I'm one of those people who really wishes it were possible to cleanly separate out Fantasy from SF, if only in bookstores and libraries. Publishers seem to know what's what, generally, and tend to label the spines accordingly, or publish them under separate imprints, but for some damn reason SF/Fantasy is one big mooshey category when it comes to shelving.
I find it interesting that Alternate History has its own award (The Sideways Awards), and that the Libertarian Futurist Society sponsors a href="http://www.lfs.org/awards.htm">The Prometheus Awards for Libertarian SF. Doubtless there are scads more, but these, at least, are awarded alongside the Hugos. It rather feels like 1996, when every schmuck with a bookmark list felt completely justified in hacking together a crappy little gif and awarding other web sites for being cool or useful or whatnot.
Ugh, I hated Chronoliths... it's been a while, so I'm not really up to explaining my reasons, but it was one of those books that started to lose me 1/2 way through and just kept getting worse, somehow.
I'm with you on Cosmonaut's Keep, however. Ken MacLeod is one of the finest authors to emerge in a long time, imho. I note that further down the page, Locus cites MacLeod as having been awarded the Sideways Award for best short-story ("The Human Front," which I've not read).
As for the Asimov quote, he's ha[r]dly pure. The premise of humans originating from aliens (the Pak, in his Known Space books) is about as "illogical" as can be. But he's trying to write SF, and so that's what it is.
It was Niven, not Asimov, who gave us "Known Space." I'm trying to think of an example from Asimov that might make your point, but nothing's coming to me at the moment.
Regardless, I agree that authors should be able to employ a McGuffin here and there without losing their "Certified SF" seal of approval. It should be done well, and sparingly, however. I've read a number of novels where the authors took things too far and completely lost my interest/respect because of their illogical and impossible devices. Suspension of disbelief is something that you have to earn, not expect, from your reader, IMHO.
I would expect that while the data about exteriors might eventually be released to the public in a low-res form, privacy and security concerns would limit the release of much interior detail. I mean, think of all those movies where cunning access to blueprints allows the criminals to pull off a brilliant heist, assassination, etc. Now, imagine you have an incredibly accurate blueprint of the entire city of new york to explore, not just on paper but it in fully immersive VR.
The only way that a virtual NYC will ever be constructed from these bits is if it is wiped off the face of the earth, so that there's no real world analogue to be concerned about anymore. I'm not particularly interested in that scenario.
So, assuming that the US space program of the 60's contributed significantly to the technological wave we're still riding today... is India's program likely to produce anything particularly new? I mean, since it's already been done and the science is understood, how likely is it that India's program will innovate? Unless they clean-room it, ignoring precedent, I would expect they'll be able to build their moon rockets with (sorta) off the shelf parts.
Good for national pride, maybe, and perhaps good for industry in a sort of heavy, Soviet way, but I don't see a lot of return on investment coming from this, unless they plan to establish a colony or somesuch.
Yeah, I know that OpenNIC covers the "Legacy Namespaces" as well. My point was that for every "traditional" domain you register or renew, a portion of your reg fee will be sent to ICANN -- they invoice the TLD registrars for their "fair share" kickback to the ICANN mothership.
ICANN sends out a letter like this, hitting up the TLD Registries to drop some cash in their sacred offering plate.
The problem I see with this is that (as I understand it) in order to Take The Internet Back we all have to not only agree to switch to OpenNIC (lest the net become fragmented), but also switch to using completely non-standard TLDs. Currently a portion of every registration fee we pay to our ICANN-approved registrars goes back to ICANN, right? So in order to cut off their power there could be no more.com,.net,.uk,.cx, etc. That seems even less likely than universally reconfiguring to an OpenNIC root.
Now, if the TLDs got more uppity and took a page from the US's book on paying its UN dues, well, maybe this wouldn't be an issue.
Of course, there are loads of wireless community groups out there, with varying methods of deployment/philosophies/etc. You might look here and start browsing the different groups to see how they run things.
NoVAWireless might be a place to look at -- they seem to be involved with organization of clusters of small, neighborhood-based WISPs.
Nice to hear that fieldmouse's laptop was returned, but it begs the question: how did you get it back? Since you were successful in this, I'm interested in whatever actions you took beforehand/afterward which facilitated recovery. Or was it just dumb luck? Tips to help the rest of us prevent/deal with a theft?
Apple had its flirtation with allowing its OS to run on other people's hardware. They killed it off. I'm still using an old PowerComputing clone that I bought back in '95, running OS X on it just fine thank you. Sure, it's been through a lot of upgrades, but until I bought an iBook last month Apple hadn't seen a dime from me for hardware since I bought my old Centris 610 a decade ago.
They killed off their licensing arrangement with the clone makers because Apple makes its money from hardware. It's very hard to imagine that they could sell Wintel users enough copies of OS X to make up for the lost hardware sales they'd get from "switchers" who no longer had to buy an entire new machine. Would it rock if I could run OS X on a tricked out custom-built PC at half the price of an apple box? Sure! Would Apple profit from my doing so? I don't think so.
I suspect that The Steve was just suggesting Apple might switch to IBM's Power 4 as the next gen architecture, not that they'll start dropping Athlons into iMacs.
And more recently (1986), before mr cobain's rise to popularity, "It's better to burn out than to fade away" was the Kurgan's jazzy tagline in Highlander (the good one, that is). That's how the phrase entered into my cultural lexicon.
... and we've dropped most of the diphthongs that British English uses (like haemophilia, paedophiles, etc) and many of those "extra" u's (colour, flavour)
IIRC the USian English Vocabulary is much larger than what is used on the other side of the Atlantic.
It might be more fair to say that the US English Vocabulary is larger than what is available on the other side of the Atlantic. I wouldn't be very comfortable suggesting that USians have larger personal vocabularies -- from my observation, that seems patently untrue.
You don't respirate, you ventilate. How stupid is that?
Not very stupid. I, myself, respire several times a minute.
respire: 1. To breathe in and out; inhale and exhale. 2. To undergo the metabolic process of respiration. 3. To breathe easily again, as after a period of exertion or trouble. etymology : Middle English respiren, to breathe again, from Latin respirare, to breathe.
If you want to be particularly geekish, you could buy one of these balls from Google, complete with Google decal. It's only $28.50 -- you could outfit an entire office for the cost of a single Aeron!
Others have suggested bean bags, but I like a good bean chair, like one of these. Unlike blobby bean bags, the covers of bean chairs are tailored so that you get a fairly stiff, supportive back. Some aren't stuffed with beans at all, but more futon-like material, which can be good... when your chair is overstuffed and not as squooshy as you'd like, it's easy to remove some batting from the seat area and the back won't go all weak on you.
These kinds of chairs share and advantage with a previous poster's recycled school-desk chairs -- you can rock backwards in them and recline a bit.
Avoid slippery vinyl, naugahyde etc. at all costs. Get a fabric covered chair so that there's a bit of friction between your ass as the seat, lest you slip around too much while jinking and fragging.
There are a slew of other chemicals in coffee so perhaps one of these or a combination of many might be the key. There really isnt a way to test this though.
Well, you could start by studying the health of people who drink 3 cups of decaf a day... then you'd know whether it was the caffeine or something else.
Starbucks may be nasty for a host of reasons -- it's the WalMart of coffee shops killing off the little guys, it's got a nasty corporatized lifestyle thing going on, whatever -- but they offer great bennies and have some nice policies as well. Does McDonald's extend medical, dental and vision benefits to part-timers and their domestic partners? Do they support sustainable agricultural practices? Recycle as much as possible?
I don't drink Starbucks coffee if I have another choice, but I don't begrudge their baristas the choice to work for a company that treats them with respect. If you're working in the $7/hour zone, there are a lot of worse places to be. And damn but the chonga bagels are tasty:)
Even if someone did settle this planet millions of years ago, something quite catastrophic would have had to happen in order to wipe out any fossil record of more advanced creatures than what we have seen so far.
Yes and no... the fossil record is really very spotty. For a body to fossilize instead of simply decompose it has to expire in some pretty unusual circumstances. It then has to survive aeons of geological processes acting upon it, and then a human has to find it, either by purposefully excavating, happening across it just as it is exposed on the surface, or by being unusually focused on the contents of his backhoe.
I'm in no way suggesting that aliens set up housekeeping on earth in the distant past. Just pointing out that the fossil record is full of lacunae.
That said, we're discovering new fossils all the time... maybe H. El-gee-emiensis' skull will be next:)
Impress me. Create something new and original, something to hang one's hat on.
So by new and different, you mean a completely new concept? Something just as addictive as Civ, but decidedly not Civ ?? As a previous poster has said, Chess has been around for quite some time and people still enjoy playing it. They also enjoy playing countless variations of Chess, with freakishly modified rules and boards and everything else. But you know what? To develop those variations there had to be an original version of Chess to build from.
I'm willing to bet that, given a few years' time, you'll see some completely new and different ways of playing Civ, thanks to FreeCiv being developed as an open project. Cloning the original version is just the starting point for FreeCiv... where we go from there is up to anyone who feels like coding.
...you can probably upgrade either the memory or hard drive from third parties for a much better price than Apple would offer.
price isn't everything. the memory and airport upgrades on the ibook are no problem -- flip up the keyboard and plug 'em right in -- but upgrading the drive is like pulling a mouthful of teeth. Really, there are 30 screws to be removed -- phillips and flatheads and torx of multiple sizes. You can see a detailed walkthrough with all the gory details here.
When I bought my ibook from the local apple retailer (not an "Apple Store" but a fully authorized service center) they told me that if I wanted a bigger HD I'd have to buy the ibook bto online -- their techs spent so much time getting in and out of the ibooks, and keeping track of all the parts, that it's just not cost-effective for them.
i figured the 20 gig drive was enough -- there's always external storage and i wanted to walk out with it.:)
I suggest that you explore Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music. It categorizes, sub-categorizes, and provides samples, descriptions and recommendations for over 100 styles of electronica. Follow the family tree until you hit a clip that appeals to you.
Caveat: it's Flash. The first link I gave is for the low-bandwidth (~3 meg) version. If your pipes are fat, or you don't mind the wait, there's also the ~17 meg high-quality stereo version.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm one of those people who really wishes it were possible to cleanly separate out Fantasy from SF, if only in bookstores and libraries. Publishers seem to know what's what, generally, and tend to label the spines accordingly, or publish them under separate imprints, but for some damn reason SF/Fantasy is one big mooshey category when it comes to shelving.
I find it interesting that Alternate History has its own award (The Sideways Awards), and that the Libertarian Futurist Society sponsors a href="http://www.lfs.org/awards.htm">The Prometheus Awards for Libertarian SF. Doubtless there are scads more, but these, at least, are awarded alongside the Hugos. It rather feels like 1996, when every schmuck with a bookmark list felt completely justified in hacking together a crappy little gif and awarding other web sites for being cool or useful or whatnot.
Ugh, I hated Chronoliths ... it's been a while, so I'm not really up to explaining my reasons, but it was one of those books that started to lose me 1/2 way through and just kept getting worse, somehow.
I'm with you on Cosmonaut's Keep, however. Ken MacLeod is one of the finest authors to emerge in a long time, imho. I note that further down the page, Locus cites MacLeod as having been awarded the Sideways Award for best short-story ("The Human Front," which I've not read).
As for the Asimov quote, he's ha[r]dly pure. The premise of humans originating from aliens (the Pak, in his Known Space books) is about as "illogical" as can be. But he's trying to write SF, and so that's what it is.
It was Niven, not Asimov, who gave us "Known Space." I'm trying to think of an example from Asimov that might make your point, but nothing's coming to me at the moment.
Regardless, I agree that authors should be able to employ a McGuffin here and there without losing their "Certified SF" seal of approval. It should be done well, and sparingly, however. I've read a number of novels where the authors took things too far and completely lost my interest/respect because of their illogical and impossible devices. Suspension of disbelief is something that you have to earn, not expect, from your reader, IMHO.
So, MOO much? Graphics as product of your imagination, to be sure, but otherwise there you are.
The only way that a virtual NYC will ever be constructed from these bits is if it is wiped off the face of the earth, so that there's no real world analogue to be concerned about anymore. I'm not particularly interested in that scenario.
Good for national pride, maybe, and perhaps good for industry in a sort of heavy, Soviet way, but I don't see a lot of return on investment coming from this, unless they plan to establish a colony or somesuch.
Still, it's cool. Go space!
ICANN sends out a letter like this, hitting up the TLD Registries to drop some cash in their sacred offering plate.
Their efforts (for 2000, at least) appear to be halfway successful!
Now, if the TLDs got more uppity and took a page from the US's book on paying its UN dues, well, maybe this wouldn't be an issue.
Of course, there are loads of wireless community groups out there, with varying methods of deployment/philosophies/etc. You might look here and start browsing the different groups to see how they run things.
NoVAWireless might be a place to look at -- they seem to be involved with organization of clusters of small, neighborhood-based WISPs.
Nice to hear that fieldmouse's laptop was returned, but it begs the question: how did you get it back? Since you were successful in this, I'm interested in whatever actions you took beforehand/afterward which facilitated recovery. Or was it just dumb luck? Tips to help the rest of us prevent/deal with a theft?
They killed off their licensing arrangement with the clone makers because Apple makes its money from hardware. It's very hard to imagine that they could sell Wintel users enough copies of OS X to make up for the lost hardware sales they'd get from "switchers" who no longer had to buy an entire new machine. Would it rock if I could run OS X on a tricked out custom-built PC at half the price of an apple box? Sure! Would Apple profit from my doing so? I don't think so.
I suspect that The Steve was just suggesting Apple might switch to IBM's Power 4 as the next gen architecture, not that they'll start dropping Athlons into iMacs.
And more recently (1986), before mr cobain's rise to popularity, "It's better to burn out than to fade away" was the Kurgan's jazzy tagline in Highlander (the good one, that is). That's how the phrase entered into my cultural lexicon.
IIRC the USian English Vocabulary is much larger than what is used on the other side of the Atlantic.
It might be more fair to say that the US English Vocabulary is larger than what is available on the other side of the Atlantic. I wouldn't be very comfortable suggesting that USians have larger personal vocabularies -- from my observation, that seems patently untrue.
Not very stupid. I, myself, respire several times a minute.
respire: 1. To breathe in and out; inhale and exhale. 2. To undergo the metabolic process of respiration. 3. To breathe easily again, as after a period of exertion or trouble.
etymology : Middle English respiren, to breathe again, from Latin respirare, to breathe.
If you want to be particularly geekish, you could buy one of these balls from Google, complete with Google decal. It's only $28.50 -- you could outfit an entire office for the cost of a single Aeron!
These kinds of chairs share and advantage with a previous poster's recycled school-desk chairs -- you can rock backwards in them and recline a bit.
Avoid slippery vinyl, naugahyde etc. at all costs. Get a fabric covered chair so that there's a bit of friction between your ass as the seat, lest you slip around too much while jinking and fragging.
So, er, how did you get your hands on the modafinil? It's a prescription drug, yes? Narcoleptic friends? Parents who are doctors?
Well, you could start by studying the health of people who drink 3 cups of decaf a day... then you'd know whether it was the caffeine or something else.
I don't drink Starbucks coffee if I have another choice, but I don't begrudge their baristas the choice to work for a company that treats them with respect. If you're working in the $7/hour zone, there are a lot of worse places to be. And damn but the chonga bagels are tasty :)
Yes and no... the fossil record is really very spotty. For a body to fossilize instead of simply decompose it has to expire in some pretty unusual circumstances. It then has to survive aeons of geological processes acting upon it, and then a human has to find it, either by purposefully excavating, happening across it just as it is exposed on the surface, or by being unusually focused on the contents of his backhoe.
I'm in no way suggesting that aliens set up housekeeping on earth in the distant past. Just pointing out that the fossil record is full of lacunae.
That said, we're discovering new fossils all the time... maybe H. El-gee-emiensis' skull will be next :)
But yes, it is surprising that they haven't complained. Or have they?
So by new and different, you mean a completely new concept? Something just as addictive as Civ, but decidedly not Civ ?? As a previous poster has said, Chess has been around for quite some time and people still enjoy playing it. They also enjoy playing countless variations of Chess, with freakishly modified rules and boards and everything else. But you know what? To develop those variations there had to be an original version of Chess to build from.
I'm willing to bet that, given a few years' time, you'll see some completely new and different ways of playing Civ, thanks to FreeCiv being developed as an open project. Cloning the original version is just the starting point for FreeCiv ... where we go from there is up to anyone who feels like coding.
price isn't everything. the memory and airport upgrades on the ibook are no problem -- flip up the keyboard and plug 'em right in -- but upgrading the drive is like pulling a mouthful of teeth. Really, there are 30 screws to be removed -- phillips and flatheads and torx of multiple sizes. You can see a detailed walkthrough with all the gory details here.
When I bought my ibook from the local apple retailer (not an "Apple Store" but a fully authorized service center) they told me that if I wanted a bigger HD I'd have to buy the ibook bto online -- their techs spent so much time getting in and out of the ibooks, and keeping track of all the parts, that it's just not cost-effective for them.
i figured the 20 gig drive was enough -- there's always external storage and i wanted to walk out with it. :)
Caveat: it's Flash. The first link I gave is for the low-bandwidth (~3 meg) version. If your pipes are fat, or you don't mind the wait, there's also the ~17 meg high-quality stereo version.
Amazon sells the CD, and has some real audio samples for those who don't know what we're talking about :)