I'm not going to argue with most of your comment, because I'll admit that your points are well taken. This novel has been sitting on my hard drive for eight years precisely because I wasn't sure how good it really was, how it would be received, and so on.
Second, the writer lets some of his biases come out in an all-too-obvious way--the tattoos, Death Jockey's, the shocking violence and drawn out sex--all of these reveal that the author is (in my oppinion) an adolescent or recently adolescent-male, who is into the punk scene and has played a lot of video games.
Um, no. I was 32 when I wrote it, have no tattoos, totally square, and I also hate all video games more modern than Pac-Man and Battlezone. What it was was one of those things that come to you in a Vision and you feel compelled to record it. I have always been strongly ambivalent about this story. Interestingly, as I get older, it seems more tame and less extreme. A few days ago I turned 39, and it would still be sitting on my hard drive if a few folks at K5 hadn't twisted my arm and convinced me to put it online.
Overall I'm very glad I did. It's definitely not for everybody. It may not even be the best story it can be. But it is what it is, and that's all I am able to offer. Plenty of people have written to say that they enjoyed it, and that is certainly better than letting it sit on C: for another year.
...didn't even concern the ultraviolence. When it got mentioned on BoingBoing someone said "Hey, it's WHITE ROOM SYNDROME!"
Well, duh. This is a character who has deliberately edited all of the nonrelevant information out of her environment; it's not that I was staring at a piece of white paper, it's how the hell else are you supposed to represent an information-free environment?
Anyway, it sat on my hard drive for eight years largely because of little hurdles like this. The response from people who have actually bothered to read it has been overwhelmingly positive and gratifying. So it isn't for everybody; neither is anything else.
My goal was for it to format in every browser I've ever used. This includes Netscape 2.0 and Arachne. I failed in Arachne; it doesn't understand VALIGN in the computer-dialogue tables. But the paragraph indentations work.
Why not just use p? Because there are many places where a skipped line of whitespace conveys an important break in the action, and after pounding my head on the problem for two days I couldn't think of a better way to convey the sense of the original printed version.
I probably will go to style sheets for indentation when I do the next version for the mopiall.html (entire novel as one file), since it's more likely to be parsed by something like Plucker.
Meanwhile, it looks the way I wanted it to look even on browsers other than Mozilla and IE, and I think that's worthwhile.
The moth diagram is an actual schematic diagram of a power supply integrated circuit. I'd give you the part number but I drew it in 1994 and I've forgotten where I found it.
Some of the actual I/O tie points are omitted, but the ones included (antennae and wingtips) were really brought out to IC pins.
I wrote it, but Zapata took it out. That was part of the deal how I got my arm twisted to put it online after it sat on my hard drive for 8 years.
It's the most interesting thing that's happened to me lately (hey, I don't go to casinos any more) and I owe Z a great big thanks for the bootprint on my butt. And Rusty, of course, for hosting it. Especially considering that neither of them had actually read the work at hand before they made the offers.
That is just a perfect selection for a teaser passage. It gets so much of the sense of the book across yet without any of the really gross stuff or revealing any spoilers... I don't think I could have found such a good selection for this purpose if I'd spent a week thinking about it.
As a well-established corner of copyright law, you do not own the correspondence you receive from others. You do own the physical media, but you do not have a right to broadcast or republish the material without the author's permission. Unless the author has done something so illegal (e.g. sending a death threat or whatever) that you can be certain of prevailing, and you need the public exposure because you have no other course of action, you should never publish correspondence you receive from others without their permission. It may seem ridiculous, but it is completely illegal almost everywhere on Earth.
You misread: What moronic logic: "If you think maybe, then definitely"
That's not what I said. I said if you think you might need one, it's a Clue. If you are being accused of something that could cause conviction or damages to be levied against you, and you are unsure enough about the situation as to not be sure you would prevail, then you need advice.
One source of such advice is a lawyer.
What I would definitely say is, if you are in such a situation and you're unsure enough of your position to not know if you would prevail, get some advice. You may save a lot of money if you can get it from nolo instead of a lawyer, but it also depends on the situation. Nolo is great if you're wondering about patent or copyright infringement or you think you might be sued for libel or slander or your tree might fall on your neighbor's house. (Sometimes their advice is "get a lawyer," even though their logo is a shark with a briefcase.)
If you have been accused of a serious crime involving the possibility of major jail time, it's a no-brainer. Even if you think you do know how it will turn out get a lawyer ASAP. In the situation described by the poster, the lawyer's function might not be so much to avert the dingbat CEO's lawsuit as to engineer the countersuit seeking damages from the CEO for being such a dingbat.
...it's a Clue. Also, your situation might be covered by a book or article at http://www.nolo.com, which is an excellent resource for self-help legal stuff.
The one regional newspaper, the Times Picayune, does not put much of its content online. The story has gotten a lot of play in the local media but it's still local politics so I haven't seen it on the major news sites.
Much as I hate Microsoft, I have to admit this is a smart move on Nagin's part. What the linked article fails to point out is the nature of the system Microsoft is replacing -- an antediluvian mainframe system whose contractor has kept getting the nod because of entrenched patronage since, literally, the days when Elvis was alive. It doesn't mention the death threats (!) which members of the Nagin administration received when they started inquiring about the computer contract.
Basically, Nagin got elected on a platform of cleaning up the corruption and he'd sign a contract with the Devil himself to get rid of the current scumbags. Wait, he actually did just do that. Well, I for one can't blame him under the circumstances.
Seems that onceuponatime the helpful folks from WHO passed out strands of 28 beads, with meaningful color variations, and told them to move a bead a day beginning at menstruation to tell when sex was more or less likely to result in pregnancy.
The program was less than successful because many of the women felt the merit resided in the beads rather than the counting, and moved them around to suit themselves.
There are at least three SV-I stages in existence which could be copied. One sits outside of the Martin-Marietta plant in New Orleans, and two more are part of complete SV stacks which are on display IIRC at Houston and Cape Canaveral. I'm sure it would be much simpler to disassemble and scan these functional units which incorporate all the sweat-and-trial-and-error mods that were undertaken during the Apollo program, rather than starting completely from scratch.
Assuming, that is, that you aren't one of the boneheads that thinks "backward is never the right direction." Sometimes you leave stuff behind you really shouldn't have.
The ads targeted by retinal scans appeared in several PKD stories (though not, notably, The Minority Report itself). This movie is the best PKD adaptation ever; the things which were added to flesh it out to movie length are almost all taken from other PKD works.
If PKD were still alive he would be laughing his ass off at the product placements in this movie; not only are the ads portrayed as he envisioned, the moviemakers actually used the techniques being portrayed to help pay for the movie portraying them.
On second viewing I also have to say that the "not too futuristic future" is more different from ours than it first appears. Every flat surface in the movie's public space is a monitor showing ads. Even the cereal box! (That was soooo Philip K. Dick.)
While The Gap might not be around in 2050, you can rest assured some other business serving the same niche will be; and it and the fashions within will be as unremarkable to the people of 2050 as the Gap and its product are to us in 2002.
And you have to really wonder whether the rest of the movie after Anderton is haloed is just a fantasy (a la Total Recall) or if it really happened...
...to have used some of the stuff in the museum, including two separate machines with iron core RAM, one of the first acoustically-coupled 300 baud modems ever offered for retail sale, paper tape as a storage medium, and Teletype as user interface. And the author is right. Things suck now.
In the 70's and early 80's, anybody with the time to spare could write a really fine application comparable to anything offered by the SW industry, and a lot of them did and their wares were superb. The C64, Apple II, TRS-80, and even the early PC often hosted apps written by little guys and marketed by small shops.
Ironically, it was the Mac that killed this. The GUI was so complicated that it could be programmed only with an expensive kit and a lot of experience. (Oddly, the Amiga overcame this but Apple killed it in court.) When Micro$oft followed Apple's lead with Windoze, the door was closed on small, clever apps. Nobody would understand or know how to use them any more unless a huge overhead of (usually useless) functionality was supported.
In the 1980's some of the most popular games ever written were written by individuals, either working for companies like Atari or on their own. Even the big companies would have individuals or teams of 3-4 people writing a project. Now, writing a game or office utility is like directing a movie. There are far too many details for an individual to take care of, so a massive heirarchally-organized team is needed just to finish the project; and there is no central vision, no personal sense of pride in the people who actually pound out the code. And we wonder why software breaks nowadays.
It may be quixotic, but you can still go back: stella@biglist.com is the mailing list for retrogamers programming the Atari 2600. Check 'em out. Read the archive and links and marvel at how our ancestors managed with 128 bytes (no K or M there, 0.1K) of RAM and 4K of ROM.
Just as C programming made a 12-MHz 80286 almost as powerful as a 4-MHz Z-80 programmed in hand-tuned assembly language, the multiply abstract and fantastically elegant languages of the future will make those terahertz machines almost as powerful for real work as a TRS-80 Model 1 programmed in Level II BASIC.
Very early computers like ENIAC were essentially programmed in microcode, so each element of what today would be the ALU could be used simultaneously with all the others. This isn't "multitasking" in the way we think of it today so much as hand-tuned "pipelining."
Similar tricks were used in machines that had drum and delay-line memories, arranging the instructions such that the next one needed would emerge from the magnetic head or piezo reader just as the previous one was finished executing... often with other instructions belonging to a different "thread" filling the gaps.
In those days you programmed to the bare metal because it was the only way to get anything useful done.
Me:and it would be foolish not to explore them all.
Imrdkl: Would it?
OF COURSE IT WOULD! Consider all the folks who think the Apollo missions were a foolish waste of time. Well, from Apollo we learned that the Moon was once molten, that it has no metallic core, and that its crust is similar to that of Earth. All these things have informed the history of Earth, from which the Moon was probably knocked off in a chance encounter early during her coalescence.
From Mars missions we have learned enough to recognize Martian meteorites, thus getting free extra samples for analysis.
From Jupiter and the other outer planets we have learned that geology is much more complex and unpredicatable than we once thought; in my childhood books these worlds were always described as cold, rocky, silent, and gray, kind of the way Pluto is still described. (You'd think we'd learn.)
The thing about Pluto is we only think we know what we'll find there. So far we've always been wrong about that. Outer Solar System objects are the only direct, unsullied links we have to conditions as they were before the inner planets formed and all the components got mixed up and distilled. Even so one must wonder; was Pluto once molten? Was Charon knocked off of it as our Moon once was, or was it just captured? The similirity between Earth/Luna and Pluto/Charon is itself enough to warrant investigation. What seems like an incredible chance event might be more likely than we think, making the "Rare Earth" hypothesis less "rare." The key is that we don't know what we'll find. One thing we can say with great confidence is that it will actually be a surprise if it is a boring cold sphere of inert frozen crap like my circa 1970 Jr. Science book said.
When I was a kid there was nothing but artists conceptions (most of which turned out to be wrong) to illustrate what the surfaces of other planets looked like. Now the only one totally left in mystery is Pluto, and it's one of the last great mysteries of our generation to know, as we do of all the other planets, what they look like up close.
Besides which, every time we investigate a new world we learn wonders. Water on Europa! Hydrocarbons on Titan! Rings around Neptune and even (chuckle) Uranus! Young worlds cracked and not fully reformed, worlds of live volcanoes, worlds whose geological processes always seem to come back and illuminate our own, either its current dynamics or its history.
Computer models are not substitute for real experience. And the only source of reale experience is another real world. We have a limited number of these close at hand, and it would be foolish not to explore them all.
As the most distant "world"-sized body Pluto likely holds many secrets to the early history of the Solar System, and to forces at work on our own world during its formation. If nothing else we should investigate it for being the only other dual planet worth the name in the Solar System (besides, of course, Earth-Luna.)
I had Fractint in indefinite-precision mode and was chasing down an especially interesting whorl at higher and higher magnification when I saw this little guy on the screen. He waved at me and said, "Hey, God, Woo-Hoo, I finally found you! Why did you create all this?"
I was about to give him a really witty answer but the power blinked, and that was that. Too bad I didn't bother to record the co-ordinates:-(
Slashdot Mirror
Second, the writer lets some of his biases come out in an all-too-obvious way--the tattoos, Death Jockey's, the shocking violence and drawn out sex--all of these reveal that the author is (in my oppinion) an adolescent or recently adolescent-male, who is into the punk scene and has played a lot of video games.
Um, no. I was 32 when I wrote it, have no tattoos, totally square, and I also hate all video games more modern than Pac-Man and Battlezone. What it was was one of those things that come to you in a Vision and you feel compelled to record it. I have always been strongly ambivalent about this story. Interestingly, as I get older, it seems more tame and less extreme. A few days ago I turned 39, and it would still be sitting on my hard drive if a few folks at K5 hadn't twisted my arm and convinced me to put it online.
Overall I'm very glad I did. It's definitely not for everybody. It may not even be the best story it can be. But it is what it is, and that's all I am able to offer. Plenty of people have written to say that they enjoyed it, and that is certainly better than letting it sit on C: for another year.
Well, duh. This is a character who has deliberately edited all of the nonrelevant information out of her environment; it's not that I was staring at a piece of white paper, it's how the hell else are you supposed to represent an information-free environment?
Anyway, it sat on my hard drive for eight years largely because of little hurdles like this. The response from people who have actually bothered to read it has been overwhelmingly positive and gratifying. So it isn't for everybody; neither is anything else.
Why not just use p? Because there are many places where a skipped line of whitespace conveys an important break in the action, and after pounding my head on the problem for two days I couldn't think of a better way to convey the sense of the original printed version.
I probably will go to style sheets for indentation when I do the next version for the mopiall.html (entire novel as one file), since it's more likely to be parsed by something like Plucker.
Meanwhile, it looks the way I wanted it to look even on browsers other than Mozilla and IE, and I think that's worthwhile.
Some of the actual I/O tie points are omitted, but the ones included (antennae and wingtips) were really brought out to IC pins.
There is a link to A Casino Odyssey in the Other Stuff Online page of the novel site.
My suggestion is try Chapter 2. If you find those people boring too then you just don't like my writing.
No prob with that; I'll deal.
Out of curiosity, is there anybody whose writing you do like?
I wrote it, but Zapata took it out. That was part of the deal how I got my arm twisted to put it online after it sat on my hard drive for 8 years.
It's the most interesting thing that's happened to me lately (hey, I don't go to casinos any more) and I owe Z a great big thanks for the bootprint on my butt. And Rusty, of course, for hosting it. Especially considering that neither of them had actually read the work at hand before they made the offers.
Of course I'm a bit close to the problem...
...you are being asked to take the red pill to enter the game.
As a well-established corner of copyright law, you do not own the correspondence you receive from others. You do own the physical media, but you do not have a right to broadcast or republish the material without the author's permission. Unless the author has done something so illegal (e.g. sending a death threat or whatever) that you can be certain of prevailing, and you need the public exposure because you have no other course of action, you should never publish correspondence you receive from others without their permission. It may seem ridiculous, but it is completely illegal almost everywhere on Earth.
That's not what I said. I said if you think you might need one, it's a Clue. If you are being accused of something that could cause conviction or damages to be levied against you, and you are unsure enough about the situation as to not be sure you would prevail, then you need advice.
One source of such advice is a lawyer.
What I would definitely say is, if you are in such a situation and you're unsure enough of your position to not know if you would prevail, get some advice. You may save a lot of money if you can get it from nolo instead of a lawyer, but it also depends on the situation. Nolo is great if you're wondering about patent or copyright infringement or you think you might be sued for libel or slander or your tree might fall on your neighbor's house. (Sometimes their advice is "get a lawyer," even though their logo is a shark with a briefcase.)
If you have been accused of a serious crime involving the possibility of major jail time, it's a no-brainer. Even if you think you do know how it will turn out get a lawyer ASAP. In the situation described by the poster, the lawyer's function might not be so much to avert the dingbat CEO's lawsuit as to engineer the countersuit seeking damages from the CEO for being such a dingbat.
...it's a Clue. Also, your situation might be covered by a book or article at http://www.nolo.com, which is an excellent resource for self-help legal stuff.
The one regional newspaper, the Times Picayune, does not put much of its content online. The story has gotten a lot of play in the local media but it's still local politics so I haven't seen it on the major news sites.
Basically, Nagin got elected on a platform of cleaning up the corruption and he'd sign a contract with the Devil himself to get rid of the current scumbags. Wait, he actually did just do that. Well, I for one can't blame him under the circumstances.
The program was less than successful because many of the women felt the merit resided in the beads rather than the counting, and moved them around to suit themselves.
Assuming, that is, that you aren't one of the boneheads that thinks "backward is never the right direction." Sometimes you leave stuff behind you really shouldn't have.
It looks like you're writing a suicide note! Click on the method you're planning to use: [gun] [jump] [drown] [other] [etc]
One of the funniest damn things I've seen in awhile.
If PKD were still alive he would be laughing his ass off at the product placements in this movie; not only are the ads portrayed as he envisioned, the moviemakers actually used the techniques being portrayed to help pay for the movie portraying them.
On second viewing I also have to say that the "not too futuristic future" is more different from ours than it first appears. Every flat surface in the movie's public space is a monitor showing ads. Even the cereal box! (That was soooo Philip K. Dick.) While The Gap might not be around in 2050, you can rest assured some other business serving the same niche will be; and it and the fashions within will be as unremarkable to the people of 2050 as the Gap and its product are to us in 2002.
And you have to really wonder whether the rest of the movie after Anderton is haloed is just a fantasy (a la Total Recall) or if it really happened...
In the 70's and early 80's, anybody with the time to spare could write a really fine application comparable to anything offered by the SW industry, and a lot of them did and their wares were superb. The C64, Apple II, TRS-80, and even the early PC often hosted apps written by little guys and marketed by small shops.
Ironically, it was the Mac that killed this. The GUI was so complicated that it could be programmed only with an expensive kit and a lot of experience. (Oddly, the Amiga overcame this but Apple killed it in court.) When Micro$oft followed Apple's lead with Windoze, the door was closed on small, clever apps. Nobody would understand or know how to use them any more unless a huge overhead of (usually useless) functionality was supported.
In the 1980's some of the most popular games ever written were written by individuals, either working for companies like Atari or on their own. Even the big companies would have individuals or teams of 3-4 people writing a project. Now, writing a game or office utility is like directing a movie. There are far too many details for an individual to take care of, so a massive heirarchally-organized team is needed just to finish the project; and there is no central vision, no personal sense of pride in the people who actually pound out the code. And we wonder why software breaks nowadays.
It may be quixotic, but you can still go back: stella@biglist.com is the mailing list for retrogamers programming the Atari 2600. Check 'em out. Read the archive and links and marvel at how our ancestors managed with 128 bytes (no K or M there, 0.1K) of RAM and 4K of ROM.
Doesn't go as far back or forward, but much more detailed and better written.
Just as C programming made a 12-MHz 80286 almost as powerful as a 4-MHz Z-80 programmed in hand-tuned assembly language, the multiply abstract and fantastically elegant languages of the future will make those terahertz machines almost as powerful for real work as a TRS-80 Model 1 programmed in Level II BASIC.
Similar tricks were used in machines that had drum and delay-line memories, arranging the instructions such that the next one needed would emerge from the magnetic head or piezo reader just as the previous one was finished executing ... often with other instructions belonging to a different "thread" filling the gaps.
In those days you programmed to the bare metal because it was the only way to get anything useful done.
Imrdkl: Would it?
OF COURSE IT WOULD! Consider all the folks who think the Apollo missions were a foolish waste of time. Well, from Apollo we learned that the Moon was once molten, that it has no metallic core, and that its crust is similar to that of Earth. All these things have informed the history of Earth, from which the Moon was probably knocked off in a chance encounter early during her coalescence.
From Mars missions we have learned enough to recognize Martian meteorites, thus getting free extra samples for analysis.
From Jupiter and the other outer planets we have learned that geology is much more complex and unpredicatable than we once thought; in my childhood books these worlds were always described as cold, rocky, silent, and gray, kind of the way Pluto is still described. (You'd think we'd learn.)
The thing about Pluto is we only think we know what we'll find there. So far we've always been wrong about that. Outer Solar System objects are the only direct, unsullied links we have to conditions as they were before the inner planets formed and all the components got mixed up and distilled. Even so one must wonder; was Pluto once molten? Was Charon knocked off of it as our Moon once was, or was it just captured? The similirity between Earth/Luna and Pluto/Charon is itself enough to warrant investigation. What seems like an incredible chance event might be more likely than we think, making the "Rare Earth" hypothesis less "rare." The key is that we don't know what we'll find. One thing we can say with great confidence is that it will actually be a surprise if it is a boring cold sphere of inert frozen crap like my circa 1970 Jr. Science book said.
Besides which, every time we investigate a new world we learn wonders. Water on Europa! Hydrocarbons on Titan! Rings around Neptune and even (chuckle) Uranus! Young worlds cracked and not fully reformed, worlds of live volcanoes, worlds whose geological processes always seem to come back and illuminate our own, either its current dynamics or its history.
Computer models are not substitute for real experience. And the only source of reale experience is another real world. We have a limited number of these close at hand, and it would be foolish not to explore them all.
As the most distant "world"-sized body Pluto likely holds many secrets to the early history of the Solar System, and to forces at work on our own world during its formation. If nothing else we should investigate it for being the only other dual planet worth the name in the Solar System (besides, of course, Earth-Luna.)
I was about to give him a really witty answer but the power blinked, and that was that. Too bad I didn't bother to record the co-ordinates :-(