As I've said before, the best way to get the United States back into space would be if a few Saudi billionaires announced plans to fund and setup the Islamic State of Luna.
We'd be vacationing on Mars within 20 years.
The idea of New Beijing on the moon would probably work, too.
I read the first two "House" books and they have forever tainted the admiration I had for the "real" Dune books -- something even the abysmal movies hadn't managed to do.
I agree. When I read SF from the 40's or 50's, it is interesting on several different levels: story, characters, politics, what they got right, what they got wrong, etc. The "what they got wrong" part rarely, if ever, ruins a story.
Where technology *does* ruin a story is when it is inconsistent or ruins the plotting (see: Star Trek) or when the author botches simple facts that he or she *should* know (like basic physics or astronomy). Even if the mistakes have nothing to do with the story, they make me sit back and say "What an idiot! Can I trust anything else they say?" A lot of "mainstream" authors writing SF do this. As do almost every single SF movie ever made.
If *I* ever had anything to do with a SF movie or TV show, I would screen it to a random sampling of Slashdotters for technical mistakes.
Let me preface this by saying that I *like* SF that makes me think, including puzzling out jargon and social norms, or interpolating history by off hand references, and any number of these other tricks that make SF unreadable to most readers.
Having said that, I have tried reading A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky 2 or 3 times each and they never clicked for me. I'd get 100 or so pages in and realize that I just didn't give a shit about what was going on.
I'm not saying they aren't good books (and I may read them in a few years and decide they are some of my favorites -- it's happened before), but they aren't to everyone's taste.
I reminds me of the essay by Jorge Luis Borges where he talks about books being a dialogue between the writer and the reader and not just an artifact. He makes the point that there are more books that *you* would like than you can read in a lifetime, so if you're reading a book and not enjoying it -- it wasn't written for you. Put it down and find another one that was.
I think that's what Robinson is saying and I agree with him and you. With few exceptions, the science fiction section at Wal-Mart has Star Trek/Wars books and maybe a fantasy novel or two. Usually the latest Card book in PB. Target never carries SF at all unless it is a hardback bestseller or a Michael Crichton book.
It it completely ironic that economics are against diversity. Every really cool video store in my area has gone from having 1 or 2 copies of almost everything to having 50+ copies of every new release, selling them as previously viewed as soon as the novelty wears off, and losing their entire back stock to attrition ("Oh yeah, we had that but the DVD got scratched (or the tape broke) and we didn't replace it"). The fact is, those people have to make a living and that's what makes money -- having a copy of a new release on the weekend after it is released, not having a copy of Tarkovsky's Solaris that might get rented one or two times a year.
This is one of the reasons why I give Amazon.com some slack -- if it is in print, I can probably find it there. If it's out of print, I have a good chance of finding it through their affiliated dealers.
Because of all of this, I find few new authors the way I used to -- by browing the shelves, reading the back cover and a few random pages, and taking a chance on buying it. If I have to seek out and order the damned thing, it's usually because I already know the author or I've read reviews by people I trust.
Has anyone figured out how libraries classify their fiction? I find many of the mainstream SF authors with some books in the SF section and some in the general fiction section. Orson Scott Card's Homebody, a non-SF fantasy/ghost story type thing was in SF, but Card's Memory of Earth was in the fiction section. Crichton, Clarke, even Heinlein (Friday was in the fiction section) are scattered at random. "Literary" SF/Fantasy (like "Lost in a Good Book") is always in fiction. Do publishers assign Dewey Decimal numbers, or is it up to the library?
The Books-A-Million chain does the same thing. I expect Bradbury to be in Literature, but I think it's weird to put Mercedes Lackey and John Ringo in the Fiction/Literature section, but that's where their latest books are. It can't just be stupid stock clerks -- these are books with dragons and spaceships on the covers.
With the exception of Pratchett, I had given up on reading fantasy because of the dearth of ideas and style in the genre. Recently, there have been a few books (and series) that made me think there was hope for the genre:
The Assassin Trilogy, The Fool series, The Ship series by Robin Hobb
Game of Thrones series, by George R. R. Martin
The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold
All of these have interesting points of view, non-traditional plots, and at least some degree of insight into the human condition (politics, religion, sociology, and history) that are not present in the common Tolkeinesque fantasy bookshelf.
Also, as others have pointed out, there are quite a few "modern" fantasies that sidestep the sword and sorcery mold and fit the SF as "speculative fiction", not just "science fiction" mold. Neil Gaimon comes to mind, as does J. K. Rowling, for that matter.
The line blurs with extreme far-future SF, like Gene Wolfe or China Mieville (sp?) or in post-singularity SF where technologies have evolved to the point to be indistinguishable from magic.
Also troubling to me is that if SF/fantasy books are "good" enough, they're not considered SF anymore. The Books-a-million chain is bad about this -- I have searched for several popular books in the SF/Fantasy section only to find them shelved in general fiction or literature instead. The actual SF/Fantasy shelves are becoming a ghetto of Trek, Dragonlance, and adventure novels.
My dream movie would be for someone to film one of the Heinlein juveniles (or "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress") as a straight adaption. Sort of an alternate history where we did colonize the solar system with vacuum tube computers and slide rules. Where Mars is a desert where you can live with a breathing mask and Venus is a swampy jungle.
Not campy, mind you. Just a literal and serious portrayal.
The "video encoded as audio track" got me thinking that what someone really needs to do is develop a Gameboy Advance cartridge with a stereo mini-plug jack that you can run from your cheapo portable CD player. Then, you could encode your video (as an audio stream) onto a standard CD-R, play it on your CD player, and display the video on your Gameboy.
Given that most kids who would be interested already have these two devices, you would just be looking at the price of the GB cart.
It'll never happen -- but it would be cool.
BTW, if you intentionally design a product that is easy to reverse engineer, can you be held liable for copyright infringement? I'm thinking of the Apex DVD players where the company left the firmware flashable and (probably) leaked the details to allow users to disable region checking and Macrovision. Therefore, you could buy a Macrovisionless, region free DVD player for $49 at Wal-Mart.
If a person were to design the above system and convince the powers that be that it came with a secure encoding method to burn the CD's, but then left enough hints that the free software folks could develop encoders for it, would the developers be accountable?
I've never done the calculation (and I'm sure the figures have a lot to do with Kirby's accusations of the comic artists being screwed), but comics declined for me when the cover price exceeded the value of something that can be read cover to cover in 10 minutes or so. Yes, I reread the good ones. Yes, I go back over the details of art that I like. But $2.75 or higher? I stopped collecting when the average price was $1.25-$1.50 and that was before I had a professional job. Now I am making 5 times as much and the comics are only twice as much, but when a new comic is the price of a used paperback (or 1/2 to 1/3 the price of a new paperback), there just ain't that much bang for the buck.
I do pick up the occasional graphic novel or collection of issues featuring my favorite writers (I don't remember buying any later because of the artist, although I know who I like and don't, the writer is more important to me).
Everytime I watch a Pixar film, or the new Star Wars films, or Jurassic Park, I always wonder what a movie audience from the 1950's (or even the 60's or 70's) would think of them. Would an explaination of "it's drawn by computers" mean anything to them? I remember being completely blown away by the tentacle in The Abyss -- here was something that was (a) impossible, and (b) completely realistic. I was one of those people who always noticed every matte line in Star Wars and every cable on the police spinners in Bladerunner (I spent my adolescence reading Starlog, Famous Monsters, and the like) and these first glimses of CGI amazed me.
When people say that, eventually, synthespians will be indistiguishable from real actors, the programmer/skeptic in me scoffs, but then I think that, twenty years ago, I don't know if I would have believed that Pixar films, Gollum, or even Jar Jar would have possible so soon, so maybe I'm wrong.
BTW, "invisible" CGI is my favorite, too. The "oh wow" moment came for me when I saw them filming Arnold jumping the motorcycle off the overpass in T2 and he was hanging off big, thick, black cables that were painted out. For some reason, this was cooler than the morphing terminator.
I grew up in a rural community and never saw any wildlife other that common birds (robins and starlings and such), one or two squirrels, maybe a few rabbits.
Now, 20 years later, I live in the suburbs of a small sized city (Huntsville, Alabama) and within a block of my house, I have seen rabbits, chipmunks, moles, skunks, foxes, coyotes, groundhogs, something in the weasel family, hawks, bats, opossums, snakes, lizards, tree frogs, toads, salamanders, and hundreds of squirrels (and waaay too many mosquitoes).
They all seem to be breeding and living happily. Go figure.
I haven't RTFA'ed and I don't know if you are serious, but the deal with moths and lights is that they typically using a remote light source (like the moon or sun) to navigate.
In other words, to fly in a straight line, they keep the light at a fixed relative point. Artificial lights screw this up and they fly around in circles and don't get about the important life activities of being moths -- eating, having moth sex, and avoiding predators.
I am assuming that predators had a much easier time adapting to artifical lights. Every street lamp is a buffet for bats and insectivore birds.
Maybe they've changed. For just about forever, this has been a "dry" county where alcohol sales were prohibited. I did hear that they recently passed a local option where you can actually buy whiskey in town.
The name Gauss rifle came to Traveller by way of Harry Harrison (in the Stainless Steel Rat books). I also think H. Beam Piper used the name back in the 1950's.
DVD players, like all consumer electronics these days, are immensely disposable. There will always be newer and better media (and players), so bite the bullet and shell out $59 for a cheap DVD players (or a DVD-ROM drive) and enjoy it, or buy a really expensive player (what, $170?) and gets the bells and whistles. When a better one comes out, move this one to the other room, sell it for $10 at a yard sale, or put it on the street -- what's the big deal? It costs as much as a dinner for two at a nice restaurant (or 10 trips to Taco Bell if you're single).
I've got 5 DVD players and the most expensive one I own (the first one I bought) is the worst -- skips occasionally, won't play recordable media, VCDs, etc. My cheapest (a $59 Apex from Wal-Mart) is a clunky piece of crap, but it will play anything I put in it - DVD, DVD-R, CD, VCD, SVCD, Picture CDs, or just CDR's with MP3's and MPG videos on it (and it's region and Macrovision free).
If you really want dual purpose, just buy and X-Box or Playstation 2. Their DVD playback kinda stinks, but they do work and, if you don't like the format anyway, at least you can watch the extras on the DVDs and play games, too.
The Diamond Age by Stephenson did pretty much the same thing. Airships that used nano created diamond spheres with a vacuum inside as lifting bodies.
IIRC, they used a "pump" that grabbed air molecules and pushed them outside the sphere, but didn't allow new ones in. Presumably, the perfect diamond spheres were close enough to unobtanium to hold a useful vacuum in a lightweight rigid body.
Even worse than being spammed
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've grown used to logging on in the morning, deleting 20-50 spams that made it through my ISP's filter, then reading the 1-10 valid messages.
Until a few days ago...
Then I started getting bounced messages showing up in the inbox. First a dozen or so, and now 300+ per day. Some unscrupulous bastard put my e-mail address as the return address on those damned "Penis enlargement" spams and sent out a coupla hundred thousand. All have a different name ("Buffy", "Steve", "Frank", etc.), but all with my e-mail address.
I've had that address for nearly 10 years, which is the reason I put up with spam on it, but now I'm going to have to kill it all because some moron (the messages originated in China according the to headers) picked my name at random to hide behind.
With all of the complaints about Taco Bell, if they could just change the law about requiring to show the base price without "hiding" the sales tax in America just for fast food restaurants, we could get in and our much quicker.
2 Tacos at $1 1 Nacho Supreme $2 1 Drink $1
Hand them a $5 bill and leave.
This was *great* when I visited France last year. The restaurant prices even included tips. Pay what's on the menu! What a concept!
Slashdot Mirror
As I've said before, the best way to get the United States back into space would be if a few Saudi billionaires announced plans to fund and setup the Islamic State of Luna.
We'd be vacationing on Mars within 20 years.
The idea of New Beijing on the moon would probably work, too.
Amen to that.
I read the first two "House" books and they have forever tainted the admiration I had for the "real" Dune books -- something even the abysmal movies hadn't managed to do.
I agree. When I read SF from the 40's or 50's, it is interesting on several different levels: story, characters, politics, what they got right, what they got wrong, etc. The "what they got wrong" part rarely, if ever, ruins a story.
Where technology *does* ruin a story is when it is inconsistent or ruins the plotting (see: Star Trek) or when the author botches simple facts that he or she *should* know (like basic physics or astronomy). Even if the mistakes have nothing to do with the story, they make me sit back and say "What an idiot! Can I trust anything else they say?" A lot of "mainstream" authors writing SF do this. As do almost every single SF movie ever made.
If *I* ever had anything to do with a SF movie or TV show, I would screen it to a random sampling of Slashdotters for technical mistakes.
Let me preface this by saying that I *like* SF that makes me think, including puzzling out jargon and social norms, or interpolating history by off hand references, and any number of these other tricks that make SF unreadable to most readers.
Having said that, I have tried reading A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky 2 or 3 times each and they never clicked for me. I'd get 100 or so pages in and realize that I just didn't give a shit about what was going on.
I'm not saying they aren't good books (and I may read them in a few years and decide they are some of my favorites -- it's happened before), but they aren't to everyone's taste.
I reminds me of the essay by Jorge Luis Borges where he talks about books being a dialogue between the writer and the reader and not just an artifact. He makes the point that there are more books that *you* would like than you can read in a lifetime, so if you're reading a book and not enjoying it -- it wasn't written for you. Put it down and find another one that was.
I think that's what Robinson is saying and I agree with him and you. With few exceptions, the science fiction section at Wal-Mart has Star Trek/Wars books and maybe a fantasy novel or two. Usually the latest Card book in PB. Target never carries SF at all unless it is a hardback bestseller or a Michael Crichton book.
It it completely ironic that economics are against diversity. Every really cool video store in my area has gone from having 1 or 2 copies of almost everything to having 50+ copies of every new release, selling them as previously viewed as soon as the novelty wears off, and losing their entire back stock to attrition ("Oh yeah, we had that but the DVD got scratched (or the tape broke) and we didn't replace it"). The fact is, those people have to make a living and that's what makes money -- having a copy of a new release on the weekend after it is released, not having a copy of Tarkovsky's Solaris that might get rented one or two times a year.
This is one of the reasons why I give Amazon.com some slack -- if it is in print, I can probably find it there. If it's out of print, I have a good chance of finding it through their affiliated dealers.
Because of all of this, I find few new authors the way I used to -- by browing the shelves, reading the back cover and a few random pages, and taking a chance on buying it. If I have to seek out and order the damned thing, it's usually because I already know the author or I've read reviews by people I trust.
Has anyone figured out how libraries classify their fiction? I find many of the mainstream SF authors with some books in the SF section and some in the general fiction section. Orson Scott Card's Homebody, a non-SF fantasy/ghost story type thing was in SF, but Card's Memory of Earth was in the fiction section. Crichton, Clarke, even Heinlein (Friday was in the fiction section) are scattered at random. "Literary" SF/Fantasy (like "Lost in a Good Book") is always in fiction. Do publishers assign Dewey Decimal numbers, or is it up to the library?
The Books-A-Million chain does the same thing. I expect Bradbury to be in Literature, but I think it's weird to put Mercedes Lackey and John Ringo in the Fiction/Literature section, but that's where their latest books are. It can't just be stupid stock clerks -- these are books with dragons and spaceships on the covers.
Hi Spider!
With the exception of Pratchett, I had given up on reading fantasy because of the dearth of ideas and style in the genre. Recently, there have been a few books (and series) that made me think there was hope for the genre:
The Assassin Trilogy,
The Fool series,
The Ship series by Robin Hobb
Game of Thrones series, by George R. R. Martin
The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold
All of these have interesting points of view, non-traditional plots, and at least some degree of insight into the human condition (politics, religion, sociology, and history) that are not present in the common Tolkeinesque fantasy bookshelf.
Also, as others have pointed out, there are quite a few "modern" fantasies that sidestep the sword and sorcery mold and fit the SF as "speculative fiction", not just "science fiction" mold. Neil Gaimon comes to mind, as does J. K. Rowling, for that matter.
The line blurs with extreme far-future SF, like Gene Wolfe or China Mieville (sp?) or in post-singularity SF where technologies have evolved to the point to be indistinguishable from magic.
Also troubling to me is that if SF/fantasy books are "good" enough, they're not considered SF anymore. The Books-a-million chain is bad about this -- I have searched for several popular books in the SF/Fantasy section only to find them shelved in general fiction or literature instead. The actual SF/Fantasy shelves are becoming a ghetto of Trek, Dragonlance, and adventure novels.
That would be a really vague and boring book.
"There is something about a man. His name starts with an 'M'. He's looking for something. I sense the color orange. He's been on a long trip."...
My dream movie would be for someone to film one of the Heinlein juveniles (or "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress") as a straight adaption. Sort of an alternate history where we did colonize the solar system with vacuum tube computers and slide rules. Where Mars is a desert where you can live with a breathing mask and Venus is a swampy jungle.
Not campy, mind you. Just a literal and serious portrayal.
For some reason, this just sounds too cool to me.
This reminds me of the Saturday Night Live skits with "Peter Graves" doing the science stories.
Scientist: "Gold is malleable and can be stretched into very long thin wires or hammered into gold leaf"
Host: "So, gold is long and thin. Like Kareem Abdul Jabbar?"
The "video encoded as audio track" got me thinking that what someone really needs to do is develop a Gameboy Advance cartridge with a stereo mini-plug jack that you can run from your cheapo portable CD player. Then, you could encode your video (as an audio stream) onto a standard CD-R, play it on your CD player, and display the video on your Gameboy.
Given that most kids who would be interested already have these two devices, you would just be looking at the price of the GB cart.
It'll never happen -- but it would be cool.
BTW, if you intentionally design a product that is easy to reverse engineer, can you be held liable for copyright infringement? I'm thinking of the Apex DVD players where the company left the firmware flashable and (probably) leaked the details to allow users to disable region checking and Macrovision. Therefore, you could buy a Macrovisionless, region free DVD player for $49 at Wal-Mart.
If a person were to design the above system and convince the powers that be that it came with a secure encoding method to burn the CD's, but then left enough hints that the free software folks could develop encoders for it, would the developers be accountable?
I've never done the calculation (and I'm sure the figures have a lot to do with Kirby's accusations of the comic artists being screwed), but comics declined for me when the cover price exceeded the value of something that can be read cover to cover in 10 minutes or so. Yes, I reread the good ones. Yes, I go back over the details of art that I like. But $2.75 or higher? I stopped collecting when the average price was $1.25-$1.50 and that was before I had a professional job. Now I am making 5 times as much and the comics are only twice as much, but when a new comic is the price of a used paperback (or 1/2 to 1/3 the price of a new paperback), there just ain't that much bang for the buck.
I do pick up the occasional graphic novel or collection of issues featuring my favorite writers (I don't remember buying any later because of the artist, although I know who I like and don't, the writer is more important to me).
There you go, taking all of the fun out of arguing by doing an experiement instead of just spouting out hypotheses. What a party-pooper!
Everytime I watch a Pixar film, or the new Star Wars films, or Jurassic Park, I always wonder what a movie audience from the 1950's (or even the 60's or 70's) would think of them. Would an explaination of "it's drawn by computers" mean anything to them? I remember being completely blown away by the tentacle in The Abyss -- here was something that was (a) impossible, and (b) completely realistic. I was one of those people who always noticed every matte line in Star Wars and every cable on the police spinners in Bladerunner (I spent my adolescence reading Starlog, Famous Monsters, and the like) and these first glimses of CGI amazed me.
When people say that, eventually, synthespians will be indistiguishable from real actors, the programmer/skeptic in me scoffs, but then I think that, twenty years ago, I don't know if I would have believed that Pixar films, Gollum, or even Jar Jar would have possible so soon, so maybe I'm wrong.
BTW, "invisible" CGI is my favorite, too. The "oh wow" moment came for me when I saw them filming Arnold jumping the motorcycle off the overpass in T2 and he was hanging off big, thick, black cables that were painted out. For some reason, this was cooler than the morphing terminator.
3) Continuity is sacrificed for goofy morality. Guys who turn into giants wear uberlycra pants all the time.
I cracked up in Hulk when Banner was floating in the sensory deprivation tank wearing *really big* stretch purple shorts. Very witty!
As for economy (#8), Trek had it the worst -- technology that completely invalidated a money economy, but with plots driven by greed (Ferengis).
I grew up in a rural community and never saw any wildlife other that common birds (robins and starlings and such), one or two squirrels, maybe a few rabbits.
Now, 20 years later, I live in the suburbs of a small sized city (Huntsville, Alabama) and within a block of my house, I have seen rabbits, chipmunks, moles, skunks, foxes, coyotes, groundhogs, something in the weasel family, hawks, bats, opossums, snakes, lizards, tree frogs, toads, salamanders, and hundreds of squirrels (and waaay too many mosquitoes).
They all seem to be breeding and living happily. Go figure.
I haven't RTFA'ed and I don't know if you are serious, but the deal with moths and lights is that they typically using a remote light source (like the moon or sun) to navigate.
In other words, to fly in a straight line, they keep the light at a fixed relative point. Artificial lights screw this up and they fly around in circles and don't get about the important life activities of being moths -- eating, having moth sex, and avoiding predators.
I am assuming that predators had a much easier time adapting to artifical lights. Every street lamp is a buffet for bats and insectivore birds.
Maybe they've changed. For just about forever, this has been a "dry" county where alcohol sales were prohibited. I did hear that they recently passed a local option where you can actually buy whiskey in town.
Either way, it's a cool trip.
If you are *really* trying for backroads, the Jack Daniel's Distillary in Lynchburg, TN has free tours (but no free samples).
It's in a really nice small town in the Tennessee foothills.
The name Gauss rifle came to Traveller by way of Harry Harrison (in the Stainless Steel Rat books). I also think H. Beam Piper used the name back in the 1950's.
This is funny, but too true.
DVD players, like all consumer electronics these days, are immensely disposable. There will always be newer and better media (and players), so bite the bullet and shell out $59 for a cheap DVD players (or a DVD-ROM drive) and enjoy it, or buy a really expensive player (what, $170?) and gets the bells and whistles. When a better one comes out, move this one to the other room, sell it for $10 at a yard sale, or put it on the street -- what's the big deal? It costs as much as a dinner for two at a nice restaurant (or 10 trips to Taco Bell if you're single).
I've got 5 DVD players and the most expensive one I own (the first one I bought) is the worst -- skips occasionally, won't play recordable media, VCDs, etc. My cheapest (a $59 Apex from Wal-Mart) is a clunky piece of crap, but it will play anything I put in it - DVD, DVD-R, CD, VCD, SVCD, Picture CDs, or just CDR's with MP3's and MPG videos on it (and it's region and Macrovision free).
If you really want dual purpose, just buy and X-Box or Playstation 2. Their DVD playback kinda stinks, but they do work and, if you don't like the format anyway, at least you can watch the extras on the DVDs and play games, too.
The Diamond Age by Stephenson did pretty much the same thing. Airships that used nano created diamond spheres with a vacuum inside as lifting bodies.
IIRC, they used a "pump" that grabbed air molecules and pushed them outside the sphere, but didn't allow new ones in. Presumably, the perfect diamond spheres were close enough to unobtanium to hold a useful vacuum in a lightweight rigid body.
I've grown used to logging on in the morning, deleting 20-50 spams that made it through my ISP's filter, then reading the 1-10 valid messages.
Until a few days ago...
Then I started getting bounced messages showing up in the inbox. First a dozen or so, and now 300+ per day. Some unscrupulous bastard put my e-mail address as the return address on those damned "Penis enlargement" spams and sent out a coupla hundred thousand. All have a different name ("Buffy", "Steve", "Frank", etc.), but all with my e-mail address.
I've had that address for nearly 10 years, which is the reason I put up with spam on it, but now I'm going to have to kill it all because some moron (the messages originated in China according the to headers) picked my name at random to hide behind.
I tipped extra in France, too, but I also knew that the service staff was getting 12.5-15% (I forgot which) regardless.
With all of the complaints about Taco Bell, if they could just change the law about requiring to show the base price without "hiding" the sales tax in America just for fast food restaurants, we could get in and our much quicker.
2 Tacos at $1
1 Nacho Supreme $2
1 Drink $1
Hand them a $5 bill and leave.
This was *great* when I visited France last year. The restaurant prices even included tips. Pay what's on the menu! What a concept!