For example, there was the introduction of draft animals, which from the introduction of the chariot to advent of the internal combustion engine tied campaigning to the seasons in which forage was available. Of course you can draw an analogy between forage and oil supply logistics -- it's certainly a valid analogy, but it is a very imprecise one.
Likewise you can draw valid but imprecise analogies between Roman imperialism and American imperialism. That's just a way of saying Rome wasn't completely different. But it certainly was *very* different. For example, it had a clan system which largely determined your political allegiances. The absence of a clan system might not seem like such a big thing to us, but it would make our politics seem very odd to a Roman of equestrian or senatorial rank.
Thinking sci-fi readers knew this all along.
on
Overly Familiar Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's not like science fiction is new, it's got a history. And anyone who's familiar with that history knows that writers write in their era for an audience of that era. Not to mention for the acquisitions editors of their era.
So Victorian wonder story writers took imperialism for granted. Golden age writers took gender roles for granted -- even women like C.L. Moore. Sci-fi in the sixties was imbued with counter-culture and counter-counter-culture in a way that strikes us as dated today. And it's OK; if you like the good old stuff, as many of us do, much of the pleasure is in the perspective it offers in how the real world has changed.
An author has no duty other than to reward the time a reader spends with his work. It's certainly an admirable ambition to entertain people by challenging their assumptions, but the very nature of that challenge is a moving target. Ultimately you still have to tell a story that makes sense to your contemporary readers, unless you plan on dumping your story straight into a time capsule -- and good luck with that. Fortunately future audiences can make allowances for things you don't get right today, just the way we make allowances for the good old stuff.
So some people *say*, but I haven't seen any information that points to exotic skills. I'm not saying Destover itself doesn't contain some sophisticated techniques, but what it *does* is crude, drama queen stuff.
I'm not saying it's *not* against the law, it very well may be. That's because Congress has a cost-plus mentality,
In the private sector the question would be what did we get for our money and could we have got it cheaper elsewhere? In the public sector Congress wants to know what you did with "their" money. Hey, you paid for coffee for people who worked overtime or attended a meeting? Well we could have saved money if you made them buy the coffee itself.
But the funny thing is that this penny-pinching doesn't actually save money. I once sat in on a meeting at a state agency that had spent quarter million dollars of federal grant money to build a trivial website. I asked the state IT guy what his group would have charged internally to develop the site. His answer? Twelve thousand. My estimate was fifteen thousand if it were a private sector customer.
It's outrageous to spend a quarter million dollars for something you could get for twelve thousand, but here's the thing: it's not illegal. Not in the least. It should be illegal to hire lobbyists to work on bids for federal contracts, but it's *totally* legal.
Legality means nothing here, ethically speaking, because the laws have been corrupted by politicians, who in turn are corrupted by lobbying and corporate dollars. In fact rules that are supposed to prevent Uncle Sam from getting cheated pretty much just ensure that he gets cheated on a jaw-dropping scale. I've seen it up close, and it's more corrupt than even people who consider themselves cynical about government suppose.
True, law enforcement has to take this seriously, but if I received such a threat I wouldn't worry too much about it. It's basic trollish behavior. Hey look at ME! Pay attention to MEEE!
These guys aren't terrorists, or even violent criminals. They aren't even hacktivists. They're script kiddies who want to see their name -- or at least their pseudonym -- in the media.
They're pathetic, but they'll get their fifteen minutes of pseudo-fame because of the almost equally pathetic obsession the media has with the celebrities. Now in my career I have had certain times been privvy to datasets that included confidential information about celebrities. Did I do anything with that information? Did I even *look* at it closely? No, because I'm not miserable little wretch who gets a thrill out of being connected, no matter how, to a celebrity. The barista who pulls my espresso shot is more significant to me than Sylvester Stallone will ever be, and if I ever threaten someone it'll be up close and personal, not be email.
Exactly how is he a visionary? Seems more like he was in the right place at the right time. Facebook wasn't even the first social media site; it just had access to the Harvard student body which helped it position itself as an upscale alternative to MySpace, and from their it was just a case of network effect fueled growth. Had Zuckerberg attended UMass Boston across town, Facebook would never have gone anywhere.
There was smart marketing along the way, but it was hardly a *transformative* vision. It was an exploitative vision: how to capture and monetize market share. Which may be exactly what TNR needs, but don't confuse competitive cunning with vision.
Which were built using 2800 integrated circuits interconnected by wire-wrapping, every single one of those ICs containing exactly two NOR gates.
What's awesome about that is it's like something you'd see at a maker fair today,except that hardly anyone knows about wire wrapping these days. Too bad; it's faster, more reliable and more repairable than soldering.
I agree that the bulk of the benefit of this approach comes from choosing hard passwords that are written down. But a lot of people have internalized the "Never write your password down" thing, so I opt to recommend a kind of poor man's two factor authentication as an approach people can accept.
You laugh, but I once advised a friend to write (most of) her passwords down on a slip of paper and carry it in her wallet.
Any policy has to take into account the circumstances and concerns of the user into account. In this case she was an author who was being cyberstalked buy someone who'd figured out her easy-to-guess password. She changed the password to her site and he promptly guessed that one too.
So my advice was this: generate a moderately tough password, say a ten digit random number, and write it down twice: once for her files, once to carry around in her wallet. Then add to that an easy-to-remember part, say the name of her best friend's cat, but don't write that part down, keep that in her head. This results in a password that looks like this: "491-265-4743Fluffy". I chose ten digits and formatted it that way because if it looks like a phone number pretty soon she won't have to carry the paper around. I reckon that this adds something like 32 bits of entropy to her weak but easy to remember password. Even if you know how the password is generated, it's not trivial to guess or break by brute force, and it's certainly not practical to guess for someone who doesn't have physical access to her wallet.
Is it secure enough for the Morgan Stanley family jewels or the nuclear launch codes of the United States? No. But it's good enough for most practical purposes where you're not that concerned about an adversary who has physical access to you.
While this is a good point, one of the questions we should be asking ourselves is to what degree the agency is under effective political control. For many years the FBI wasn't because it had the goods on everyone.
It makes a difference whether the actions of the agency are due to the vulnerability of political leaders, the lack of will of political leaders, or the direction of political leaders. Specifically it makes a difference to how to fix the problem.
It explictly mentions the sun so extrasolar planets aren't planets.
Oddly enough, I don't find this the least bit confusing. Including extrasolar planets in the technical definition of "planet" has just as much potential for confusion -- which is to say not much, but some. It's in the nature of language to be confusing without context. Including the Sun in the definition actually makes it more consistent with the classical definition of a planet -- a visible object that moves against the backdrop of the "fixed stars".
It defines dwarf planet such that a dwarf planet is not a planet (very confusing especially for a definition intended for lay people).
Who says the definitions is intended for lay people?
It defines a planet that has not cleared it's path as not being a planet. Well what about the Trojan Asteroids and Jupiter? Is Jupiter not a planet?
Trojans are like moons. They're gravitationally entrained by another body (the putative "planet" in question), but they happen to orbit the Lagrange points rather than the planet's center. An object which is gravitationally locked to another object counts as "cleared".
An astronomer hating the definition I completely understand; if it doesn't work for him it's like sand in his communication gears. But I find it curious that people who aren't astronomers have any opinion whatsoever on a definition that astronomers have presumably devised for their own convenience. It's like getting upset at civil engineers for calling the part that connects the two flanges of an I-beam the "web". It's not a "web", it's a solid rectangle of material! But it doesn't matter to most of us, as long as engineers aren't confused.
Boys often go through a period where they want to copy Mom. I think parents are sometimes taken aback by this because there's a lot of selective memory. If you're a boy your parents tell you how much you liked trucks when you are little, but they often don't like to bring up the fact you wanted to carry a purse or play with your sister's dolls.
It's OK for little boys to like "girl" things, and if that's true it's surely OK for little girls to like "girl" things too.
An integral part of play at any age is trying on different identities. The best thing parents can do if they don't want to inculcate arbitrary gender role limitations is avoid the temptation to micro-manage play. For years of age a time for stimulating imagination, not channeling it, and certainly not worrying about nudging a child into your preferred career path.
Well, on the flip of the flip side, the virus doesn't actually "mean" us harm. Some viruses reach a kind of commensalism with their host population where they do not do significant harm to that population, they more or less hitch a ride.
Well, look at their financial statements, which are available on-line. Wikimedia doesn't have a cash cow. They don't even have an endowment (yet) that can cover much their expenses. They reported for FY2014 investment income of $243,707, which is less than 1/10 of what they spend on Internet hosting. Their investment income covers only about 1% of their salaries.
94% of their income comes from unrestricted cash donations like the ones they are soliciting. It's great that so many people want to give them money, but relying on that to go on indefinitely is a very precarious position for a non-profit. It puts them one recession away from running out of cash to keep the doors open. By comparison the Sierra Club is approximately the same size as Wikimedia if you go by revenue, but only 9% of it comes from unrestricted cash donations.
So it's not shady at all that they're trying to build up a cushion by asking for lots of small unrestricted donations. How else would they do it? Well, consider the alternative. Normally a non-profit would go hat in hand to someone with a lot of money and promise to do something, like build a cancer wing on the hospital. That promise is a "restriction". So when Mr. Moneybags writes you a ten million dollar check, you don't book it as income until you've filled your promise.
And that's fine if you're a hospital. You're there to treat patients. But is promising to do things a really a good business model for Wikipedia? Either somebody needs to give them huge bundles of money to create an endowment, or they've got to raise a lot more cash than they need to cover operations for the next year or so.
What's unrealistic is believing one strategy is always favored by evolution. Evolution tries everything, so you get all strategies tried.
The substantive argument here should be over this question: what is it that makes H. sapiens such a successful species? The vast majority of discourse on this, unfortunately, is tainted by ideological bias.
I think what makes us successful can't be boiled down to one strategy without being simplistic. The minimum number of strategies that's interesting, in my opinion, is two, because realistic strategies have to interact. Personally the two I'd go with would be cooperation and behavioral flexibility, noting especially that behavioral flexibility sometimes works *against* cooperation. People cooperate to build a successful village, but during a disaster having a few selfish bastards who grab what they can and run is good for the survival of the species. But just because a *little* bit of something is good, doesn't mean a *lot* of it is good. So much selfishness people can't cooperate efficiently is too much selfishness. So little selfishness that nobody saves themselves when they can't save anyone else is too much selflessness.
One more thing to chew on: nature doesn't owe you a justification for your behavior, and it's certainly not going to provide you a logically complete and non-contradictory ideology. It doesn't even give us that for arithmetic.
It doesn't matter how much land it takes to create animal protein, not per se, not in relation to sustainability.
The Great Plains once has giant herds of bison roaming across them. Humans could eat those bison sustainably as long as they didn't take enough bison to disturb the equilibrium between bison and grass. Taking one bison out of the equation would simply cause the equilibrium to produce one more bison. Reducing the buffalo herd from 25 million to 600 on the other hand is a different matter.
What matters for sustainability is the disruption of natural systems, not the acreage.
They're only required to gerrymander minority districts if they have a history suppressing minority votes.
This is kind of like equitable relief, where the court compels a guilty party in a civil case to perform some action to remedy an unfair action it performed earlier.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing they're asking whether he's ever been convicted of a crime, and being honest these days he answers "yes".
Who is Ron Perlman? Does he have anything to do with PERL?
I'm assuming he's a movie actor. I'm a bit of an anachronism myself, in the sci-fi to me means reading. I don't watch TV or movies.
Of course war changes.
For example, there was the introduction of draft animals, which from the introduction of the chariot to advent of the internal combustion engine tied campaigning to the seasons in which forage was available. Of course you can draw an analogy between forage and oil supply logistics -- it's certainly a valid analogy, but it is a very imprecise one.
Likewise you can draw valid but imprecise analogies between Roman imperialism and American imperialism. That's just a way of saying Rome wasn't completely different. But it certainly was *very* different. For example, it had a clan system which largely determined your political allegiances. The absence of a clan system might not seem like such a big thing to us, but it would make our politics seem very odd to a Roman of equestrian or senatorial rank.
It's not like science fiction is new, it's got a history. And anyone who's familiar with that history knows that writers write in their era for an audience of that era. Not to mention for the acquisitions editors of their era.
So Victorian wonder story writers took imperialism for granted. Golden age writers took gender roles for granted -- even women like C.L. Moore. Sci-fi in the sixties was imbued with counter-culture and counter-counter-culture in a way that strikes us as dated today. And it's OK; if you like the good old stuff, as many of us do, much of the pleasure is in the perspective it offers in how the real world has changed.
An author has no duty other than to reward the time a reader spends with his work. It's certainly an admirable ambition to entertain people by challenging their assumptions, but the very nature of that challenge is a moving target. Ultimately you still have to tell a story that makes sense to your contemporary readers, unless you plan on dumping your story straight into a time capsule -- and good luck with that. Fortunately future audiences can make allowances for things you don't get right today, just the way we make allowances for the good old stuff.
They're not script kiddies, not even close.
So some people *say*, but I haven't seen any information that points to exotic skills. I'm not saying Destover itself doesn't contain some sophisticated techniques, but what it *does* is crude, drama queen stuff.
All of which are illegal to charge to the NSF.
Which law would that violate?
I'm not saying it's *not* against the law, it very well may be. That's because Congress has a cost-plus mentality,
In the private sector the question would be what did we get for our money and could we have got it cheaper elsewhere? In the public sector Congress wants to know what you did with "their" money. Hey, you paid for coffee for people who worked overtime or attended a meeting? Well we could have saved money if you made them buy the coffee itself.
But the funny thing is that this penny-pinching doesn't actually save money. I once sat in on a meeting at a state agency that had spent quarter million dollars of federal grant money to build a trivial website. I asked the state IT guy what his group would have charged internally to develop the site. His answer? Twelve thousand. My estimate was fifteen thousand if it were a private sector customer.
It's outrageous to spend a quarter million dollars for something you could get for twelve thousand, but here's the thing: it's not illegal. Not in the least. It should be illegal to hire lobbyists to work on bids for federal contracts, but it's *totally* legal.
Legality means nothing here, ethically speaking, because the laws have been corrupted by politicians, who in turn are corrupted by lobbying and corporate dollars. In fact rules that are supposed to prevent Uncle Sam from getting cheated pretty much just ensure that he gets cheated on a jaw-dropping scale. I've seen it up close, and it's more corrupt than even people who consider themselves cynical about government suppose.
True, law enforcement has to take this seriously, but if I received such a threat I wouldn't worry too much about it. It's basic trollish behavior. Hey look at ME! Pay attention to MEEE!
These guys aren't terrorists, or even violent criminals. They aren't even hacktivists. They're script kiddies who want to see their name -- or at least their pseudonym -- in the media.
They're pathetic, but they'll get their fifteen minutes of pseudo-fame because of the almost equally pathetic obsession the media has with the celebrities. Now in my career I have had certain times been privvy to datasets that included confidential information about celebrities. Did I do anything with that information? Did I even *look* at it closely? No, because I'm not miserable little wretch who gets a thrill out of being connected, no matter how, to a celebrity. The barista who pulls my espresso shot is more significant to me than Sylvester Stallone will ever be, and if I ever threaten someone it'll be up close and personal, not be email.
Exactly how is he a visionary? Seems more like he was in the right place at the right time. Facebook wasn't even the first social media site; it just had access to the Harvard student body which helped it position itself as an upscale alternative to MySpace, and from their it was just a case of network effect fueled growth. Had Zuckerberg attended UMass Boston across town, Facebook would never have gone anywhere.
There was smart marketing along the way, but it was hardly a *transformative* vision. It was an exploitative vision: how to capture and monetize market share. Which may be exactly what TNR needs, but don't confuse competitive cunning with vision.
Right, Left -- actual life is more complicated than that.
Which were built using 2800 integrated circuits interconnected by wire-wrapping, every single one of those ICs containing exactly two NOR gates.
What's awesome about that is it's like something you'd see at a maker fair today,except that hardly anyone knows about wire wrapping these days. Too bad; it's faster, more reliable and more repairable than soldering.
I agree that the bulk of the benefit of this approach comes from choosing hard passwords that are written down. But a lot of people have internalized the "Never write your password down" thing, so I opt to recommend a kind of poor man's two factor authentication as an approach people can accept.
You laugh, but I once advised a friend to write (most of) her passwords down on a slip of paper and carry it in her wallet.
Any policy has to take into account the circumstances and concerns of the user into account. In this case she was an author who was being cyberstalked buy someone who'd figured out her easy-to-guess password. She changed the password to her site and he promptly guessed that one too.
So my advice was this: generate a moderately tough password, say a ten digit random number, and write it down twice: once for her files, once to carry around in her wallet. Then add to that an easy-to-remember part, say the name of her best friend's cat, but don't write that part down, keep that in her head. This results in a password that looks like this: "491-265-4743Fluffy". I chose ten digits and formatted it that way because if it looks like a phone number pretty soon she won't have to carry the paper around. I reckon that this adds something like 32 bits of entropy to her weak but easy to remember password. Even if you know how the password is generated, it's not trivial to guess or break by brute force, and it's certainly not practical to guess for someone who doesn't have physical access to her wallet.
Is it secure enough for the Morgan Stanley family jewels or the nuclear launch codes of the United States? No. But it's good enough for most practical purposes where you're not that concerned about an adversary who has physical access to you.
While this is a good point, one of the questions we should be asking ourselves is to what degree the agency is under effective political control. For many years the FBI wasn't because it had the goods on everyone.
It makes a difference whether the actions of the agency are due to the vulnerability of political leaders, the lack of will of political leaders, or the direction of political leaders. Specifically it makes a difference to how to fix the problem.
It explictly mentions the sun so extrasolar planets aren't planets.
Oddly enough, I don't find this the least bit confusing. Including extrasolar planets in the technical definition of "planet" has just as much potential for confusion -- which is to say not much, but some. It's in the nature of language to be confusing without context. Including the Sun in the definition actually makes it more consistent with the classical definition of a planet -- a visible object that moves against the backdrop of the "fixed stars".
It defines dwarf planet such that a dwarf planet is not a planet (very confusing especially for a definition intended for lay people).
Who says the definitions is intended for lay people?
It defines a planet that has not cleared it's path as not being a planet. Well what about the Trojan Asteroids and Jupiter? Is Jupiter not a planet?
Trojans are like moons. They're gravitationally entrained by another body (the putative "planet" in question), but they happen to orbit the Lagrange points rather than the planet's center. An object which is gravitationally locked to another object counts as "cleared".
An astronomer hating the definition I completely understand; if it doesn't work for him it's like sand in his communication gears. But I find it curious that people who aren't astronomers have any opinion whatsoever on a definition that astronomers have presumably devised for their own convenience. It's like getting upset at civil engineers for calling the part that connects the two flanges of an I-beam the "web". It's not a "web", it's a solid rectangle of material! But it doesn't matter to most of us, as long as engineers aren't confused.
I think you may be reading too much into it too.
Boys often go through a period where they want to copy Mom. I think parents are sometimes taken aback by this because there's a lot of selective memory. If you're a boy your parents tell you how much you liked trucks when you are little, but they often don't like to bring up the fact you wanted to carry a purse or play with your sister's dolls.
It's OK for little boys to like "girl" things, and if that's true it's surely OK for little girls to like "girl" things too.
An integral part of play at any age is trying on different identities. The best thing parents can do if they don't want to inculcate arbitrary gender role limitations is avoid the temptation to micro-manage play. For years of age a time for stimulating imagination, not channeling it, and certainly not worrying about nudging a child into your preferred career path.
Well, on the flip of the flip side, the virus doesn't actually "mean" us harm. Some viruses reach a kind of commensalism with their host population where they do not do significant harm to that population, they more or less hitch a ride.
Dunno. Seems to me like HIV has a built-in advantage. It's usually more fun to get than Comcast is.
Well, look at their financial statements, which are available on-line. Wikimedia doesn't have a cash cow. They don't even have an endowment (yet) that can cover much their expenses. They reported for FY2014 investment income of $243,707, which is less than 1/10 of what they spend on Internet hosting. Their investment income covers only about 1% of their salaries.
94% of their income comes from unrestricted cash donations like the ones they are soliciting. It's great that so many people want to give them money, but relying on that to go on indefinitely is a very precarious position for a non-profit. It puts them one recession away from running out of cash to keep the doors open. By comparison the Sierra Club is approximately the same size as Wikimedia if you go by revenue, but only 9% of it comes from unrestricted cash donations.
So it's not shady at all that they're trying to build up a cushion by asking for lots of small unrestricted donations. How else would they do it? Well, consider the alternative. Normally a non-profit would go hat in hand to someone with a lot of money and promise to do something, like build a cancer wing on the hospital. That promise is a "restriction". So when Mr. Moneybags writes you a ten million dollar check, you don't book it as income until you've filled your promise.
And that's fine if you're a hospital. You're there to treat patients. But is promising to do things a really a good business model for Wikipedia? Either somebody needs to give them huge bundles of money to create an endowment, or they've got to raise a lot more cash than they need to cover operations for the next year or so.
What's unrealistic is believing one strategy is always favored by evolution. Evolution tries everything, so you get all strategies tried.
The substantive argument here should be over this question: what is it that makes H. sapiens such a successful species? The vast majority of discourse on this, unfortunately, is tainted by ideological bias.
I think what makes us successful can't be boiled down to one strategy without being simplistic. The minimum number of strategies that's interesting, in my opinion, is two, because realistic strategies have to interact. Personally the two I'd go with would be cooperation and behavioral flexibility, noting especially that behavioral flexibility sometimes works *against* cooperation. People cooperate to build a successful village, but during a disaster having a few selfish bastards who grab what they can and run is good for the survival of the species. But just because a *little* bit of something is good, doesn't mean a *lot* of it is good. So much selfishness people can't cooperate efficiently is too much selfishness. So little selfishness that nobody saves themselves when they can't save anyone else is too much selflessness.
One more thing to chew on: nature doesn't owe you a justification for your behavior, and it's certainly not going to provide you a logically complete and non-contradictory ideology. It doesn't even give us that for arithmetic.
Only if you qualify "selfish" to mean something specific that may or may not be what people mean when they use "selfish" in general discourse.
Yes, but we as a species already know enough not to trust rocks.
It doesn't matter how much land it takes to create animal protein, not per se, not in relation to sustainability.
The Great Plains once has giant herds of bison roaming across them. Humans could eat those bison sustainably as long as they didn't take enough bison to disturb the equilibrium between bison and grass. Taking one bison out of the equation would simply cause the equilibrium to produce one more bison. Reducing the buffalo herd from 25 million to 600 on the other hand is a different matter.
What matters for sustainability is the disruption of natural systems, not the acreage.
They're only required to gerrymander minority districts if they have a history suppressing minority votes.
This is kind of like equitable relief, where the court compels a guilty party in a civil case to perform some action to remedy an unfair action it performed earlier.
The state lottery commission.
Oddly enough, a state that can't be counted on to run an election competently and honestly can *still* manage to run a competent lottery.
10? I think you mean 18.