISP logs every packet. So I don't see how they can retain them.
It's not, technically, a tax. Money the government makes you pay to them is a tax. Money the government makes you pay to somebody else is not a tax. Or do you consider compulsory car insurance or employer's liability insurance to be taxes?
I pay my TV license fee, I get BBC 1, BBC 2, BBC 3, BBC 4, CBBC, BBC News 24, BBC Parliament, six national radio stations and a nationwide chain of regional stations. Since none of them carry advertisements, I don't think they'll be much affected by ad-stripping technologies.
It works for me.
It's the Internet, in case you hadn't noticed. What do you mean by a "local" band? Where would a non-local band be from -- Mars? No, wait, NASA is extending the Internet to the planets they have probes orbiting -- it'd have to be Pluto.
The calculation is easy if you assume the station at the south pole is exactly at the axial pole, the earth is a perfect sphere, and the station is on the surface of the sphere. It has to be infinitely deep. Those assumptions are all simplifications, but in fact they're all reasonably accurate.
I thought of this, too. But how are you going to power those wireless repeaters. Solar is a bit of a bust, since it's dark for five or six months of the year. Of course, you could always lay a power cable...