Mostly because it was so slow I barely got through the monkey scene.
I saw it when it came out. At college, they showed it at a "Films on the Quad" thing, outdoors, and one of my friends was there who had never seen it. He was complaining about the "monkeys" part. I think I recall he enjoyed most of the rest of it, up until the light show part where he was going "WTF?"
Then, when Bowman walked into the room and there's someone sitting at a table with his back to him, all you can see is the top of that guy's head, he said "If that's another monkey, I'm out of here." (That was the much older Bowman at the table, of course.)
I enjoyed it from the first time I saw it, though I thought some parts went on too long. (The trippy light show, the monkeys.) And the ending wasn't particularly clear. I loved all the dance of the spaceships parts.
Speaking of the trippy light show, the best take on that that I've seen was in Mad Magazine's "201 Minutes of a Space Idiocy" parody. "You just crashed through all 201 stories of the Jupiter Museum of Modern Art." That light show part (Yeah, trip through the Star Gate, through the aliens' transportation system) is the part that holds up least. It was pretty much a souped-up version of what was done with overhead projectors at Iron Butterfly and Grateful Dead concerts, not anything that looked like actual astronomical objects, which was what it was supposed to be.
At my age, "giving up a career" is considerably less of a threat. Alas, the company I work for isn't doing anything that that sort of whistles need to be blown about. Not that they've told me about, anyway.
And they're typically in a tiny window that can not be resized, so you can only see a sentence fragment at a time, which is massively obnoxious.
Still, worse than the Soviet Union? In the Soviet Union, what they find when eavesdropping on you could merely send you to the Gulag death camps, where you'd never be heard from again. Google and Facebook's surveillance might result in... let me compose myself... them trying to SELL you something! Showing you TARGETTED ADVERTISING!! The horror, oh, the horror.
I used to sometimes enter the mall on my way to the food court via the "Off 5th" store. (Sak's discount bargain bin.)
I never paid much attention to the store, but I saw a light jacket of the style I'd worn for years, and needed to get another one of. The "Sears" type places had quit carrying that type of jacket.
Holy deleted expletives, six hundred dollars!! That's insane!! I can't do business with crazy people!!
(It was marked down from $800.)
After that, I found a different place to park where I didn't have to go through Saks. I didn't want to get any of the stupid on me. I've never entered a Sak's since.
For example, Soviet Union has, thankfully, been dead for almost 30 years now, but the top-level domain (.su) continues to exist with plenty of sites under it.
Spam, with no content but "Hey, check this out", and a link to goatse or something stored on OneDrive. They're saying this to give themselves cover when they nuke porno-spammers.
Any online cloud storage place that lets you share links to your content is infested with this. It's absolutely rampant, along with links to virus-infected documents, images of 419 scam letters, etc. It's the latest dodge to avoid spam filters.
Now, if they actually do start playing the eavesdropping Mrs. Grundy with peoples' Skype conversations, then we have another issue. But I really doubt that's going to happen. As someone else said, it's probably going to require a complaint about the content they're hosting to trigger action.
Niven's essay included SF transporters up to the next-to-worst one, that was used in some stories by Poul Anderson; scanner determines the location of every atom in your body. Alas, the process mortally vaporizes you. At the receiver, a plasma of the appropriate mixture of elements is injected into the chamber, and the reverse process re-constitutes a copy of you.
There's one even worse. (I don't recall the author.) The scanner scans you, harmlessly. At the receiver, a copy is made of you. Once the transporter chief at the destination confirms that your copy is safely synthesized... They drop you into a vat of acid to tracelessly dissolve your body and maintain the fiction that you've "traveled" somewhere.
At least, this seems worse. But how is it really worse than Anderson's, when you get down to it? Niven went over some interesting "What if you..." scenarios for the Anderson transporter. His conclusion is one I share... "I'll never set foot in one of the Damned things."
I've never been in an MRI machine, but somewhere online (maybe Slashdot?) I read someone describe the experience as like being stuffed into a 55 gallon oil drum while all the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz pound on the drum with ball-peen hammers. People I've talked to who have had the experience have nodded in agreement when I told them that description.
Which sounds kind of trippy to begin with, and not in a good way.
I suspect that actual tripping would not enhance the experience in a positive direction.
When I signed up in 2008, their stated position was otherwise. There's a clip from a 2009 interview (CNN I think) where Zuck specifically says that the data is owned by the user, will only be shared with the people the user selects, and will never be sold
<voice=Mark Zuckerberg doing a bad Darth Vader impression> I have altered the agreement. Pray I do not alter it further. </voice>
Brake pads on an electric car last a very long time, due to most braking being regenerative -- run the motor backwards as a generator to put the car's kinetic energy back into the battery rather than grind pads against disks and convert it to useless heat.
My Prius is still on its original brake pads at 120K+ miles, and it's just a hybrid.
Splitting up Ma Bell was a bad move. It just led to regional monopolies who were more abusive to consumers.
Well...
I recall, before the split-up, long distance calls were expensive. Dollars per minute expensive, in 1960-something dollars. "Quiet, Grandma is calling long distance." "Make it quick, this is long distance."
Now, the whole concept of "long distance" is pretty much dead; flat rate call anyone in the US. Extra money only comes into it when calling international.
Dang slack app is a wretched reeking steaming pile. Getting stuck with slack has been tolerable with the XMPP gateway. Bleah.
I want information density. Text, that I can relegate to one side of the screen. Not a whole page taken up with pretty-pretty whitespace and formatting diddlypoo.
Revealing the identities of moderators is probably a bad idea.
Whatever happened to metamoderation? I haven't see the "Have you meta-moderated today" link in quite a while. Or did it turn out to be not that useful?
So, after coal plant exhaust is scrubbed, what is done with all that fly ash? The radioactivity that coal plants used to emit is all in the coal ash.
We do know how to dispose of waste from nuclear plants. The omni-obstructionists just will not permit it. They want the waste to stay right where it is, in cooling ponds a nuclear power plants, where they can get filmed for the evening news wringing their hands over it and wailing "The horror, oooo, the horror!"
As for a disposal site, go to Google Earth and search for "Sedan Crater". Scan south. That's the general area of Yucca Mountain, an lunar landscape of atomic bomb craters lined with completely uncontained fission products and unburned plutonium. No anti-nuke has ever given a remotely adequate explanation of how glassified, contained waste is more of a problem than what is already there.
Why would an alien civilization want to mess with us? (Assuming FTL is as completely impossible as our current knowledge of physics thinks it is...) Perhaps they might consider other civilizations to be potential threats for some reason. Maybe they're just paranoid and xenophobic, maybe they had an encounter with something that paranoid and xenophobic, perhaps from another planet in their own solar system. (War of the Worlds scenario.)
Depending on how close they are, they may be watching our TV and listening to our radio. (Plot element that's been done a lot.)
So what would they do? What could they do?
First, they've got to decode the signals and understand the languages. Analog TV images are probably the easiest to decode. Given the images, they could perhaps get enough clues to interpret the spoken language, and then decode the previously recorded audio.
What conclusions would they come to based on 1950s TV? There are videos of nuclear weapon tests.
Assuming they got those 40 years ago, and it took them 10 years to develop a response, it's going to be another 30-ish years before their response gets here.
How much has our civilization changed since the 1950s? What will it look like in the 2040s?
There have also been a bunch of stories about aliens getting blindsided by how fast human societies change.
I think the most effective attack would likely be something that looks indigenous, like "those other guys" did it. I'm not sure how they could do that from another star system, though.
Imagine if your job gets replaced overnight with a magic machine. Not just your employment, your job. Overnight, there is literally no reason for anyone to care that you are skilled at X. All of your skills are now categorically irrelevant to the world.
I look forward to my job being to sit on Poipu Beach with a tropical umbrella drink in my hand.
Airlines operate on exceedingly thin margins, and the little things they allow you to pay extra for are huge cash cows. In fact, those little extras are what makes them profits.
They're not going to give you free baggage check if it means they lose booked fares or higher fuel costs.
But oddly enough, Southwest has lower listed prices, even though they are just about alone in not charging for the first two checked bags. (If you even think another airline's fare on a flight is better, first add $50/bag to the price, and think again.)
Slashdot Mirror
Mostly because it was so slow I barely got through the monkey scene.
I saw it when it came out. At college, they showed it at a "Films on the Quad" thing, outdoors, and one of my friends was there who had never seen it. He was complaining about the "monkeys" part. I think I recall he enjoyed most of the rest of it, up until the light show part where he was going "WTF?"
Then, when Bowman walked into the room and there's someone sitting at a table with his back to him, all you can see is the top of that guy's head, he said "If that's another monkey, I'm out of here." (That was the much older Bowman at the table, of course.)
I enjoyed it from the first time I saw it, though I thought some parts went on too long. (The trippy light show, the monkeys.) And the ending wasn't particularly clear. I loved all the dance of the spaceships parts.
Speaking of the trippy light show, the best take on that that I've seen was in Mad Magazine's "201 Minutes of a Space Idiocy" parody. "You just crashed through all 201 stories of the Jupiter Museum of Modern Art." That light show part (Yeah, trip through the Star Gate, through the aliens' transportation system) is the part that holds up least. It was pretty much a souped-up version of what was done with overhead projectors at Iron Butterfly and Grateful Dead concerts, not anything that looked like actual astronomical objects, which was what it was supposed to be.
At my age, "giving up a career" is considerably less of a threat. Alas, the company I work for isn't doing anything that that sort of whistles need to be blown about. Not that they've told me about, anyway.
And they're typically in a tiny window that can not be resized, so you can only see a sentence fragment at a time, which is massively obnoxious.
Still, worse than the Soviet Union? In the Soviet Union, what they find when eavesdropping on you could merely send you to the Gulag death camps, where you'd never be heard from again. Google and Facebook's surveillance might result in... let me compose myself... them trying to SELL you something! Showing you TARGETTED ADVERTISING!! The horror, oh, the horror.
I used to sometimes enter the mall on my way to the food court via the "Off 5th" store. (Sak's discount bargain bin.)
I never paid much attention to the store, but I saw a light jacket of the style I'd worn for years, and needed to get another one of. The "Sears" type places had quit carrying that type of jacket.
Holy deleted expletives, six hundred dollars!! That's insane!! I can't do business with crazy people!!
(It was marked down from $800.)
After that, I found a different place to park where I didn't have to go through Saks. I didn't want to get any of the stupid on me. I've never entered a Sak's since.
And all of them spammers.
Spam, with no content but "Hey, check this out", and a link to goatse or something stored on OneDrive. They're saying this to give themselves cover when they nuke porno-spammers.
Any online cloud storage place that lets you share links to your content is infested with this. It's absolutely rampant, along with links to virus-infected documents, images of 419 scam letters, etc. It's the latest dodge to avoid spam filters.
Now, if they actually do start playing the eavesdropping Mrs. Grundy with peoples' Skype conversations, then we have another issue. But I really doubt that's going to happen. As someone else said, it's probably going to require a complaint about the content they're hosting to trigger action.
Niven's essay included SF transporters up to the next-to-worst one, that was used in some stories by Poul Anderson; scanner determines the location of every atom in your body. Alas, the process mortally vaporizes you. At the receiver, a plasma of the appropriate mixture of elements is injected into the chamber, and the reverse process re-constitutes a copy of you.
There's one even worse. (I don't recall the author.) The scanner scans you, harmlessly. At the receiver, a copy is made of you. Once the transporter chief at the destination confirms that your copy is safely synthesized... They drop you into a vat of acid to tracelessly dissolve your body and maintain the fiction that you've "traveled" somewhere.
At least, this seems worse. But how is it really worse than Anderson's, when you get down to it? Niven went over some interesting "What if you..." scenarios for the Anderson transporter. His conclusion is one I share... "I'll never set foot in one of the Damned things."
I've never been in an MRI machine, but somewhere online (maybe Slashdot?) I read someone describe the experience as like being stuffed into a 55 gallon oil drum while all the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz pound on the drum with ball-peen hammers. People I've talked to who have had the experience have nodded in agreement when I told them that description.
Which sounds kind of trippy to begin with, and not in a good way.
I suspect that actual tripping would not enhance the experience in a positive direction.
When I signed up in 2008, their stated position was otherwise. There's a clip from a 2009 interview (CNN I think) where Zuck specifically says that the data is owned by the user, will only be shared with the people the user selects, and will never be sold
<voice=Mark Zuckerberg doing a bad Darth Vader impression>
I have altered the agreement. Pray I do not alter it further.
</voice>
But sometimes they don't, then watch out.
http://lifeisaroad.com/stories...
Brake pads on an electric car last a very long time, due to most braking being regenerative -- run the motor backwards as a generator to put the car's kinetic energy back into the battery rather than grind pads against disks and convert it to useless heat.
My Prius is still on its original brake pads at 120K+ miles, and it's just a hybrid.
Coolant... Not on a pure electric.
The other stuff, yeah.
Splitting up Ma Bell was a bad move. It just led to regional monopolies who were more abusive to consumers.
Well...
I recall, before the split-up, long distance calls were expensive. Dollars per minute expensive, in 1960-something dollars. "Quiet, Grandma is calling long distance ." "Make it quick, this is long distance ."
Now, the whole concept of "long distance" is pretty much dead; flat rate call anyone in the US. Extra money only comes into it when calling international.
I don't know where I came across this link. It may even have been SlashDot.
http://radio.garden/
A Google Earth type globe with radio stations lit up as little green dots, zoom in, select radio station, and play it.
Nuclear? "No nukes no nukes no nublub blub blub blub".
Yeah. They'll still be chanting "no nukes" as they go under.
crap crap crapity crap.
Dang slack app is a wretched reeking steaming pile. Getting stuck with slack has been tolerable with the XMPP gateway. Bleah.
I want information density. Text, that I can relegate to one side of the screen. Not a whole page taken up with pretty-pretty whitespace and formatting diddlypoo.
have you been to San Francisco or Seattle? There police presence is such that crime is nil
The evening news on KRON TV has non-Alternate-Facts about the issue of crime in San Francisco.
Revealing the identities of moderators is probably a bad idea.
Whatever happened to metamoderation? I haven't see the "Have you meta-moderated today" link in quite a while. Or did it turn out to be not that useful?
So, after coal plant exhaust is scrubbed, what is done with all that fly ash? The radioactivity that coal plants used to emit is all in the coal ash.
We do know how to dispose of waste from nuclear plants. The omni-obstructionists just will not permit it. They want the waste to stay right where it is, in cooling ponds a nuclear power plants, where they can get filmed for the evening news wringing their hands over it and wailing "The horror, oooo, the horror!"
As for a disposal site, go to Google Earth and search for "Sedan Crater". Scan south. That's the general area of Yucca Mountain, an lunar landscape of atomic bomb craters lined with completely uncontained fission products and unburned plutonium. No anti-nuke has ever given a remotely adequate explanation of how glassified, contained waste is more of a problem than what is already there.
Hydro is renewable, but limited. "All the good sites are taken." Except Yosemite Valley, but that is (and should be) off limits.
It's also dependent on the amount of rainfall you get, which isn't necessarily constant from year to year.
See Jerry Pournelle's "Iron Law of Bureaucracy"
Why would an alien civilization want to mess with us? (Assuming FTL is as completely impossible as our current knowledge of physics thinks it is...) Perhaps they might consider other civilizations to be potential threats for some reason. Maybe they're just paranoid and xenophobic, maybe they had an encounter with something that paranoid and xenophobic, perhaps from another planet in their own solar system. (War of the Worlds scenario.)
Depending on how close they are, they may be watching our TV and listening to our radio. (Plot element that's been done a lot.)
So what would they do? What could they do?
First, they've got to decode the signals and understand the languages. Analog TV images are probably the easiest to decode. Given the images, they could perhaps get enough clues to interpret the spoken language, and then decode the previously recorded audio.
What conclusions would they come to based on 1950s TV? There are videos of nuclear weapon tests.
Assuming they got those 40 years ago, and it took them 10 years to develop a response, it's going to be another 30-ish years before their response gets here.
How much has our civilization changed since the 1950s? What will it look like in the 2040s?
There have also been a bunch of stories about aliens getting blindsided by how fast human societies change.
I think the most effective attack would likely be something that looks indigenous, like "those other guys" did it. I'm not sure how they could do that from another star system, though.
Imagine if your job gets replaced overnight with a magic machine. Not just your employment, your job. Overnight, there is literally no reason for anyone to care that you are skilled at X. All of your skills are now categorically irrelevant to the world.
I look forward to my job being to sit on Poipu Beach with a tropical umbrella drink in my hand.
Airlines operate on exceedingly thin margins, and the little things they allow you to pay extra for are huge cash cows. In fact, those little extras are what makes them profits.
They're not going to give you free baggage check if it means they lose booked fares or higher fuel costs.
But oddly enough, Southwest has lower listed prices, even though they are just about alone in not charging for the first two checked bags. (If you even think another airline's fare on a flight is better, first add $50/bag to the price, and think again.)
All ba(aaa)d jokes aside, some of this kind of research should really squick everyone out.
Now I've got to go find some other swype-clone. I tried several way back when, and Swype was clearly superior. The others were just ... horrible.
I hope at least one of them has improved since then.