I wouldn't call anything impossible. See The Dispossessed.
Ursula LeGuin's best novel, IMO.
And, to get back to the inevitable FLT topic, we might note that in her "Hainish" novels she got a lot of good stories about a universe in which there was no faster-than-light travel, but instantaneous communication had been developed. A number of her stories are about the social and personal effects of relativistic time dilation.
Sadly, in her later stories in this universe she seems to have gotten tired of the restriction, and introduced a sort of semi-mystical FTL mechanism. I don't think this improved the series. She turned it from science-fiction into science-fantasy.
If you're limited to significantly slower-than-light travel your stories have to take place in our solar system. They can't involve any alien species, because no aliens would bother spending millenia coming to earth.
Not necessarily though you do have some serious limits.
Recently I've read Octavia Butler's "Xenogenesis" trilogy, which takes place entirely within the solar system, with no mention of FTL travel. It's a very well-done "first contact" story, with the visiting aliens introduced in the first chapter. The pre-story is that the aliens are in the outer part of the solar system right now, waiting for the right time to contact humans and initiate "trade". This isn't quite what you might think, because these aliens' technology is all biological. Their "ship" is a very large, intelligent organism that lives a very long time. The aliens routinely modify themselves genetically to fit any environment. They see us as a new source of useful genetic data, which they are willing to pay for. But their wait is interrupted when humans start a nuclear war, producing a nuclear winter. This puts the lurking aliens into emergency recovery mode as Earth's biosphere dies. Some humans are recovered, and wake to find that Earth's recovery is well underway, but humans have forfeited their control of the planet. And the aliens are still very interested in a "deal", with the terms slowly emerging during the story.
The reason these aliens aren't kept away by the speed of light is that they don't have a home planet any more. They just routinely travel the galaxy in their version of a "generation ship", but it's their permanent home. When they find life, they study it. If it's intelligent, they make a deal with it, leaving behind as much information as the species can handle. When they meet others of their kind, they merge their biological databases. There are thousands of ships full of these aliens scattered around the galaxy.
There are a lot of interesting scenarios that don't require violating lightspeed. You just need to look at things on a longer time scale than most humans are used to dealing with.
... if I'm somewhere where there's a clock the lack of comfort annoys me and I take it [my watch] off:)
I've seen a number of articles about the falling watch sales in North America and Europe over the past few years. I'd guess it's also happening in Japan and a few other Asian countries. It seems that a lot of people are realizing that they are now hardly ever out of sight of a clock, so why wear one?
I stopped wearing a watch 4 or 5 years ago for this very reason. I don't miss it. And the cell phone that's usually in my pocket shows the time when it's not otherwise busy. So I'm still carrying a clock around anyway, except that it periodically gets its time from the phone system, so it's more accurate than a watch.
Except as jewelry, watches are a dying technology.
Actually, this is a misconstruing that is at the heart of a lot of the problems the US is now having with the rest of the world.
The Sep 11 attack wasn't on the American Trade Center; it was on the World Trade Center. Citizens of around 60 nations died in that attack.
When you claim that this was an attack on America or Americans, you are repeating the Bush administration's oft-stated attitude that the rest of those dead don't matter. They weren't Americans; they aren't relevant; we don't care if they died. Only Americans are important.
With the Internet, it's fairly easy to find information about bin Laden and his Wahhabi gang. Their fight isn't with America; it's with the entire modern world. America is just the biggest, baddest of their opponents. But they are fighting us all, not just Americans. The Sep 11 attack wasn't their first try at the World Trade Center, and they have perpetrated attacks on many other places and people who weren't American.
But, of course, only American deaths count. The rest of the world is irrelevant.
Small wonder that the rest of the world isn't being too cooperative with the US these days.
I guess that means that the only thing 20-30% faster will be Linux ISOs!
Hey, what makes you think you'll be allowed to download linux ISOs with it? Notice that:
It's meant for legal downloads only, of course.
I take this to mean that there's DRM involved. Once MS's P2P is widely accepted, we can assume that communistic things like linux won't pass the DRM test.
But we can always just use BT (which always makes me think Bacillus thuringensis).
Hey, it's a good thing I decided to read a while before writing the reply that I was thinking of. It'd just be a dup of your message. The image of would-be terrorists descending on public libraries to check out books on making atomic bombs is good for a bit of humor.
Instead, I'll add an example from a college physics course that I took maybe 30 years ago. At the end of one chapter, the list of exercises included one along the lines of "Using the equations in this chapter and table X in the back of the book, calculate the critical masses of the following isotopes...."
This was followed by a footnote symbol, and the footnote at the bottom of the page advised that telling the answer to this exercise to anyone without a top-secret security clearance was a felony under US law, with punishment including life in prison or execution.
Everyone in the class thought this was pretty funny. It taught us something useful about the sanity of US "security" laws.
So it's not just libraries that our neocon leaders think are aiding the terrorists. Many college bookstores are selling information critical to bomb making. They openly sell such books to anyone with the $50 or $75 price tag.
Somehow I suspect there just might be better solutions to the problem than attacking libraries and college bookstores.
Probably a vast majority of the people driving cars (at least in the USA) probably don't smoke. So why does every car equipped still ship with several cigarette lighters?
The answer is that third-party products (e.g. cellphones, laptops, and other power adaptors) use the cigarette lighter interface for their powersource. So we need cigarette lighters in our cars for the 3rd-party products, even if we don't use them directly for their immediate purpose, i.e. smoking.
Yes, and this also illustrates something very familiar: When something gets widely adopted as a "standard" that is extended past its original use, the result is often big and clumsy, and doesn't work very well.
The cigarette lighter socket is a really crummy power source. It was designed for running a resistance-heater coil. The adapters for powering things generally don't fit too well, in part because the socket isn't very well standardized. For a lighter, it doesn't need to be. But the power-cord plugs usually don't make good contact, and they fall out all too easily. Or they get stuck and can't be pulled out easily without damaging the cord.
And the power isn't very well regulated. For a lighter coil, you don't need a constant voltage; for electronics, you do. For a lighter coil, voltage spikes don't hurt; for electronics, they do. And on and on.
If we didn't have the lighter socket as a standard, we'd more likely have a small, well-standardized socket with plugs that fit. We've known how to make them for a century; there's no problem putting them in cars. And the power to the socket would be now go through some simple, cheap electronics to regulate the voltage and block spikes.
Actually, you can special-order good power outlets in most models of cars. But most electronic devices sold for use in cars come with a cord that plugs into the lighter. You could special-order power cords for electronic devices, but that turns out to be more difficult than you'd expect. It's easier to just use the cord that came with the device. And they all come with lighter plugs because that's what's found in all cars.
Fast forward 5 years. Almost all media is WMA and WMV only.
It likely won't take 5 years.
For another example, a year ago ComedyCentral.com gave you a choice of RM or WMP files for most of their video clips. Now they only offer WMP. If you don't have WMP, their site is worthless.
This isn't as frivolous an example as it might sound. Before the recent US election, there were fun stories about surveys that turned up the interesting fact that people who watched the Daily Show were better able to answer questions about the candidates that people who got their news from other major media sources. It was about that time that the Daily Show dropped the RM format. There's lots of opportunity for conspiracy (or monopoly) theories here.
It is pretty sad, of course, when a comedy and satire show is the best source of news about your own government. But it is also funny. And for them to switch to sending solely a proprietary MS format is a sign of how things are probably going.
For another useful example, there is the widespread use of MS Word's ".doc" format in email. You can still get software for non-MS platforms that display such messages, but this might end soon. We've had discussions here of MS's applications for patents on some of the Word encodings. This is a potential legal threat to anyone using non-MS mail readers. Many of us find that MS users often insist on sending Word docs; requests for non-proprietary versions of the message are ignored (and often not understood). If the sender is your boss, you may find it difficult to ignore such messages, and soon you could end up in jail if you decode them with non-MS-approved software. So no matter who you are, you may soon have to have a Windows machine handy for reading Word docs.
Even if people did prefer a player other than WMP -- why on earth would they want a version of Windows with it removed?
Well, my wife a year and a half back would have. She had always used Windows "because that's what we have at work". On her home machine, she tried installing a bunch of high-quality audio and video software. Repeatedly, when she started something playing, WMP would also wake up and start playing the same thing, out of sync by several seconds. With video, you can just close one window. But this doesn't work with audio, and the result was pretty much garbage.
She asked around, did a bunch of googling, but got no satisfaction. Lots of "RTFM, 1D10T!" replies. She was getting really frustrated. As a developer for unix/linux/OSX, but not much Windows experience, I couldn't help much.
Then one day she tried my Mac Powerbook. After a couple of hours, she drove over to the local Apple store and bought one. A couple of weeks later, she donated her Windows box to me (and I occasionally turn it on to test web pages against its browsers). Her attitude now is that she has to use Windows at work, but at home she can use something that works. All the quality audio/video stuff she wants runs on her Mac.
Perhaps the best way to look at this is in comparison with older audio/video equipment. There have always been the all-in-one combo boxes that do everything, but don't do anything all that well. That's fine for your average Joe Sixpack. If you want quality, you get a mess of components and learn to wire them together. It's not as convenient but it looks and sounds a lot better. The two kinds of equipment have never much been in competition, because they're aimed at different kinds of users.
Windows is becoming the equivalent of those all-in-one boxes. Convenient for someone who doesn't demand high quality and doesn't want to spend time learning about making all the components work. But if you want quality, you buy a Mac or linux (or *BSD or Solaris or..., depending on exactly what you want to do).
If you're a developer, you're probably getting more and more frustrated with the growing closed nature of Windows. Every couple years, you have to shell out big bucks for the required new releases of all those libraries. And more and more you have to license your stuff through MS if you want it to work on customers' machines; you can't be truly independent. This is always the fate of developers for a closed, unified, it-all-works-together architecture. The owner of the platform controls everything that runs on it.
If you really want to develop quality consumer software, though, you're mostly looking at OSX or linux (or both). Those platforms are still friendly to independent developers. You can market your stuff over the Net, so Microsoft's control of retail outlets isn't important any more. You have to learn how to get along with other software that isn't controlled by a central authority. You need to write documentation, because your users are mostly literate and expect you to teach them all about your stuff.
But face it; if you want to develop quality software, and make some money selling it, MS Windows isn't the platform you want. In particular, if you're writing audio or video software, you don't want to be competing with WMP. This discussion may be considered a long, rambling explanation why.
(I have a number of friends who have been writing audio and/or video software for Windows for some years. They are all starting to show serious signs of depression, as they try to put off admitting that their independent careers are ending.)
Hmmm... Thanks for the Census Bureau numbers. I've heard the myth of course, and also seen a number of sets of numbers that supported the myth but didn't agree with each other. I'd just assumed that there weren't any good census numbers. Of course, considering the mistrust between the folks in Utah and the US for the first few decades, I'm not sure I'd trust the Census Bureau's numbers much before 1880 or so anyway. But it's interesting to see numbers from what should be a reasonably disinterested source. Maybe I'll do some googling for more opinions (and maybe even some facts;-).
There certainly was a lot of "crazy cult" in the early Mormon population. Not so much nowadays, though there are a few small cult communities that manage to get a lot of publicity every few years.
There's also the observation that the last half of the 19th century was a hotbed of religiosity in much of the US. The Mormons were only one of a long list of crazy cults. Most have settled down into indistinguishable suburban churches by now.
In any case, there is still the widespread distinction between civil and religious marriage in most of the US. This does permit cults (and mainstream religious groups) to implement their own rules for marriages registered with the church or temple. Not that many people really want to distinguish, of course. But some churches do have stricter marriage rules than the state government, and a few are less strict.
They just need to have the ability to filter those sites listed by the AG
Yeah, and you just know the kids will refer to this a the "Required Reading List".
And there'll be lively traffic in software to defeat the censor software. Geek status in Utah schools will in part depend on how quickly one can get around the blocking on a random machine.
So it'll actually be for the good: It'll encourage kids to learn enough about computers to defeat the censorship.
The majority voice of any state can't override the Constitution.
Actually, it happens all the time.
For around 90 years (approx 1880 to 1970), lynchings happened in the US on the average of about once a week. Many of them were publicly announced beforehand. They were local civic events. People took pictures. Postcards were made and sold. Souvenirs were collected (sometimes including body parts). It was all documented, and totally illegal. But hardly anyone was ever prosecuted.
Actually, Utah is like many American states, in that there is a strict distinction between a religious and a civil marriage. Utah did outlaw plural civil marriage in the 1880's. But the state doesn't really regulate (or recognize) religious marriage at all; that's between you and your church.
This isn't unusual, of course. In many states, a Catholic can get a divorce from the state fairly easily, but the church will still recognize the couple as married, and will refuse to marry either again after their (religiously unrecognized) divorce. States mostly have no problem with this, as what goes on inside the church isn't generally the state's concern. Unless an actual crime is committed, of course, but attempting to get married isn't a criminal act.
My wife often kids me about the 50% or so of my relatives Out West who are Mormons. I've learned a lot about Mormon practices from them, but I don't know any who have more than one wife. This isn't surprising, as the SLC branch of the church doesn't exactly encourage the practice these days, and there's no longer the 10:1 ratio of women to men that they had 150 years ago. But there are a lot of smaller Mormon sects that don't answer to the temple in SLC, and some of them still do plural marriages among their members. These would be religious marriages, of course; they aren't recognized by any state government (or the SLC temple).
Such situations can exist in other circumstances. A few years ago, before the state government here in Massachusetts started recognizing gay marriage, my wife and I were guests at a Jewish lesbian wedding. During the service, the rabbi made a comment that I thought quite appropriate: Perhaps the government doesn't know about this marriage, but God is present and knows about it. We find nothing in God's Word that says He objects to such a union. So to the religious community, it is as valid as any marriage, and will be entered in the temple's records. It lacks the sanction of the state, but we know how valuable that is. Next year the state's rules may change [they did]; God's rules won't change.
I'd guess that the tiny minority of Mormons with plural marriages have a similar understanding.
I've occasionally wondered about the legal status of, say, a Muslim tourist who visits the US with his two wives. I haven't read about any court tests that are relevant. For that matter, I'd wager that there are a tiny minority of American Muslims who have two wives, approved by the mosque but not the state. Maybe someone knows? I don't suppose they'd speak up much, under the circumstances.
like several people e-mailing one person but not each other, which is how some criminal networks operate.
We have an addresses "techsupport@internaldomain" which matches this pattern to a T.
Yeah, and I'd never realized that all of those geek mailing lists that I'm on are centers of illegal activity.
After all, it's only the newbies that use "reply to all" and produce messages between subscribers. The experienced list members usually figure out that getting two replies to a message is dumb, and just reply to the list. But then, we all know that experienced computer geeks are all hackers, and thus evildoers. Right?
Nope. PNG was the first format that I tried. It renders a bit better than GIF, but there are still a lot of horizontal and vertical lines that disappear. This happens even if the width of the PNG image is less than the BB's supposed screen width.
Actually I'm a bit curious about whether I have the correct screen dimensions. It's amazingly difficult to find the numbers, and I'm not sure that I have them right. The numbers that I have are 240x160. So I've tried sending, e.g., 235 x 155 PNG images. The horizontals come out partly missing and partly double thickness. This makes the image useless for the app.
Funny thing - I've been involved with a project to deliver readable (not playable, but readable) music to various sorts of little computer gadgets. Usually this has involved finding the screen size and sending gif or png files, which do better than jpg or tiff for displaying music notation.
In the case of the blackberry, I've had near total failure. For reasons that nobody seems to explain, all four of these file types are munged in such a way that some of the horizontal lines (the staffs) disappear. This is a killer bug; it makes the music totally unreadable.
This doesn't happen with palm devices. If the screen is WxH pixels, I can send a gif or png that's slighly less than W pixels wide, and it displays. But the same gif or png on the blackberry, at any size, will have missing horizontals. Some of the verticals (note stems) are missing, too, but that's more a nuisance than a killer.
This is a real disappointment. One of my test toys is a BB with an unlimited net-access contract. It would be quite useful for the desired uses. But if I can't get those lines to show on the screen, it's utterly useless for this app.
(Posted with the hope that someone will say "Oh, the solution is easy; read about it at <URL>..." If it's any help, the service is via attwireless, not owned by but not integrated with cingular.;-)
(I've also been trying to discover how to use the BB as a wireless modem for my Mac Powerbook. Another brick wall.)
Well, I explored the nationalatlas.gov site a bit, slowly getting more and more frustrated with not being able to get any maps that showed what I was looking for.
Finally I stumbled across the comment:
For example, within the National Atlas Map Maker, we do not include detailed street maps. That is because the intent of an atlas that covers the whole Nation is to use generalized maps that portray America's broad conditions, patterns, and trends.
That explains the problem. If you're after patterns and trends, it's a good site. If you're after actual maps, it's not what you want at all.
If you look up this bit of history, you'll find that Boston's ordinance was passed a few months after the "great fire of 1631" that destroyed much of the town center.
Of course, back then Boston was a village of only a few thousand people. But still, seeing your downtown turned into a pile of smoking embers has a way of getting people's attention.
2 1/2 centuries later, Chicago still hadn't learned that lesson.
If you come back in a few centuries, I'll bet you'll find that software is still being created (in C and VB, not to mention Fortran and Cobol;-) that has just as many usability problems.
GUIs are there for the user, not the developer. GUIs are supposed to be intuitive, so as to allow the user to be far more productive, rather than hindered. Such ideas are not new. Mr. Raskin spoke of such things decades ago.
Well, yes and no. I've built a number of GUIs that are in use by users, but without any user input during the design. The reason was that I built them for my own use. Then some other people saw me using them, and wanted a copy. When I was designing them, I usually couldn't get feedback from users, because users weren't interested. If I could get them to listen at all, they had no idea what I was getting at, and saw no reason that I should waste my time on something that nobody needed. And sometimes, it was literally something I did to save myself some time.
All too often, users either can't or won't give useful feedback until they see a prototype. You usually can't get feedback from a verbal description; people will have little idea what you're talking about. When you have something to put up on their screen, it finally becomes possible for users to give reasonable feedback. Before that, about all you can often get is "make it user-friendly", which contains little if any useful information.
So a good design approach is often to build a simplified prototype which does a few things you find useful, in a way that you find convenient to use. Let a few of your more cooperative users get their hands on it. Ask them what they think. Listen, and try to make sense of it if you can. Then build version 0.2, and repeat.
it actually took friggin long for them to come up with the idea for a chimney.
Here in Boston, one of the fun bits of history is that in 1631, what may have been the first fire ordinance was passed. Among other things, it outlawed wooden chimneys.
Think about it. There was a reason that they decided to ban wooden chimneys. It wasn't done out of silliness.
Sometimes I think of this when I see an especially goofy mis-design in some software. I'm also reminded of it by a lot of the anti-regulation rhetoric in this and other forums.
Imagine trying to use a CAD program, or even browse a web-forum without a mouse.
Even with one, CAD users are likely to complain. Take my wife, for example. She used to work a lot with CAD systems in several civil engineering offices. She still complains about the stupid 1-, 2- and even 3-button mice, saying how nice her old 16-button mice were.
Of course, she had software that would let her quickly map any of a zillion library functions to any button. She even liked to demo using this with a text editor. The mapping had all the common edit operations mapped to buttons. She could rearrange text faster than you could follow with your eyes, just using the 16-button mouse.
Funny thing; she now has a Mac with a trackpad input that uses a pen. She still complains about the lack of buttons. She has to keep putting the pen down and switching to the keyboard to type a command, then picking the pen up.
"What a waste of time! They knew how to do it better 20 years ago."
you are stupid to use your work email to send something along the lines of: "Did you pick up the handcuffs and the whip?" to your SO.
Heh. I've had a few jobs where I helped keep the email flowing. Inevitably there are failed deliveries that end up in the hands of "postmaster" for delivery or return-to-sender. And, inevitably, there were a few messages with content like this.
Now, if you're trying to fix a failed message, you usually don't much care about the contents, because the info you need is in the headers. But it's often difficult to not glance at the message content.
While I've never (knowingly) helped bust someone for such messages, I have often taken steps to make it clear to the people involved that 1) I'm not personally concerned with what they're sending, but 2) I and several others can read any message that goes through our machines. Sometimes we have to read them, for example in cases like this message that failed due to some net.hiccup or other problem. You should be aware of this. I might be a nice guy, but others may not.
What I'd do if I accidentally saw a message dealing with illegal or unethical activity, I don't know. But it might happen some day.
And I've introduced a lot of email users to the wonders of ROT13...
Exclusive homosexuality, with a huge fitness hit is rarely seen.
True, but it's not unknown. The research on wild primates has turned up cases of homosexual pairs that ignore available members of the other sex. This has been observed in most primate species that have been studied to any degree. But it isn't as common as "casual" sex. Most of the reports are of male-male pairs, which could be explained as something that doesn't really affect the group's next generation as much as a female-female pair would. Those two males may not leave descendants, true, but Mother Nature doesn't much care. A male infant eaten by a predator has about the same effect, after all.
One of the common arguments for the "social bonding" hypothesis is that homosexuality is rare in non-social species. Thus, the orangutan is the main non-social primate, and field researchers have commented on the lack of any homosexual pairs in their observations. They don't seem to do casual sex, either; they just get together for mating when a female is in estrus. But again, this is anecdotal, and much more research is needed to get any true theory out of the data.
A common observation is that true female homosexuality is rare; females are more often bisexual. This is consistent with a need for females to produce offspring during their limited fertility windows. What they do for social bonding at other times doesn't affect their reproductive ability. A female can do "sexual bonding" with another female, while fooling around with the occasional male, without affecting the group's genetics at all.
True male homosexuality seems to be more common than female, though bisexuality is more common in both sexes. But it matters less if males take themselves out of the gene pool, because other males can step in and take up the slack.
I do recall some years back, when I was working with some primate field researchers (as their computer guru), and they described the pair of males that shared the alpha position in one monkey troop as "flaming gay". It seems that this pair ignored or repulsed females in heat that tried to get their attention. They had to settle for the beta male, who was happy to handle the job. Meanwhile, the low-ranking males engaged in a lot of gay sex. But most of them clearly preferred females, and would often mate with one when out of sight of a dominant male.
Another curious case I've read of: Homosexual mating has been observed in several species of fish that breed in large groups (such as the salmon that spawn in large numbers in small streams). In this case the breeding water tends to be filled with a cloud of sperm. So, though a male is more likely to fertilize eggs of a female that he's near, some of her eggs are probably fertilized by random sperm in the water. This means that even the homosexual males are likely to fertilize a few eggs. And homosexual females in the center of the breeding area are likely to have all their eggs fertilized even with no males nearby.
Ignorance is natural too, but I don't see anyone arguing that people who've learned nothing should be considered equal to those who have studied extensively and developed important intellectual skills.
[W]hat if it could be scientifically proven, without a doubt, that race A was in many ways superior to race B? The scientist may be perfectly capable of accepting this without it affecting his actions towards others, but the rest of the world may see this as an excuse or reason to treat race B as inferior.
Indeed, and this is partly why articles on such topics so often bring up the sickle-cell trait as an example. There are few social/political hangups over this genetic trait. Unlike stupidity, sickle-cell is considered a disease that should be diagnosed and treated.
Here in the US, sickle-cell screening is done in a subset of the public schools, and they're mostly in neighborhoods with a large percent of students with African ancestry. Few people consider this "racism", because this genetic disease is primarily found in people with West-African ancestry. Not entirely, of course. It shows up in people of all races and ethnic backgrounds, presumably because of interbreeding (with or without intermarriage;-). But it's fairly clear that intensive screening programs are most effective if used in areas where a disease is most common. If you have limited dollars, efforts to diagnose sickle-cell will be most effective (in the US) if you primarily test black children.
Cochran's hypotheses are interesting, but a lot more prone to social and political attack, because he is talking about problems in the central nervous sytem rather than a physical defect in red blood cells. But still, medical screening for problems like Tay-Sachs disease is mostly done in areas where the problem has been found in the past, and these are mostly neighborhoods with a large percentage of specific ethnic groups.
In a rational world, we'd be treating genetic problems that affect the nervous system similarly to how we treat other genetic problems. But we do seem to have problems dealing rationally with questions concerning "intelligence". There's some sort of irony here.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't call anything impossible. See The Dispossessed.
Ursula LeGuin's best novel, IMO.
And, to get back to the inevitable FLT topic, we might note that in her "Hainish" novels she got a lot of good stories about a universe in which there was no faster-than-light travel, but instantaneous communication had been developed. A number of her stories are about the social and personal effects of relativistic time dilation.
Sadly, in her later stories in this universe she seems to have gotten tired of the restriction, and introduced a sort of semi-mystical FTL mechanism. I don't think this improved the series. She turned it from science-fiction into science-fantasy.
If you're limited to significantly slower-than-light travel your stories have to take place in our solar system. They can't involve any alien species, because no aliens would bother spending millenia coming to earth.
Not necessarily though you do have some serious limits.
Recently I've read Octavia Butler's "Xenogenesis" trilogy, which takes place entirely within the solar system, with no mention of FTL travel. It's a very well-done "first contact" story, with the visiting aliens introduced in the first chapter. The pre-story is that the aliens are in the outer part of the solar system right now, waiting for the right time to contact humans and initiate "trade". This isn't quite what you might think, because these aliens' technology is all biological. Their "ship" is a very large, intelligent organism that lives a very long time. The aliens routinely modify themselves genetically to fit any environment. They see us as a new source of useful genetic data, which they are willing to pay for. But their wait is interrupted when humans start a nuclear war, producing a nuclear winter. This puts the lurking aliens into emergency recovery mode as Earth's biosphere dies. Some humans are recovered, and wake to find that Earth's recovery is well underway, but humans have forfeited their control of the planet. And the aliens are still very interested in a "deal", with the terms slowly emerging during the story.
The reason these aliens aren't kept away by the speed of light is that they don't have a home planet any more. They just routinely travel the galaxy in their version of a "generation ship", but it's their permanent home. When they find life, they study it. If it's intelligent, they make a deal with it, leaving behind as much information as the species can handle. When they meet others of their kind, they merge their biological databases. There are thousands of ships full of these aliens scattered around the galaxy.
There are a lot of interesting scenarios that don't require violating lightspeed. You just need to look at things on a longer time scale than most humans are used to dealing with.
... if I'm somewhere where there's a clock the lack of comfort annoys me and I take it [my watch] off :)
I've seen a number of articles about the falling watch sales in North America and Europe over the past few years. I'd guess it's also happening in Japan and a few other Asian countries. It seems that a lot of people are realizing that they are now hardly ever out of sight of a clock, so why wear one?
I stopped wearing a watch 4 or 5 years ago for this very reason. I don't miss it. And the cell phone that's usually in my pocket shows the time when it's not otherwise busy. So I'm still carrying a clock around anyway, except that it periodically gets its time from the phone system, so it's more accurate than a watch.
Except as jewelry, watches are a dying technology.
...lots of dead Americans.
Actually, this is a misconstruing that is at the heart of a lot of the problems the US is now having with the rest of the world.
The Sep 11 attack wasn't on the American Trade Center; it was on the World Trade Center. Citizens of around 60 nations died in that attack.
When you claim that this was an attack on America or Americans, you are repeating the Bush administration's oft-stated attitude that the rest of those dead don't matter. They weren't Americans; they aren't relevant; we don't care if they died. Only Americans are important.
With the Internet, it's fairly easy to find information about bin Laden and his Wahhabi gang. Their fight isn't with America; it's with the entire modern world. America is just the biggest, baddest of their opponents. But they are fighting us all, not just Americans. The Sep 11 attack wasn't their first try at the World Trade Center, and they have perpetrated attacks on many other places and people who weren't American.
But, of course, only American deaths count. The rest of the world is irrelevant.
Small wonder that the rest of the world isn't being too cooperative with the US these days.
I guess that means that the only thing 20-30% faster will be Linux ISOs!
Hey, what makes you think you'll be allowed to download linux ISOs with it? Notice that:
It's meant for legal downloads only, of course.
I take this to mean that there's DRM involved. Once MS's P2P is widely accepted, we can assume that communistic things like linux won't pass the DRM test.
But we can always just use BT (which always makes me think Bacillus thuringensis).
Hey, it's a good thing I decided to read a while before writing the reply that I was thinking of. It'd just be a dup of your message. The image of would-be terrorists descending on public libraries to check out books on making atomic bombs is good for a bit of humor.
...."
Instead, I'll add an example from a college physics course that I took maybe 30 years ago. At the end of one chapter, the list of exercises included one along the lines of "Using the equations in this chapter and table X in the back of the book, calculate the critical masses of the following isotopes
This was followed by a footnote symbol, and the footnote at the bottom of the page advised that telling the answer to this exercise to anyone without a top-secret security clearance was a felony under US law, with punishment including life in prison or execution.
Everyone in the class thought this was pretty funny. It taught us something useful about the sanity of US "security" laws.
So it's not just libraries that our neocon leaders think are aiding the terrorists. Many college bookstores are selling information critical to bomb making. They openly sell such books to anyone with the $50 or $75 price tag.
Somehow I suspect there just might be better solutions to the problem than attacking libraries and college bookstores.
Probably a vast majority of the people driving cars (at least in the USA) probably don't smoke. So why does every car equipped still ship with several cigarette lighters?
The answer is that third-party products (e.g. cellphones, laptops, and other power adaptors) use the cigarette lighter interface for their powersource. So we need cigarette lighters in our cars for the 3rd-party products, even if we don't use them directly for their immediate purpose, i.e. smoking.
Yes, and this also illustrates something very familiar: When something gets widely adopted as a "standard" that is extended past its original use, the result is often big and clumsy, and doesn't work very well.
The cigarette lighter socket is a really crummy power source. It was designed for running a resistance-heater coil. The adapters for powering things generally don't fit too well, in part because the socket isn't very well standardized. For a lighter, it doesn't need to be. But the power-cord plugs usually don't make good contact, and they fall out all too easily. Or they get stuck and can't be pulled out easily without damaging the cord.
And the power isn't very well regulated. For a lighter coil, you don't need a constant voltage; for electronics, you do. For a lighter coil, voltage spikes don't hurt; for electronics, they do. And on and on.
If we didn't have the lighter socket as a standard, we'd more likely have a small, well-standardized socket with plugs that fit. We've known how to make them for a century; there's no problem putting them in cars. And the power to the socket would be now go through some simple, cheap electronics to regulate the voltage and block spikes.
Actually, you can special-order good power outlets in most models of cars. But most electronic devices sold for use in cars come with a cord that plugs into the lighter. You could special-order power cords for electronic devices, but that turns out to be more difficult than you'd expect. It's easier to just use the cord that came with the device. And they all come with lighter plugs because that's what's found in all cars.
Fast forward 5 years. Almost all media is WMA and WMV only.
It likely won't take 5 years.
For another example, a year ago ComedyCentral.com gave you a choice of RM or WMP files for most of their video clips. Now they only offer WMP. If you don't have WMP, their site is worthless.
This isn't as frivolous an example as it might sound. Before the recent US election, there were fun stories about surveys that turned up the interesting fact that people who watched the Daily Show were better able to answer questions about the candidates that people who got their news from other major media sources. It was about that time that the Daily Show dropped the RM format. There's lots of opportunity for conspiracy (or monopoly) theories here.
It is pretty sad, of course, when a comedy and satire show is the best source of news about your own government. But it is also funny. And for them to switch to sending solely a proprietary MS format is a sign of how things are probably going.
For another useful example, there is the widespread use of MS Word's ".doc" format in email. You can still get software for non-MS platforms that display such messages, but this might end soon. We've had discussions here of MS's applications for patents on some of the Word encodings. This is a potential legal threat to anyone using non-MS mail readers. Many of us find that MS users often insist on sending Word docs; requests for non-proprietary versions of the message are ignored (and often not understood). If the sender is your boss, you may find it difficult to ignore such messages, and soon you could end up in jail if you decode them with non-MS-approved software. So no matter who you are, you may soon have to have a Windows machine handy for reading Word docs.
Even if people did prefer a player other than WMP -- why on earth would they want a version of Windows with it removed?
..., depending on exactly what you want to do).
Well, my wife a year and a half back would have. She had always used Windows "because that's what we have at work". On her home machine, she tried installing a bunch of high-quality audio and video software. Repeatedly, when she started something playing, WMP would also wake up and start playing the same thing, out of sync by several seconds. With video, you can just close one window. But this doesn't work with audio, and the result was pretty much garbage.
She asked around, did a bunch of googling, but got no satisfaction. Lots of "RTFM, 1D10T!" replies. She was getting really frustrated. As a developer for unix/linux/OSX, but not much Windows experience, I couldn't help much.
Then one day she tried my Mac Powerbook. After a couple of hours, she drove over to the local Apple store and bought one. A couple of weeks later, she donated her Windows box to me (and I occasionally turn it on to test web pages against its browsers). Her attitude now is that she has to use Windows at work, but at home she can use something that works. All the quality audio/video stuff she wants runs on her Mac.
Perhaps the best way to look at this is in comparison with older audio/video equipment. There have always been the all-in-one combo boxes that do everything, but don't do anything all that well. That's fine for your average Joe Sixpack. If you want quality, you get a mess of components and learn to wire them together. It's not as convenient but it looks and sounds a lot better. The two kinds of equipment have never much been in competition, because they're aimed at different kinds of users.
Windows is becoming the equivalent of those all-in-one boxes. Convenient for someone who doesn't demand high quality and doesn't want to spend time learning about making all the components work. But if you want quality, you buy a Mac or linux (or *BSD or Solaris or
If you're a developer, you're probably getting more and more frustrated with the growing closed nature of Windows. Every couple years, you have to shell out big bucks for the required new releases of all those libraries. And more and more you have to license your stuff through MS if you want it to work on customers' machines; you can't be truly independent. This is always the fate of developers for a closed, unified, it-all-works-together architecture. The owner of the platform controls everything that runs on it.
If you really want to develop quality consumer software, though, you're mostly looking at OSX or linux (or both). Those platforms are still friendly to independent developers. You can market your stuff over the Net, so Microsoft's control of retail outlets isn't important any more. You have to learn how to get along with other software that isn't controlled by a central authority. You need to write documentation, because your users are mostly literate and expect you to teach them all about your stuff.
But face it; if you want to develop quality software, and make some money selling it, MS Windows isn't the platform you want. In particular, if you're writing audio or video software, you don't want to be competing with WMP. This discussion may be considered a long, rambling explanation why.
(I have a number of friends who have been writing audio and/or video software for Windows for some years. They are all starting to show serious signs of depression, as they try to put off admitting that their independent careers are ending.)
Hmmm ... Thanks for the Census Bureau numbers. I've heard the myth of course, and also seen a number of sets of numbers that supported the myth but didn't agree with each other. I'd just assumed that there weren't any good census numbers. Of course, considering the mistrust between the folks in Utah and the US for the first few decades, I'm not ;-).
sure I'd trust the Census Bureau's numbers much before 1880 or so anyway. But it's interesting to see numbers from what should be a reasonably disinterested source. Maybe I'll do some googling for more opinions (and maybe even some facts
There certainly was a lot of "crazy cult" in the early Mormon population. Not so much nowadays, though there are a few small cult communities that manage to get a lot of publicity every few years.
There's also the observation that the last half of the 19th century was a hotbed of religiosity in much of the US. The Mormons were only one of a long list of crazy cults. Most have settled down into indistinguishable suburban churches by now.
In any case, there is still the widespread distinction between civil and religious marriage in most of the US. This does permit cults (and mainstream religious groups) to implement their own rules for marriages registered with the church or temple. Not that many people really want to distinguish, of course. But some churches do have stricter marriage rules than the state government, and a few are less strict.
They just need to have the ability to filter those sites listed by the AG
Yeah, and you just know the kids will refer to this a the "Required Reading List".
And there'll be lively traffic in software to defeat the censor software. Geek status in Utah schools will in part depend on how quickly one can get around the blocking on a random machine.
So it'll actually be for the good: It'll encourage kids to learn enough about computers to defeat the censorship.
The majority voice of any state can't override the Constitution.
Actually, it happens all the time.
For around 90 years (approx 1880 to 1970), lynchings happened in the US on the average of about once a week. Many of them were publicly announced beforehand. They were local civic events. People took pictures. Postcards were made and sold. Souvenirs were collected (sometimes including body parts). It was all documented, and totally illegal. But hardly anyone was ever prosecuted.
Unenforced law just isn't very relevant.
Actually, Utah is like many American states, in that there is a strict distinction between a religious and a civil marriage. Utah did outlaw plural civil marriage in the 1880's. But the state doesn't really regulate (or recognize) religious marriage at all; that's between you and your church.
This isn't unusual, of course. In many states, a Catholic can get a divorce from the state fairly easily, but the church will still recognize the couple as married, and will refuse to marry either again after their (religiously unrecognized) divorce. States mostly have no problem with this, as what goes on inside the church isn't generally the state's concern. Unless an actual crime is committed, of course, but attempting to get married isn't a criminal act.
My wife often kids me about the 50% or so of my relatives Out West who are Mormons. I've learned a lot about Mormon practices from them, but I don't know any who have more than one wife. This isn't surprising, as the SLC branch of the church doesn't exactly encourage the practice these days, and there's no longer the 10:1 ratio of women to men that they had 150 years ago. But there are a lot of smaller Mormon sects that don't answer to the temple in SLC, and some of them still do plural marriages among their members. These would be religious marriages, of course; they aren't recognized by any state government (or the SLC temple).
Such situations can exist in other circumstances. A few years ago, before the state government here in Massachusetts started recognizing gay marriage, my wife and I were guests at a Jewish lesbian wedding. During the service, the rabbi made a comment that I thought quite appropriate: Perhaps the government doesn't know about this marriage, but God is present and knows about it. We find nothing in God's Word that says He objects to such a union. So to the religious community, it is as valid as any marriage, and will be entered in the temple's records. It lacks the sanction of the state, but we know how valuable that is. Next year the state's rules may change [they did]; God's rules won't change.
I'd guess that the tiny minority of Mormons with plural marriages have a similar understanding.
I've occasionally wondered about the legal status of, say, a Muslim tourist who visits the US with his two wives. I haven't read about any court tests that are relevant. For that matter, I'd wager that there are a tiny minority of American Muslims who have two wives, approved by the mosque but not the state. Maybe someone knows? I don't suppose they'd speak up much, under the circumstances.
like several people e-mailing one person but not each other, which is how some criminal networks operate.
We have an addresses "techsupport@internaldomain" which matches this pattern to a T.
Yeah, and I'd never realized that all of those geek mailing lists that I'm on are centers of illegal activity.
After all, it's only the newbies that use "reply to all" and produce messages between subscribers. The experienced list members usually figure out that getting two replies to a message is dumb, and just reply to the list. But then, we all know that experienced computer geeks are all hackers, and thus evildoers. Right?
Nope. PNG was the first format that I tried. It renders a bit better than GIF, but there are still a lot of horizontal and vertical lines that disappear. This happens even if the width of the PNG image is less than the BB's supposed screen width.
Actually I'm a bit curious about whether I have the correct screen dimensions. It's amazingly difficult to find the numbers, and I'm not sure that I have them right. The numbers that I have are 240x160. So I've tried sending, e.g., 235 x 155 PNG images. The horizontals come out partly missing and partly double thickness. This makes the image useless for the app.
... jpg, gif, png, tiff...check. ...
..." If it's any help, the service is via attwireless, not owned by but not integrated with cingular. ;-)
Funny thing - I've been involved with a project to deliver readable (not playable, but readable) music to various sorts of little computer gadgets. Usually this has involved finding the screen size and sending gif or png files, which do better than jpg or tiff for displaying music notation.
In the case of the blackberry, I've had near total failure. For reasons that nobody seems to explain, all four of these file types are munged in such a way that some of the horizontal lines (the staffs) disappear. This is a killer bug; it makes the music totally unreadable.
This doesn't happen with palm devices. If the screen is WxH pixels, I can send a gif or png that's slighly less than W pixels wide, and it displays. But the same gif or png on the blackberry, at any size, will have missing horizontals. Some of the verticals (note stems) are missing, too, but that's more a nuisance than a killer.
This is a real disappointment. One of my test toys is a BB with an unlimited net-access contract. It would be quite useful for the desired uses. But if I can't get those lines to show on the screen, it's utterly useless for this app.
(Posted with the hope that someone will say "Oh, the solution is easy; read about it at <URL>
(I've also been trying to discover how to use the BB as a wireless modem for my Mac Powerbook. Another brick wall.)
Well, I explored the nationalatlas.gov site a bit, slowly getting more and more frustrated with not being able to get any maps that showed what I was looking for.
Finally I stumbled across the comment:
For example, within the National Atlas Map Maker, we do not include detailed street maps. That is because the intent of an atlas that covers the whole Nation is to use generalized maps that portray America's broad conditions, patterns, and trends.
That explains the problem. If you're after patterns and trends, it's a good site. If you're after actual maps, it's not what you want at all.
If you look up this bit of history, you'll find that Boston's ordinance was passed a few months after the "great fire of 1631" that destroyed much of the town center.
;-) that has just as many usability problems.
Of course, back then Boston was a village of only a few thousand people. But still, seeing your downtown turned into a pile of smoking embers has a way of getting people's attention.
2 1/2 centuries later, Chicago still hadn't learned that lesson.
If you come back in a few centuries, I'll bet you'll find that software is still being created (in C and VB, not to mention Fortran and Cobol
GUIs are there for the user, not the developer. GUIs are supposed to be intuitive, so as to allow the user to be far more productive, rather than hindered. Such ideas are not new. Mr. Raskin spoke of such things decades ago.
Well, yes and no. I've built a number of GUIs that are in use by users, but without any user input during the design. The reason was that I built them for my own use. Then some other people saw me using them, and wanted a copy. When I was designing them, I usually couldn't get feedback from users, because users weren't interested. If I could get them to listen at all, they had no idea what I was getting at, and saw no reason that I should waste my time on something that nobody needed. And sometimes, it was literally something I did to save myself some time.
All too often, users either can't or won't give useful feedback until they see a prototype. You usually can't get feedback from a verbal description; people will have little idea what you're talking about. When you have something to put up on their screen, it finally becomes possible for users to give reasonable feedback. Before that, about all you can often get is "make it user-friendly", which contains little if any useful information.
So a good design approach is often to build a simplified prototype which does a few things you find useful, in a way that you find convenient to use. Let a few of your more cooperative users get their hands on it. Ask them what they think. Listen, and try to make sense of it if you can. Then build version 0.2, and repeat.
it actually took friggin long for them to come up with the idea for a chimney.
Here in Boston, one of the fun bits of history is that in 1631, what may have been the first fire ordinance was passed. Among other things, it outlawed wooden chimneys.
Think about it. There was a reason that they decided to ban wooden chimneys. It wasn't done out of silliness.
Sometimes I think of this when I see an especially goofy mis-design in some software. I'm also reminded of it by a lot of the anti-regulation rhetoric in this and other forums.
Imagine trying to use a CAD program, or even browse a web-forum without a mouse.
Even with one, CAD users are likely to complain. Take my wife, for example. She used to work a lot with CAD systems in several civil engineering offices. She still complains about the stupid 1-, 2- and even 3-button mice, saying how nice her old 16-button mice were.
Of course, she had software that would let her quickly map any of a zillion library functions to any button. She even liked to demo using this with a text editor. The mapping had all the common edit operations mapped to buttons. She could rearrange text faster than you could follow with your eyes, just using the 16-button mouse.
Funny thing; she now has a Mac with a trackpad input that uses a pen. She still complains about the lack of buttons. She has to keep putting the pen down and switching to the keyboard to type a command, then picking the pen up.
"What a waste of time! They knew how to do it better 20 years ago."
you are stupid to use your work email to send something along the lines of: "Did you pick up the handcuffs and the whip?" to your SO.
...
Heh. I've had a few jobs where I helped keep the email flowing. Inevitably there are failed deliveries that end up in the hands of "postmaster" for delivery or return-to-sender. And, inevitably, there were a few messages with content like this.
Now, if you're trying to fix a failed message, you usually don't much care about the contents, because the info you need is in the headers. But it's often difficult to not glance at the message content.
While I've never (knowingly) helped bust someone for such messages, I have often taken steps to make it clear to the people involved that 1) I'm not personally concerned with what they're sending, but 2) I and several others can read any message that goes through our machines. Sometimes we have to read them, for example in cases like this message that failed due to some net.hiccup or other problem. You should be aware of this. I might be a nice guy, but others may not.
What I'd do if I accidentally saw a message dealing with illegal or unethical activity, I don't know. But it might happen some day.
And I've introduced a lot of email users to the wonders of ROT13
Exclusive homosexuality, with a huge fitness hit is rarely seen.
...
True, but it's not unknown. The research on wild primates has turned up cases of homosexual pairs that ignore available members of the other sex. This has been observed in most primate species that have been studied to any degree. But it isn't as common as "casual" sex. Most of the reports are of male-male pairs, which could be explained as something that doesn't really affect the group's next generation as much as a female-female pair would. Those two males may not leave descendants, true, but Mother Nature doesn't much care. A male infant eaten by a predator has about the same effect, after all.
One of the common arguments for the "social bonding" hypothesis is that homosexuality is rare in non-social species. Thus, the orangutan is the main non-social primate, and field researchers have commented on the lack of any homosexual pairs in their observations. They don't seem to do casual sex, either; they just get together for mating when a female is in estrus. But again, this is anecdotal, and much more research is needed to get any true theory out of the data.
A common observation is that true female homosexuality is rare; females are more often bisexual. This is consistent with a need for females to produce offspring during their limited fertility windows. What they do for social bonding at other times doesn't affect their reproductive ability. A female can do "sexual bonding" with another female, while fooling around with the occasional male, without affecting the group's genetics at all.
True male homosexuality seems to be more common than female, though bisexuality is more common in both sexes. But it matters less if males take themselves out of the gene pool, because other males can step in and take up the slack.
I do recall some years back, when I was working with some primate field researchers (as their computer guru), and they described the pair of males that shared the alpha position in one monkey troop as "flaming gay". It seems that this pair ignored or repulsed females in heat that tried to get their attention. They had to settle for the beta male, who was happy to handle the job. Meanwhile, the low-ranking males engaged in a lot of gay sex. But most of them clearly preferred females, and would often mate with one when out of sight of a dominant male.
Another curious case I've read of: Homosexual mating has been observed in several species of fish that breed in large groups (such as the salmon that spawn in large numbers in small streams). In this case the breeding water tends to be filled with a cloud of sperm. So, though a male is more likely to fertilize eggs of a female that he's near, some of her eggs are probably fertilized by random sperm in the water. This means that even the homosexual males are likely to fertilize a few eggs. And homosexual females in the center of the breeding area are likely to have all their eggs fertilized even with no males nearby.
Nature has been rather inventive
Ignorance is natural too, but I don't see anyone arguing that people who've learned nothing should be considered equal to those who have studied extensively and developed important intellectual skills.
;-)
Don't know much history, do you?
[W]hat if it could be scientifically proven, without a doubt, that race A was in many ways superior to race B? The scientist may be perfectly capable of accepting this without it affecting his actions towards others, but the rest of the world may see this as an excuse or reason to treat race B as inferior.
;-). But it's fairly clear that intensive screening programs are most effective if used in areas where a disease is most common. If you have limited dollars, efforts to diagnose sickle-cell will be most effective (in the US) if you primarily test black children.
Indeed, and this is partly why articles on such topics so often bring up the sickle-cell trait as an example. There are few social/political hangups over this genetic trait. Unlike stupidity, sickle-cell is considered a disease that should be diagnosed and treated.
Here in the US, sickle-cell screening is done in a subset of the public schools, and they're mostly in neighborhoods with a large percent of students with African ancestry. Few people consider this "racism", because this genetic disease is primarily found in people with West-African ancestry. Not entirely, of course. It shows up in people of all races and ethnic backgrounds, presumably because of interbreeding (with or without intermarriage
Cochran's hypotheses are interesting, but a lot more prone to social and political attack, because he is talking about problems in the central nervous sytem rather than a physical defect in red blood cells. But still, medical screening for problems like Tay-Sachs disease is mostly done in areas where the problem has been found in the past, and these are mostly neighborhoods with a large percentage of specific ethnic groups.
In a rational world, we'd be treating genetic problems that affect the nervous system similarly to how we treat other genetic problems. But we do seem to have problems dealing rationally with questions concerning "intelligence". There's some sort of irony here.