Part of the game with novels is to put something intriguing in the first paragraph, preferably the first sentence. Something that will make a browser at the airport bookstore want to read more, if just to figure out how that's even possible. Something like, "Being dead turned out to have its advantages".
I kind of make a game of reading novel first lines. IMHO, starting off with an exploding moon make this one of the better ones I've seen.
stop playing star spangled banner and smell the real coffee. what worked 100 years ago is not applicable now. the workforce is too crowded, the unemployment is sky high and we are borderline on depression, again and again. is that a time you think of as a 'work surplus' era?
WTH are you talking about? Unemployment right now is 5.5, which is well within the range it sat at from 2002 to 2008 before the recession started. The recession ended back in June of 2009 (6 freaking years ago). Our GDP (how recessions are officially measured) has been in the same range it was from 2002-2007 since then.
Most of the rest of your comment doesn't feel right to me either. I see no reason why sociological forces that built the USA would have suddenly stopped working the way they always did before. Normally I wouldn't bring up my "feelings", but since you seem to put more stock in how the economy feels than how it is really provably doing, perhaps that's relevant too.
Hmm, a few minutes of google-fu shows the number of "civilians" killed by police in 2013 (to pick a year as close as possible to today, and far enough back to be sure the statistics have all been gathered together) to be 320.
It is most certainly noticeable when you go over there. I'm 5'11.5 (that 0.5 is important, damnit!). That isn't huge, but most people are shorter, and I'm considered a "big" player on the soccer field. I went over there for business, got off the train in Leiden, and felt generally short for the first time since I was in 6th grade.
They were also ludicrously thin by US standards. At first I was like, "where are the older people? Where are the 40+ year olds? Do they euthanize them all? Should I go hide?" It took a while to realize than everyone looked younger that I'm used to, due to being so slim. I put it down to much less motorized transport use, and smaller portions. But perhaps there's some natural selection going on there too?
Theorem 2c: Dutch women are unusually financially independent, and thus don't care as much as other women about the wealth of their mates. That leaves only height as the prime selector.
Holding a camera and recording video while in no direct danger does not make someone a hero.
If the video you are recording is a murder, and your video will have a direct impact upon the murder's ability to get away with the crime, it most certainly does make you a hero. If the cop had noticed, he could easily have made it two killings, "accidentally" smashed the phone, and got away with both. Afterwards, the videographer's got a murderer and an unknown amount of his buddies pissed off at him. And these are people skilled in investigation with the full power and resources of the state behind them. They WILL find out who he is and where he lives.
I had a relative who reported a cop for assault once. For her troubles, she got to suffer months of pointless traffic stops, parking tickets, and car vandalism. If a murder was involved...I don't know that I'd want to expose my family to what could happen.
This person was either amazingly brave or amazingly stupid.
That explains the increase I just saw in my bill. An extra $15... they are already trying to squeeze their customers to pay for the fine.
I bet that came as a line item on the bill, saying something like "government fees". So not only do they pass the cost on to customers, they try to blame them for it as well.
What does that really hurt? I suppose if a neighbor mooches off my wifi, that hurts my ISP, but not really me.
If it becomes a problem, at best I might wanna put up a wifi password to keep my neighbors off, but I don't really understand why my wifi (not the computers on it but the wifi itself) needs to have industrial-strength security.
I worked at the time for what is now Lockheed-Martin. So as someone who was an indirect beneficiary of the "Star Wars" $'s, perhaps I can pipe in too?
Sure, the free money for engineers (and their employers) was nice. But you know what else would have been nice? Spending that exact same amount of money on NASA, for stuff that we might have had something to show for at the end. Maybe something that might have accomplished something (eg: a visit to mars), or advanced science a bit (better space propulsion, habitation tech), rather than just blowing it all on something that everyone involved knew going in was a total waste, just to make some politicians feel better about their personal constructed reality.
Let's get this straight. This group that is concerned with one of the most outlandish and socially ridiculous preventable causes of death...
No, they aren't. They've done nothing to ban alcoholism in general. During the exact same period my state went from being a dry state (yes, we still had those in the '80s) to a liquor-by-the-drink state, and MADD didn't say "boo" about it. There is far more drinking and drunk driving in Oklahoma now than there was when MADD started.
All they did was get the rest of the electorate to gang up on 3 years of it. That was just as effective for getting drunks off the road as if they'd banned drinking for anyone 28-30, or 38-40. Heck, we could probably save a lot of lives by banning anyone over 68 from having a drivers license period. It would be an appalling abridgement of rights, and seniors PACs would (rightly) scream bloody murder, but we could do it.
MADD only picked on 18-20's because that's the group of the electorate with the least power.
To put this in a bit of perspective, earthquakes were pretty much unheard of in the state when I was a kid. Yeah, seismologists would probably tell you there were some, but not ones anybody ever noticed. We used to console ourselves that, yes we have tornadoes, but those you can prepare for. At least we didn't have Earthquakes like California. Hahaha, suckers!
If you're interested in SF you're probably better off checking reader reviews, not the list of Hugo/Nebula Awards.
Probably the best thing to do (not that I've tried it) would be to get a Goodreads account, find people who seem to like the same books as you, and look at stuff they've liked that you haven't read.
What I do is just semi-randomly buy cheap paperbacks whenever I'm going on a trip. The results are as random as you might think, but I don't waste a lot of money this way, and find some good stuff.
My wife's strategy is to buy compilations either edited by, or with submissions from authors she likes. She's a smart woman, and more of a fan than I, so her method would probably be the smarter bet.:-)
IMHO, honestly I don't give a crap. Really. I have my favorite authors, as does every other fan. Hugo's don't factor into my buying decisions at all. If they do, its to show me books to avoid (based on my past history with Hugo winners).
My wife (a much bigger fan than I) buys mostly female authors. I buy (barely) mostly men. I find female authors have trouble making believable (to me as a lifetime male) male characters, and that can be distracting. I'm sure my wife finds the equivalent with male authors. So most of our library at home is female authors, naturally. In a completely fair universe (ha!) Hugos would mostly go to people who aren't white men every year, because a minority of English speakers are white men.
In the meantime (I suspect from now until the extinction of the Human race), if voters want to use awards to promote writers they think are under-promoted, for whatever, they should do that. Seriously. Knock yourselves out. It probably won't effect me much, but go for it.
Perhaps a day will come where Hugos are a reliable indicator of works I will like, but its never worked that way in the past.
I wonder how much of this objection has nothing to do with the vasty overstated risks but instead is of a commercial nature. Alcoholic beverages are extremely expensive in a lot of places (stadiums, bars, restaurants, events) and sneaking your own in is inconvenient or impossible
Another good question is how much of its promotion has to do with exactly that. Several posters have already pointed out that for its supposed use (camping) this solution is actually significantly worse than currently available options. So perhaps we should all just quit pretending that this product isn't intended almost solely for the purpose you describe above.
Back in the 80's, MADD was formed with the purpose of blackmailing all the states into banning alchohol sales to anyone under 21. This of course includes a good 3 years of actual voters, but fuck them, there are more over 21 than under, so we can just outvote them! Yes folks, a portion of the electorate can gang up on another portion and take their rights away. MADD has shown us the way. They accomplished this by getting Congress to threaten to take away their highway funds unless they complied. (BTW: Extra credit goes to Louisiana here for being about the last state to give in).
They got to my state just at the perfect time that the "grandfathering" of the new law assured people 1 year older than me could legally drink for 3 years while I could not. I didn't even like alcohol, but this completely pissed me off. 30 years later, and I still hold a grudge. I hate MADD with the heat of 1000 suns. Anything they are against, I'm automatically for. In 30 years, that rule has held me in good stead.
Being smart and/or intelligent isn't the same as knowing a lot of facts.
There's also a very underappreciated value to experience. You can be the smartest person in the world, and have all the world's facts at your fingertips, but if you've never experienced something personally, there's a good chance you just don't have the mental framework to begin to understand that situation. This is how you get very smart people explaining to actual (very experienced) poor people how they have no business "letting" themselves be poor, and must just be inferior humans in some way. This is how you get "mansplaining" and "whitesplaining".
Sometimes the best thing to do, even if you are a really smart person (heck, particularly if you are a really smart person), is to STFU and listen to people who have different experiences than you. If a lot of them are saying the same thing, but it doesn't jibe with the information you have, you are almost certainly missing something.
During the runup to the second Gulf War there was a story circulating about how The Empire was really the good guys and the Rebel Alliance was just a bunch of terrorists. The sad part was, in the logic of the time it was being sold by many as a serious argument. Not even a joke. Here's a link to it from 2002 in The Weekly Standard
"Wait a minute. Perhaps she's right. Perhaps I've been wrong to blindly follow the intelligence traditions and superstitions of past decades. Maybe we intelligence agents should test these assumptions analytically, through experimentation and a "scientific method", with a respectful eye towards our citizen's privacy. Maybe this privacy could be extended to other branches of government: medicine, the IRS, lawmaking, social services, law enforcement. Perhaps I could lead the way to a new age, an age of rebirth, a Renaissance!...Naaaaaahhh!"
Not exactly. By the definition of "abortion" that most pro-lifer's like to use (any pregnancy termination after fertilization of an egg), hormone-based birth control in some circumstances does cause abortions.
Banning The Pill of course would have massive social implications, but that's precisely where the absolutist line of thinking leads one.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the game with novels is to put something intriguing in the first paragraph, preferably the first sentence. Something that will make a browser at the airport bookstore want to read more, if just to figure out how that's even possible. Something like, "Being dead turned out to have its advantages".
I kind of make a game of reading novel first lines. IMHO, starting off with an exploding moon make this one of the better ones I've seen.
stop playing star spangled banner and smell the real coffee. what worked 100 years ago is not applicable now. the workforce is too crowded, the unemployment is sky high and we are borderline on depression, again and again. is that a time you think of as a 'work surplus' era?
WTH are you talking about? Unemployment right now is 5.5, which is well within the range it sat at from 2002 to 2008 before the recession started. The recession ended back in June of 2009 (6 freaking years ago). Our GDP (how recessions are officially measured) has been in the same range it was from 2002-2007 since then.
Most of the rest of your comment doesn't feel right to me either. I see no reason why sociological forces that built the USA would have suddenly stopped working the way they always did before. Normally I wouldn't bring up my "feelings", but since you seem to put more stock in how the economy feels than how it is really provably doing, perhaps that's relevant too.
And why the funk do you want him to exercise his hobby behind a computer instead of playing outdoors with other kids, a dog or...
Interestingly, this is my /. quote of the day at the bottom of the page:
"Life begins when you can spend your spare time programming instead of watching television." -- Cal Keegan
So clearly he wants the kid to do that so that his 7 year old's life can finally begin. Are you anti-life, sir?
Hmm, a few minutes of google-fu shows the number of "civilians" killed by police in 2013 (to pick a year as close as possible to today, and far enough back to be sure the statistics have all been gathered together) to be 320.
...but the problem is that number, like most numbers about this, is complete BS. Nate Silver's website has several articles up about how hard it is to get legit numbers about police shootings.
Tall men are percieved as more powerful, commanding -
It is most certainly noticeable when you go over there. I'm 5'11.5 (that 0.5 is important, damnit!). That isn't huge, but most people are shorter, and I'm considered a "big" player on the soccer field. I went over there for business, got off the train in Leiden, and felt generally short for the first time since I was in 6th grade.
They were also ludicrously thin by US standards. At first I was like, "where are the older people? Where are the 40+ year olds? Do they euthanize them all? Should I go hide?" It took a while to realize than everyone looked younger that I'm used to, due to being so slim. I put it down to much less motorized transport use, and smaller portions. But perhaps there's some natural selection going on there too?
But why would this preferentially affect this one country?
Clearly more study is needed.
Holding a camera and recording video while in no direct danger does not make someone a hero.
If the video you are recording is a murder, and your video will have a direct impact upon the murder's ability to get away with the crime, it most certainly does make you a hero. If the cop had noticed, he could easily have made it two killings, "accidentally" smashed the phone, and got away with both. Afterwards, the videographer's got a murderer and an unknown amount of his buddies pissed off at him. And these are people skilled in investigation with the full power and resources of the state behind them. They WILL find out who he is and where he lives.
I had a relative who reported a cop for assault once. For her troubles, she got to suffer months of pointless traffic stops, parking tickets, and car vandalism. If a murder was involved...I don't know that I'd want to expose my family to what could happen.
This person was either amazingly brave or amazingly stupid.
That explains the increase I just saw in my bill. An extra $15... they are already trying to squeeze their customers to pay for the fine.
I bet that came as a line item on the bill, saying something like "government fees". So not only do they pass the cost on to customers, they try to blame them for it as well.
That's a switch...usually they just give that information away for free to criminals.
This isn't an improvement for customers, but at least its better for stockholders.
What Would a Constructed Language Have To Be To Replace English?
English
To misquote Tony Hoare: I don't know what the language of the future will look like, but I know it will be called English.
What does that really hurt? I suppose if a neighbor mooches off my wifi, that hurts my ISP, but not really me.
If it becomes a problem, at best I might wanna put up a wifi password to keep my neighbors off, but I don't really understand why my wifi (not the computers on it but the wifi itself) needs to have industrial-strength security.
I worked at the time for what is now Lockheed-Martin. So as someone who was an indirect beneficiary of the "Star Wars" $'s, perhaps I can pipe in too?
Sure, the free money for engineers (and their employers) was nice. But you know what else would have been nice? Spending that exact same amount of money on NASA, for stuff that we might have had something to show for at the end. Maybe something that might have accomplished something (eg: a visit to mars), or advanced science a bit (better space propulsion, habitation tech), rather than just blowing it all on something that everyone involved knew going in was a total waste, just to make some politicians feel better about their personal constructed reality.
That's what I would have liked to see.
the equivalent of a 486DX2 (look that one up)...
If they wanted the minivan to go faster, they just hit the PC's "turbo" button.
Let's get this straight. This group that is concerned with one of the most outlandish and socially ridiculous preventable causes of death...
No, they aren't. They've done nothing to ban alcoholism in general. During the exact same period my state went from being a dry state (yes, we still had those in the '80s) to a liquor-by-the-drink state, and MADD didn't say "boo" about it. There is far more drinking and drunk driving in Oklahoma now than there was when MADD started.
All they did was get the rest of the electorate to gang up on 3 years of it. That was just as effective for getting drunks off the road as if they'd banned drinking for anyone 28-30, or 38-40. Heck, we could probably save a lot of lives by banning anyone over 68 from having a drivers license period. It would be an appalling abridgement of rights, and seniors PACs would (rightly) scream bloody murder, but we could do it.
MADD only picked on 18-20's because that's the group of the electorate with the least power.
To put this in a bit of perspective, earthquakes were pretty much unheard of in the state when I was a kid. Yeah, seismologists would probably tell you there were some, but not ones anybody ever noticed. We used to console ourselves that, yes we have tornadoes, but those you can prepare for. At least we didn't have Earthquakes like California. Hahaha, suckers!
In 2014 we had three times more earthquakes than California.
If you're interested in SF you're probably better off checking reader reviews, not the list of Hugo/Nebula Awards.
Probably the best thing to do (not that I've tried it) would be to get a Goodreads account, find people who seem to like the same books as you, and look at stuff they've liked that you haven't read.
What I do is just semi-randomly buy cheap paperbacks whenever I'm going on a trip. The results are as random as you might think, but I don't waste a lot of money this way, and find some good stuff.
My wife's strategy is to buy compilations either edited by, or with submissions from authors she likes. She's a smart woman, and more of a fan than I, so her method would probably be the smarter bet. :-)
Another mostly Baen reader here.
IMHO, honestly I don't give a crap. Really. I have my favorite authors, as does every other fan. Hugo's don't factor into my buying decisions at all. If they do, its to show me books to avoid (based on my past history with Hugo winners).
My wife (a much bigger fan than I) buys mostly female authors. I buy (barely) mostly men. I find female authors have trouble making believable (to me as a lifetime male) male characters, and that can be distracting. I'm sure my wife finds the equivalent with male authors. So most of our library at home is female authors, naturally. In a completely fair universe (ha!) Hugos would mostly go to people who aren't white men every year, because a minority of English speakers are white men.
In the meantime (I suspect from now until the extinction of the Human race), if voters want to use awards to promote writers they think are under-promoted, for whatever, they should do that. Seriously. Knock yourselves out. It probably won't effect me much, but go for it.
Perhaps a day will come where Hugos are a reliable indicator of works I will like, but its never worked that way in the past.
I wonder how much of this objection has nothing to do with the vasty overstated risks but instead is of a commercial nature. Alcoholic beverages are extremely expensive in a lot of places (stadiums, bars, restaurants, events) and sneaking your own in is inconvenient or impossible
Another good question is how much of its promotion has to do with exactly that. Several posters have already pointed out that for its supposed use (camping) this solution is actually significantly worse than currently available options. So perhaps we should all just quit pretending that this product isn't intended almost solely for the purpose you describe above.
Back in the 80's, MADD was formed with the purpose of blackmailing all the states into banning alchohol sales to anyone under 21. This of course includes a good 3 years of actual voters, but fuck them, there are more over 21 than under, so we can just outvote them! Yes folks, a portion of the electorate can gang up on another portion and take their rights away. MADD has shown us the way. They accomplished this by getting Congress to threaten to take away their highway funds unless they complied. (BTW: Extra credit goes to Louisiana here for being about the last state to give in).
They got to my state just at the perfect time that the "grandfathering" of the new law assured people 1 year older than me could legally drink for 3 years while I could not. I didn't even like alcohol, but this completely pissed me off. 30 years later, and I still hold a grudge. I hate MADD with the heat of 1000 suns. Anything they are against, I'm automatically for. In 30 years, that rule has held me in good stead.
Being smart and/or intelligent isn't the same as knowing a lot of facts.
There's also a very underappreciated value to experience. You can be the smartest person in the world, and have all the world's facts at your fingertips, but if you've never experienced something personally, there's a good chance you just don't have the mental framework to begin to understand that situation. This is how you get very smart people explaining to actual (very experienced) poor people how they have no business "letting" themselves be poor, and must just be inferior humans in some way. This is how you get "mansplaining" and "whitesplaining".
Sometimes the best thing to do, even if you are a really smart person (heck, particularly if you are a really smart person), is to STFU and listen to people who have different experiences than you. If a lot of them are saying the same thing, but it doesn't jibe with the information you have, you are almost certainly missing something.
During the runup to the second Gulf War there was a story circulating about how The Empire was really the good guys and the Rebel Alliance was just a bunch of terrorists. The sad part was, in the logic of the time it was being sold by many as a serious argument. Not even a joke. Here's a link to it from 2002 in The Weekly Standard
So yeah, this has already happened.
"Wait a minute. Perhaps she's right. Perhaps I've been wrong to blindly follow the intelligence traditions and superstitions of past decades. Maybe we intelligence agents should test these assumptions analytically, through experimentation and a "scientific method", with a respectful eye towards our citizen's privacy. Maybe this privacy could be extended to other branches of government: medicine, the IRS, lawmaking, social services, law enforcement. Perhaps I could lead the way to a new age, an age of rebirth, a Renaissance!...Naaaaaahhh!"
Not exactly. By the definition of "abortion" that most pro-lifer's like to use (any pregnancy termination after fertilization of an egg), hormone-based birth control in some circumstances does cause abortions.
Banning The Pill of course would have massive social implications, but that's precisely where the absolutist line of thinking leads one.