For a short while in the affected areas, yes society did collapse. The reason you never read about it is that folks don't like to admit to themselves, much less to their children reading history books, that this kind of thing can happen.
I wouldn't be thinking a Road Warrior style collapse, but Katrina-style would not be out of the question.
From Wikipedia's article:
Even in areas where mortality was low, those incapacitated by the illness were often so numerous as to bring much of everyday life to a stop. Some communities closed all stores or required customers not to enter the store but place their orders outside the store for filling. There were many reports of places with no health care workers to tend the sick because of their own ill health and no able-bodied grave diggers to bury the dead. Mass graves were dug by steam shovel and bodies buried without coffins in many places.
In theory the worry would be that the government doesn't have to run at a profit at all, as they can just dip into the tax till to make up any shortfalls. Having to compete with an entity that can run at a loss isn't an enviable position.
The problem with this logic is that cable service is more or less a monopoly everywhere. No monopoly, government or otherwise, is going to be as efficient as the survivors in a nice cutthroat market will be. Due to the high cost of laying all that cable, cable TV is pretty much is a textbook natural monopoly. So there is no effeciency to be gained by making the monopoly entity private rather than public.
If it is also something pretty much everyone needs, (water, trash pickup, cable?) then keeping it public at least provides some kind of citizen input into how it is run without everyone having to go out and buy stock or something. If you keep it private, there at least needs to be some kind of utility regulation board with real power to provide that accountability to the users.
SCSI buses should be terminated exactly twice; once at each end of the bus
Wrong. Everybody knows that SCSI requires three terminations: one on one end of the cable,
one on the far end, and the goat, terminated over the SCSI chain with
a silver-handled knife whilst burning black candles.
So basically you reduced your electricity needs by using a lot of fossil-fuel burning devices. That's great for grid-independance, but kinda sucks majorly for CO2 production.
Did anyone else notice the huge loophole in this law? It only outlaws human/animal hybrids, not human/plant hybrids. This law puts other states' superheroes and villians at a disadvantage, while still allowing their own Louisiana native Swamp Thing.
And there's the flaw that makes this fantasy fiction, not science. A 10,000 pound dragon could not...
--
THE BIRTH OF BABYLON 5 (the original notes from 1988) -
Uh huh....So explain to me exactly what the scientific basis behind the "SF" show Babylon-5's telepathy is.
Or how about Dune where they actually used drug-induced telepathy and mind-magic to pilot spaceships around, and had scientifically impossibly large worms (which apparently you could wear babies of like an exoskeleton and jump around like the incredible hulk)?
If the principle is that it just takes one impossible element to chuck a work into the "Fantasy" bin, I suppose I could go with that. I can then go through about %90 of all "SF" and chuck it into "Fantasy" too on some technicality. Then we can get rid of that vestigal "SF" label and call it all "Fantasy".
When this comes out coincidental with a new administration publicly pondering how much money to cut from their budget, yes it smacks quite considerably of scare-mongering.
enough mingling between SF and fantasy that makes it hard to pin down the genre of many stories and a lot of it depends on what you, individually, think is possible or plausible
Exactly. Take the Pern books for example. If you read the first one, you have people riding giant dragons in a medevil type society fighting flaming death from the skies. Clearly "Fantasy".
But if you keep reading the series, it turns out they were colonists who arrived on that planet in a space-ship, the flaming death from the skies are broken off pieces from a comet-like body that peroidicly orbits close to their planet, the dragons were geneticly engineered from smaller flying creatures, and the society was just the technological level they fell to after having to deal with the periodic comet passes. Clearly Sci-Fi. So does that retroactively make the first book Science Fiction too? If I can't tell the difference between the genres after reading an entire book, I put it to you that there really isn't much of difference to begin with.
In a few more words, NASA's budget peaked at less than 10% of the DoD's budget.
You also have to remember that some of that budget is eaten up every year in launching and tracking DoD spy sattelites. So not all of it is available for public space missions.
there's the communists in power, and so on. Doesn't surprise me much that they're going the same way as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine...
Totally OT: Moldova has the BEST wine and the CRAZIEST Nightclubs.
That's when he put it online for free, and a funny thing happened. His sales doubled from the previous 6 month period, and had grown another 50% for the following period.
Just to put a more human face on it, I'm one of those statistics. I found his work through the Free Library, and now buy just about all of his authored material. I'm anxiously awaiting the next Trail of Glory book. His presence in the Free Library (at no real cost to him) brought him sales of 7 books from me (and counting).
There's at least one other small series I found there that I purchased even though bookstores don't stock it (even when new ones come out), so I have to really hunt it down.
The Southern colonies actually *were* used as prison dumping grounds. Interestingly enough, when the Revoultion happened, that's where the "Loyalists" were concentrated.
The British landed an army in Georgia and marched north, turning over pacified areas to the Loyalists as they went. The problem was that the further north they went, the less Loyalists they found. It didn't work at all once they got to Virginia. The army finally got bottled up in Yorktown, Virginia and had to surrender.
After that the Brits had to find a new prision dumping ground. That's where Austrailia comes in.
One area that didn't show improvement in the latest Taulbee Survey is the number of women pursuing computer science degrees, which held steady at 11.8%
Times are rough perhaps, but they aren't rough enough yet that women are eager to sign up for the disrespect we have to put up with. Perhaps being a Lawyer or a Doctor isn't as sure a thing anymore, but at least they still make more money and get more respect, for roughly the same mental outlay.
I'm old enough to remember when MTV died the same self-inflicted death. 20 years later its zombie corpse is still stumbling around asking after brains (and presumably raking in dough), but it is nothing like it used to be back before the suits killed it.
I've been a professional developer for about 20 years now, and that is exactly right.
Posters going off on this need to realise TFA was written by a manager to other managers. While "Josh" doesn't resemble any real developer I have ever met, he is a great representation of what a typical pointy-haired manger thinks all developers are like.
In the real world, the only a-holes I have ever met down in the trenches are the kiss-up types. Plenty of managers are jerks though. At least to their subordinates. Excrement flows downhill.
I got a hero (regen scrapper - pre nerf) to about level 42 before I gave up in disgust over the grind. You say that the grind has mostly gone away now? I dunno. I tried him again during one of the free reativation weekends, and spent pretty much all my gaming time that weekend (perhaps 15 hours or so) slaughtering legions of red baddies, and didn't manage to level him once.
I'm still thinking of restarting my account, but only to play with noob toons until Champions comes online.
If you truly believe they reduced the grind, could you give specifics?
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For a short while in the affected areas, yes society did collapse. The reason you never read about it is that folks don't like to admit to themselves, much less to their children reading history books, that this kind of thing can happen.
I wouldn't be thinking a Road Warrior style collapse, but Katrina-style would not be out of the question. From Wikipedia's article:
Even in areas where mortality was low, those incapacitated by the illness were often so numerous as to bring much of everyday life to a stop. Some communities closed all stores or required customers not to enter the store but place their orders outside the store for filling. There were many reports of places with no health care workers to tend the sick because of their own ill health and no able-bodied grave diggers to bury the dead. Mass graves were dug by steam shovel and bodies buried without coffins in many places.
In theory the worry would be that the government doesn't have to run at a profit at all, as they can just dip into the tax till to make up any shortfalls. Having to compete with an entity that can run at a loss isn't an enviable position.
The problem with this logic is that cable service is more or less a monopoly everywhere. No monopoly, government or otherwise, is going to be as efficient as the survivors in a nice cutthroat market will be. Due to the high cost of laying all that cable, cable TV is pretty much is a textbook natural monopoly. So there is no effeciency to be gained by making the monopoly entity private rather than public.
If it is also something pretty much everyone needs, (water, trash pickup, cable?) then keeping it public at least provides some kind of citizen input into how it is run without everyone having to go out and buy stock or something. If you keep it private, there at least needs to be some kind of utility regulation board with real power to provide that accountability to the users.
SCSI buses should be terminated exactly twice; once at each end of the bus
Wrong. Everybody knows that SCSI requires three terminations: one on one end of the cable, one on the far end, and the goat, terminated over the SCSI chain with a silver-handled knife whilst burning black candles.
So basically you reduced your electricity needs by using a lot of fossil-fuel burning devices. That's great for grid-independance, but kinda sucks majorly for CO2 production.
Did anyone else notice the huge loophole in this law? It only outlaws human/animal hybrids, not human/plant hybrids. This law puts other states' superheroes and villians at a disadvantage, while still allowing their own Louisiana native Swamp Thing.
I gave no such talk.
And there's the flaw that makes this fantasy fiction, not science. A 10,000 pound dragon could not...
--
THE BIRTH OF BABYLON 5 (the original notes from 1988) -
Uh huh....So explain to me exactly what the scientific basis behind the "SF" show Babylon-5's telepathy is.
Or how about Dune where they actually used drug-induced telepathy and mind-magic to pilot spaceships around, and had scientifically impossibly large worms (which apparently you could wear babies of like an exoskeleton and jump around like the incredible hulk)?
If the principle is that it just takes one impossible element to chuck a work into the "Fantasy" bin, I suppose I could go with that. I can then go through about %90 of all "SF" and chuck it into "Fantasy" too on some technicality. Then we can get rid of that vestigal "SF" label and call it all "Fantasy".
Works for me.
When this comes out coincidental with a new administration publicly pondering how much money to cut from their budget, yes it smacks quite considerably of scare-mongering.
enough mingling between SF and fantasy that makes it hard to pin down the genre of many stories and a lot of it depends on what you, individually, think is possible or plausible
Exactly. Take the Pern books for example. If you read the first one, you have people riding giant dragons in a medevil type society fighting flaming death from the skies. Clearly "Fantasy". But if you keep reading the series, it turns out they were colonists who arrived on that planet in a space-ship, the flaming death from the skies are broken off pieces from a comet-like body that peroidicly orbits close to their planet, the dragons were geneticly engineered from smaller flying creatures, and the society was just the technological level they fell to after having to deal with the periodic comet passes. Clearly Sci-Fi. So does that retroactively make the first book Science Fiction too? If I can't tell the difference between the genres after reading an entire book, I put it to you that there really isn't much of difference to begin with.
In a few more words, NASA's budget peaked at less than 10% of the DoD's budget.
You also have to remember that some of that budget is eaten up every year in launching and tracking DoD spy sattelites. So not all of it is available for public space missions.
there's the communists in power, and so on. Doesn't surprise me much that they're going the same way as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine ...
Totally OT: Moldova has the BEST wine and the CRAZIEST Nightclubs.
So they party like it's 1984?
...two legs better.
That's when he put it online for free, and a funny thing happened. His sales doubled from the previous 6 month period, and had grown another 50% for the following period.
Just to put a more human face on it, I'm one of those statistics. I found his work through the Free Library, and now buy just about all of his authored material. I'm anxiously awaiting the next Trail of Glory book. His presence in the Free Library (at no real cost to him) brought him sales of 7 books from me (and counting).
There's at least one other small series I found there that I purchased even though bookstores don't stock it (even when new ones come out), so I have to really hunt it down.
And for the Zerg, a Cerebrate pod meteors in from orbit
Bah, that's lame. For the Zerg, I'd settle for nothing less than ... Godzilla!
here is a proposal for a scientifically objective method to determine whether a picture constitutes child pornography
Since Justice Potter "I know obscenity when I see it" Stewart died in 1985, that would require communing with the dead.
Depending on how you do it, that is also illegal. :-)
Where's Microsoft Bob?
So they shredded a woman for swabs? I thought we were only good for barbecue, masks, book covers, lampshades and creepy garments.
I'm pretty sure you missed one...
The only time the author would get payed would be once by Paramount when he originally wrote the episode
Pretty much like now, apparently.
You might be onto something there, actually.
The Southern colonies actually *were* used as prison dumping grounds. Interestingly enough, when the Revoultion happened, that's where the "Loyalists" were concentrated.
The British landed an army in Georgia and marched north, turning over pacified areas to the Loyalists as they went. The problem was that the further north they went, the less Loyalists they found. It didn't work at all once they got to Virginia. The army finally got bottled up in Yorktown, Virginia and had to surrender.
After that the Brits had to find a new prision dumping ground. That's where Austrailia comes in.
Larry: It's all downhill from here!
Mr. Shoop (wistful): Yeah, but it's a lovely ride.
(Great line from the otherwise forgettable movie Summer School).
One area that didn't show improvement in the latest Taulbee Survey is the number of women pursuing computer science degrees, which held steady at 11.8%
Times are rough perhaps, but they aren't rough enough yet that women are eager to sign up for the disrespect we have to put up with. Perhaps being a Lawyer or a Doctor isn't as sure a thing anymore, but at least they still make more money and get more respect, for roughly the same mental outlay.
So Australians aren't allowed to see what it is that the Danes aren't allowed to see?
Not only that, it appears that they aren't allowed to see what it is they aren't allowed to see what it is that the Danes aren't allowed to see.
I'm old enough to remember when MTV died the same self-inflicted death. 20 years later its zombie corpse is still stumbling around asking after brains (and presumably raking in dough), but it is nothing like it used to be back before the suits killed it.
I've been a professional developer for about 20 years now, and that is exactly right.
Posters going off on this need to realise TFA was written by a manager to other managers. While "Josh" doesn't resemble any real developer I have ever met, he is a great representation of what a typical pointy-haired manger thinks all developers are like.
In the real world, the only a-holes I have ever met down in the trenches are the kiss-up types. Plenty of managers are jerks though. At least to their subordinates. Excrement flows downhill.
I got a hero (regen scrapper - pre nerf) to about level 42 before I gave up in disgust over the grind. You say that the grind has mostly gone away now? I dunno. I tried him again during one of the free reativation weekends, and spent pretty much all my gaming time that weekend (perhaps 15 hours or so) slaughtering legions of red baddies, and didn't manage to level him once. I'm still thinking of restarting my account, but only to play with noob toons until Champions comes online. If you truly believe they reduced the grind, could you give specifics?