I'm sick of the relative low level of sexism on slashdot. Every time I walk into a 400 level class which might invlove math (physics, math, compsci, etc) I'm amazed at the number of females. That is to day, there are 3 or less out of 20. Whereas in the 100 level intro classes (for majors, not for the great unwashed) there is around 40 - 50% females. That means females are starting a technical program, but not making it to the higher level classes (there are other factors, but they don't account for the difference).
Of course, alot of those females switch to the much less demanding education track and go on to torture those who aren't incompetent all throughout their K-12 education.
So you tell me, Feminist-Mom, are girls dumb or do they just give up easily? Or does the MAN, (in this case the super-diversity-loving university which actively recruits girls for science and technology, and spends alot of money to do it, and which hires many many female faculty members and advisors, a much larger fraction than in the field in general) fail them out because of sexism?
I mean, if achievement is the argument you use to prove that sexism is wrong, that implies that lack of achievement proves it right.
Oh, and while I'm cussing you out, way to go with beating babies in diapers with your "mad computer skills". Now that those babies have had some time to catch up I'll bet you don't compare so favorably.
Yea, but you get all that great healthcare and the government will baby-sit your pets while you're at the store. Also, free happy pills for everybody.
Besides, what is there to drive too in Sweden? "Kids! Jump in the car, let's go look at some snow!" "Aww, dad, we can see snow everywhere we go." "You're right kids, now go stand in front of that UV light so you don't get vitamin deficient." "I fucking hate Sweden." "Watch your mouth."
don't be "one of those people". You can't just take words to mean whatever you want 'to you'. That is bullshit. As soon as you do that everything you say has no meaning, as who knows what YOU mean by 'reliable'. Perhaps by 'reliable' you mean 'lasts at least 1 week' and 'cheap' means 'less than a million dollars'. Of course you take 'ideas' to mean 'the internet version of deas' or something equally stupid.
So, since you don't seem to know what words mean, I'll lend a hand:
Generic: Not having a brand name.
So you cannot possibly consider 'Crucial' to be 'generic' as 'Crucial' IS the name of the brand.
Now, everything today has branding of some sort. You can't buy a box at the store that just says 'crackers' and doesn't refer to a brand. So it seems that there are no longer generic products. So now the word generic means 'lower quality or lesser known brand'. Safeway brand food is generic, Kraft is name brand. This is mostly a product of advertising.
However, crucial is generally considered to be the premier brand of RAM. In most compatibility tests it scores near or at the top.
By "not generic' you seem to mean 'flashy, shiny'. And that is about what I would expect from you. Tell me, do you drive a souped up civic? Does your car have a carbon fiber hood and an exhaust tip?
Oh please. It's the same (perfectly decent) generic ram everyone else uses, it just costs twice as much.
Stop, collaborate and listen!
Ram quality is a highly overlooked cause of many many stability problems. I will NOT run generic ram in the debian machine I use for development, nor will I in my powerbook. Many of those hard to track down and intermittent 'software' errors are caused by either poor quality ram or a cheap power supply. With windows it's not so important, as you are less likely to keep it up for long periods of time (apparently it reboots itself to install patches now, without asking).
If you are doing anything serious on a PC, I really recommend ECC. There is a slight cost involved, and a very small performance penalty, but it comes with the total prevention of single bit errors due to cosmic rays or decomposing atoms in solder. You'll avoid a hell of a lot WTF troubleshooting.
Now, if you're a cretin, feel free to get GENERTEC's offering for $5 less, but in the long run you'll bitch and moan about whatever operating system you're using being unstable.
CRETINS STOP READING HERE, AND RECEIVE A GENUINE IMITATION LEATHERETTE WALLET CARRYING CASE
Ok, now that they're out of the picture, check out www.crucial.com. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Micron, and it is high quality stuff.
Two RAM boards with the exact same chips can vary widely in quality. This is because the big 3 ram manufacturers do a great job, but the PCB makers do an often shit job.
As in all things you get what you pay for.
Oh, and parent IS a cretin. Nobody cares about your personal justification for Apple bashing. Apple makes great stuff, it's not everything to everybody. I personally wish that konqueror would be split from KDE so that it could be platform independent. It's fantastic.
You make the following claims as though they are factual statements. Please revise or provide support:
it is a false premise that government can create property rights
it is a false premise that property revolves arround feelings and not things like natural limits in supply and demand
that society doesn't owe anyone a distribution monopoly
that it is nice to see artists make it
Further, your claims are ambiguous. When you say "government doesn't owe" do you mean in a legal sense? Becuase according to US law the government owes the US Postal service a monopoly on distribution of mail.
When you say that it is false that 'government can create property rights', where do property rights come from, and who, if anyone, creates them?
When you say "natural limits in supply and demand" what the hell are you talking about? Do you truly believe your 4th grade understanding of economics makes you some sort of expert to lecture others?
extra stuff = requirement to give back changes and enhancements.
So I am saying that they are different. In fact, I EXPLICITLY SAY THAT THEY ARE DIFFERENT.
I'm saying that if you "Take a car, and give it a truck body, and truck tires" then "you have a truck". If you "Take the BSD license" and "require people to share their changes" then you have "the GPL license".
Basically the GPL is BSD+sharingrequirements+overhead, where overhead is technical language to make it airtight.
but put those apps under the BSD license instead.... They can even make a product out of it, make some money, and feed changes/improvements back into the program.
You've just described EXACTLY what the GPL is, BSD license with a requirement to feed changes/enhancements back into the program. That is what the license does, period.
With the BSD license a company is much more likely to take the BSD'd code, and then that's it. For example, microsoft's TCP stack.
For the sake of little brothers everywhere I hope they do this.
I remember many a game of Street Fighter 2 that ended in real violence, not because of the game, but over who had to use the "generic" controller and who got the "real" controller. The difference was noticeable enought to cause fights, and not because of branding. Cheap controllers suck.
So you don't have a problem if someone takes your idea, which you use to make a living (remember, this is hypothetical). They then use their greater resources, steal your idea, put on a huge marketing blitz, and put you out of business. Yea, your right, it's totally different. You can still use your idea, except you'll be doing it in your mother's basement.
Suck it up and create, dumbshit.
And one more thing. An analogy isn't exactly the same as the situation it is similar to. If it were, it would have to actually BE that situation. When someone presents an analogy for a situation, and you rip into an entirely inconsequential part of it, it just shows that you really don't follow the discussion at a useful level.
Example:
Somebody: Arguing with an idiot is like trying to teach a pig to sing...
You: PIGS DON'T HAVE VOCAL CORDS STUPID!
My point was that when someone steals from you, whether a physical object or not, you don't just let them get away with it. I was pointing out the childishness of the 'suck it up and create' idea. You then pick ONE of the two analogies and try to pick it apart, but you miss the point. The point is that we do not tolarate theft, as that would just encourage more theft, such that creating more would just give thieves more to steal.
An idea isn't a physical object, you're right. However, if you've ever had an idea worth a nickel, which is unlikely, you would know that it is very frustrating to see someone who's only contribution is hearing your idea and stealing it make money off of it. As a society we have agreed that certain types of ideas, specifically works of art and inventions, must be protected to encourage their creation. Now that one of these laws has come in to effect, there is a disagreement. Your solution to this is "Why can't we all just not argue about it and stop wasting resources and not argue and just create." The long answer is that there is no motivation to create if there is no reward for it.
Someday, when you're all grown up, you'll learn about a thing called money. Money is pieces of paper that can be exchanged for goods and services. Money is necessary to live. Your Mommy and Daddy trade money for the food you eat and even your Backstreet Boys CD's.
Listen, I didn't say weeks had 7 days for any reason. As it happens, it is probably just because 7 days is a convienient amount of time if you want to do something periodically. So you can have church once a week, and that seems about right. Twice a week and you don't have anything new to talk about, once every two weeks and you forget stuff from the beginning of the period.
At least that is how it seems. I know that I am about through with work by the time the weekend comes along, and it is just barely long enough that I don't bite people on monday morning.
A week doesn't need to be split up, it already has convienient units which make it up. It is obvious that you split a week up into days.
what isn't obvious is how to split up a day. There is no reason to pick 12 hours instead of 60 hours, except convienience.
Now look at a week. Suppose we split what we now call a 'week' into 6 units, call each unit a dayX. Notice that a dayX is 1 and 1/6 of a day. This is a shitty unit of time because every dayX starts at a different moment of our earths rotation relative to the last. Thus it is clear that any set of days should be grouped into a number of days, and not arbitrarily divided.
You can't say that about a day, it can be divided any number of ways, none of which are rediculous. We could have 10 hours per day (20 per day + night) and get along fine, or we could have 10 hours per rotation of the earth, and get along fine. 12 hours per day is just convienient and historically has inertia.
You don't need to split a week or month, you can just specify a whole number of days. Do you see how this makes sense? You only need something to be easily divisible if there isn't a natural smaller unit you can just use multiples of.
So instead of saying some fraction of a month, you can just say "5 days" or whatever. If you want to specify a part of a day, how do you do it? Either you say "1/3 day" or you say 4 hours. Now, at one point the length of an hour was longer or shorter depending on what season it was. An hour was literally 1/12 of a day.
"I don't get virus's so there isn't a problem with windows."
So all you do to avoid viruses is: 1. Purchase additional network hardware 2. Avoid using any programs integrated with the OS such as the web browser or the email client. 3. Not trust attachments 4. Modify the OS by shutting off services *5. Run additional virus scanning software weekly 6. Run additional firewall software
*Now, I won't ask you how you know you don't have a virus or worm, since you say you don't even use a virus scanner you must 'just know'.
These are great ideas if you're stuck with windows, but I just: 1. Run an OS that doesn't suck.
Plus, I get the benifit of: A shell that isn't crap (bash by default) Unixness (for those of us that know how to use real OS's)
Plus: App directories instead of DLL Hell, And of course it is secure by default/design
You're comparing a fully shut down laptop to a G5 in suspend mode?
How about this, My G4 Powerbook boots in about 25 seconds, from a cold start, and it also responds instantly from sleep. My Toshiba Laptop on the other hand takes close to 2 minutes to boot, and takes about 50 seconds to wake from hibernate, and it weighs about 5 pounds more with a screen that has less than half as many pixils and shitty color.
Also, you can run windows "sans-AV". it's called "don't have services you don't need on" and "don't install software you don't trust".
FALSE. Even with all the services off you can still get virii in windows JUST BY HAVING IT CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET. Oh, and through Media Player, and through IE, and through Office, and through Outlook Express. With windows virus's are just one 0-day exploit away.
And for the most part you can configure AV's not to do boot scans but just runtime scans.
Or you can run a Mac, where the only reason to have virus scan at all is as a service to your windows using associates who you might share files with.
Plus, you have dated your knowlege. Virus scanners don't do boot scans anymore, because it isn't necessary. Back in the days of your beloved MS's DOS and Win 3.x virus scanners ran at bootup because they couldn't intercept files before they were loaded at runtime. Now Virusscanners can sit between the disk and software, so bootup scan isn't even an option with Mcaffee. (if it is it is turned off by default). However, the extra overhead of scanning the thousands of files windows touches as it boots might slow it down a bit, don't you think?
So really you're bitching that your properly inconfigured totally turned off laptop [which probably has way slower disk, memory and processing than your DESKTOP G5] is slower to boot then your properly set up desktop G5 in suspend mode.
Why do you love Windows so much? Windows is a pain to use, it's API's are shitty, and it is the least secure OS available today, and hardly a week goes by without a remote exploit being discovered. Meanwhile Mac's are a joy to use, have wonderful hardware, and no security or virus problems to speak of, and MS office for Mac is actually a much better and more stable program than Office for Windows!
They are the year, the day, the half day (the part where there is light), the length of the lunar cycle, the time between the longest and shortest days, the time between the longest and the average day, the time between the first and last freeze of a year, the time it takes a human baby to gestate, the time between planting crops and harvesting them, etc etc. Some of these vary a little, but many don't, and all are very important to people without modern technology.
Now, it was arbitrary that the babelonians picked 60 to be the base of their counting system, thus leading to the 60's with regard to time. However, 60 is a convienient way to break things up.
What number of divisions would let us evenly take a twelth, a sixth, a quarter, a third, a half? If we just take 2*2*3 we get 12, so there is the 12 hour day. If we multiply that by 5 we get 60, and thus we can also take a fifth of an hour or minute evenly.
To recap, the 12 hours in a day let us break the day up into alot of different sizes while avoiding fractions, and the 60 minute hour and 60 second minute let us do the same but more so.
This is less important to us since we can use calculators, but to someone who just wants you to spend ~a third of a day working in this field, and a third in that one it is easier to just say "spend 4 hours in each" than to try to figure out the fractions, especially since when this was devised fractions were poorly understood.
In other words, it is nice to have 5,10,15,20,and 30 minutes be nice fractions of a full hour and still be whole minutes. (respectively 1/12, 1/6, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2), 1/5 of an hour isn't used much, probably because of hour bias towards base 10 with 10 being almost 12 anyway.
Like I said even when its wrong it makes you think about the issues, maybe even more so if you are picking holes in his science. Obviously it got you to THINKING:)
No, that's just it! I didn't think about it at all, it was obvious from the initial description that it was bogus.
you probably need a bent for the actual science part of science fiction and not so much the fiction part.
No. I take issue with the fiction part of the story. I enjoy science fiction that has no basis in the 'actual science part', such as Lem.
they won Hugo and Nebula awards, apparently some people disagree with you.
Green and Blue won Hugo's only and nothing else of note. This isn't suprising, as the Hugo is selected by a popular vote of the members of WSFS, and as we all know, 90% of everything is crap (sturgeon's law), and that includes members of WSFS.
Now, KSR is a shitty author. He came up with some of the most contrived and ridiculous 'problems' for the people of Mars to face, while totally glossing over the hard stuff. They'll need raw materials early on, this is a hard problem. KSR just gives them 'air miners' which are propositioned. They will need a lot of machinery, but luckily KSR has given them robots which can just be programmed to produce any machinery you want directly from raw materials, thus they literally get all their tools OUT OF THIN AIR.
Next they need water. Do they just pull it out of the air? No, they build a pipeline to the polar ice cap. Does ground control help direct them? No, they have to think of everything themselves, although we find out later when it is convienient for the plot that they are on TV virtually all the time.
Now, there isn't a lot of science in these books, but the science that is there is completely wrong in every way. For example, early in the books they want to terriform the planet. The first attempt is to drop little windmills. The spinning of the windmill powers a small generator, which is connected to a heating coil. Thus, this turns wind energy into heat energy, which we are assured by the sciencey characters will help warm the planet. Except of course that the net effect on temperature is exactly ZERO as this just turns one form of energy (wind) into another (heat) which it would have turned into anyway due to friction. So there is no increase in temperature. Now from a planetary perspective, enough of these devices could actually lower temperature. These devices raise the temperature a lot in one place, whereas the wind would dissipate over a large area raising the temperature very little, but spread out. Thus the heating coils are radiating much higher frequency radiation, which might more easily escape into space if the atmosphere is less able to absorb radiation of that frequency. This is a subtle point, but the not subtle point is that the main super smart physicist in the story doesn't know basic first year college thermodynamics.
KSR gives the characters ridiculous motivations. For example, about half of the Martians don't want to terra-form the planet, and so become terrorists to prevent terra-forming. This flies in the face of 10,000 years of human history, where people have always tried to turn any land they came across into grassland, and never acted against their own interests intentionally, at least not for long.
Then there is the cult of Horiko. She says like 2 things per book, and everyone in the book thinks she is some sort of religious figure, even though every time she opens her mouth she says something ridiculous and unhelpful.
Next we have the later generations, which KSR clearly hoped to use in the sequels. However, they are weirdos and are not developed properly, and apparently KSR decided to abort using them and just make the original characters from his short story immortal! Way to go KSR, that's not a transparent device too salvage what is almost decent.
Then there are probably 100 places where KSR started to go one direction and then abruptly forgets about it without returning, and these really shouldn't be in the story at all, but I'm guessing he was paid by the word thus they stayed in. For example, one of the second generation Martians has this magic power to heat up and control his body temperature. He can also run forever a
Kim Stanely Robinson is a hack. Those books were awful crap. I read both red and green mars back to back, then started blue mars, to "find out what happens" as my wife was also reading them. Red Mars was So-So as sci-fi goes in general, far below Heinlein or Asimovor Lem but about as good as hacks like Ringo and his colaborators.
Then Green Mars. Apparently Kim didn't plan for a sequel, because all the characters who lived through the first book were rather boring weirdos. The big conflict was whether or not to terraform the planet, but also whether or not to become independent from earth. Meanwhile these huge corporations from earth are pumping huge amounts of money into terraforming mars for no apparent reason. Oh, did I mention that he continually pulls out magic to keep the characters alive? They end up being like 300 by the end of the book, and they have perfect recall of EVERYTHING that ever happened to them.
The characters were worthless, the dialog was wooden, the plot was forced throughout. Every 3rd word was "fellfield" and every 5th phrase was "people that might have lived a thousand years" because people who might live a long time have more valuable lives than everyone else apparently.
Ahh, I see that you're no one note wonder! You can sound like an idiot in both economics, and now... politics! You ain't much of one of dem smarties neither!
Oh Bother, Why do you insist on trying to use your brain? It simply doesn't work very well, and you end up embarasing yourself and wasting everyone's time.
A publisher should be no more than stepping stone for an artist. Once the artist is established, they should be able to make direct profit from their creations by starting their own publishing company.
How would the publishing company make money? Why would they risk a large amount of money publishing a new author when as soon as that author becomes popular they lose him? Wouldn't that be a stupid idea? Authors aren't legally obligated to stick with a publisher, they are contracturally obligated. That means that they sign a contract in exchange for money and the services of a publishing house, and give up certain rights in exchange. They do this because it is better than working at McDonalds.
On top of that, his publishing company could then become a stepping stone for other pormising authors in the same genre.
How is that different than the original publishing house recruiting pormising authors?
Listen friend. Perhaps you should spend more time reading and learning, and less time with your mouth open. If you have any potential usefulness to the universe you certainly won't realize it going about things as you are. However, we were all 14 once and so a little impetuousness can be indulged if it is not repeated.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, how selfish can you get? Saving millions of lives and he wants to profit from it!!!
Like we want to encourage that sort of behavior? If my kid ever saves 1 million lives I'll tan his hide I will.
Profit is reserved for things like soda and rap cd's, you know, the stuff that we want to reward people for making.
I'm sick of the relative low level of sexism on slashdot. Every time I walk into a 400 level class which might invlove math (physics, math, compsci, etc) I'm amazed at the number of females. That is to day, there are 3 or less out of 20. Whereas in the 100 level intro classes (for majors, not for the great unwashed) there is around 40 - 50% females. That means females are starting a technical program, but not making it to the higher level classes (there are other factors, but they don't account for the difference).
Of course, alot of those females switch to the much less demanding education track and go on to torture those who aren't incompetent all throughout their K-12 education.
So you tell me, Feminist-Mom, are girls dumb or do they just give up easily? Or does the MAN, (in this case the super-diversity-loving university which actively recruits girls for science and technology, and spends alot of money to do it, and which hires many many female faculty members and advisors, a much larger fraction than in the field in general) fail them out because of sexism?
I mean, if achievement is the argument you use to prove that sexism is wrong, that implies that lack of achievement proves it right.
Oh, and while I'm cussing you out, way to go with beating babies in diapers with your "mad computer skills". Now that those babies have had some time to catch up I'll bet you don't compare so favorably.
Yea, but you get all that great healthcare and the government will baby-sit your pets while you're at the store. Also, free happy pills for everybody.
Besides, what is there to drive too in Sweden? "Kids! Jump in the car, let's go look at some snow!" "Aww, dad, we can see snow everywhere we go." "You're right kids, now go stand in front of that UV light so you don't get vitamin deficient." "I fucking hate Sweden." "Watch your mouth."
And PC Chips is widely known for making unreliable crap. THIS IS MY POINT TO BEGIN WITH.
don't be "one of those people". You can't just take words to mean whatever you want 'to you'. That is bullshit. As soon as you do that everything you say has no meaning, as who knows what YOU mean by 'reliable'. Perhaps by 'reliable' you mean 'lasts at least 1 week' and 'cheap' means 'less than a million dollars'. Of course you take 'ideas' to mean 'the internet version of deas' or something equally stupid.
So, since you don't seem to know what words mean, I'll lend a hand:
Generic: Not having a brand name.
So you cannot possibly consider 'Crucial' to be 'generic' as 'Crucial' IS the name of the brand.
Now, everything today has branding of some sort. You can't buy a box at the store that just says 'crackers' and doesn't refer to a brand. So it seems that there are no longer generic products. So now the word generic means 'lower quality or lesser known brand'. Safeway brand food is generic, Kraft is name brand. This is mostly a product of advertising.
However, crucial is generally considered to be the premier brand of RAM. In most compatibility tests it scores near or at the top.
By "not generic' you seem to mean 'flashy, shiny'. And that is about what I would expect from you. Tell me, do you drive a souped up civic? Does your car have a carbon fiber hood and an exhaust tip?
Oh please. It's the same (perfectly decent) generic ram everyone else uses, it just costs twice as much.
Stop, collaborate and listen!
Ram quality is a highly overlooked cause of many many stability problems. I will NOT run generic ram in the debian machine I use for development, nor will I in my powerbook. Many of those hard to track down and intermittent 'software' errors are caused by either poor quality ram or a cheap power supply. With windows it's not so important, as you are less likely to keep it up for long periods of time (apparently it reboots itself to install patches now, without asking).
If you are doing anything serious on a PC, I really recommend ECC. There is a slight cost involved, and a very small performance penalty, but it comes with the total prevention of single bit errors due to cosmic rays or decomposing atoms in solder. You'll avoid a hell of a lot WTF troubleshooting.
Now, if you're a cretin, feel free to get GENERTEC's offering for $5 less, but in the long run you'll bitch and moan about whatever operating system you're using being unstable.
CRETINS STOP READING HERE, AND RECEIVE A GENUINE IMITATION LEATHERETTE WALLET CARRYING CASE
Ok, now that they're out of the picture, check out www.crucial.com. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Micron, and it is high quality stuff.
Two RAM boards with the exact same chips can vary widely in quality. This is because the big 3 ram manufacturers do a great job, but the PCB makers do an often shit job.
As in all things you get what you pay for.
Oh, and parent IS a cretin. Nobody cares about your personal justification for Apple bashing. Apple makes great stuff, it's not everything to everybody. I personally wish that konqueror would be split from KDE so that it could be platform independent. It's fantastic.
You make the following claims as though they are factual statements. Please revise or provide support:
it is a false premise that government can create property rights
it is a false premise that property revolves arround feelings and not things like natural limits in supply and demand
that society doesn't owe anyone a distribution monopoly
that it is nice to see artists make it
Further, your claims are ambiguous. When you say "government doesn't owe" do you mean in a legal sense? Becuase according to US law the government owes the US Postal service a monopoly on distribution of mail.
When you say that it is false that 'government can create property rights', where do property rights come from, and who, if anyone, creates them?
When you say "natural limits in supply and demand" what the hell are you talking about? Do you truly believe your 4th grade understanding of economics makes you some sort of expert to lecture others?
Ok, let me spell it out for you schlomo.
GPL = BSD + extra stuff
extra stuff = requirement to give back changes and enhancements.
So I am saying that they are different. In fact, I EXPLICITLY SAY THAT THEY ARE DIFFERENT.
I'm saying that if you "Take a car, and give it a truck body, and truck tires" then "you have a truck". If you "Take the BSD license" and "require people to share their changes" then you have "the GPL license".
Basically the GPL is BSD+sharingrequirements+overhead, where overhead is technical language to make it airtight.
but put those apps under the BSD license instead. ... They can even make a product out of it, make some money, and feed changes/improvements back into the program.
You've just described EXACTLY what the GPL is, BSD license with a requirement to feed changes/enhancements back into the program. That is what the license does, period.
With the BSD license a company is much more likely to take the BSD'd code, and then that's it. For example, microsoft's TCP stack.
For the sake of little brothers everywhere I hope they do this.
I remember many a game of Street Fighter 2 that ended in real violence, not because of the game, but over who had to use the "generic" controller and who got the "real" controller. The difference was noticeable enought to cause fights, and not because of branding. Cheap controllers suck.
So you don't have a problem if someone takes your idea, which you use to make a living (remember, this is hypothetical). They then use their greater resources, steal your idea, put on a huge marketing blitz, and put you out of business. Yea, your right, it's totally different. You can still use your idea, except you'll be doing it in your mother's basement.
Suck it up and create, dumbshit.
And one more thing. An analogy isn't exactly the same as the situation it is similar to. If it were, it would have to actually BE that situation. When someone presents an analogy for a situation, and you rip into an entirely inconsequential part of it, it just shows that you really don't follow the discussion at a useful level.
Example:
Somebody: Arguing with an idiot is like trying to teach a pig to sing...
You: PIGS DON'T HAVE VOCAL CORDS STUPID!
My point was that when someone steals from you, whether a physical object or not, you don't just let them get away with it. I was pointing out the childishness of the 'suck it up and create' idea. You then pick ONE of the two analogies and try to pick it apart, but you miss the point. The point is that we do not tolarate theft, as that would just encourage more theft, such that creating more would just give thieves more to steal.
An idea isn't a physical object, you're right. However, if you've ever had an idea worth a nickel, which is unlikely, you would know that it is very frustrating to see someone who's only contribution is hearing your idea and stealing it make money off of it. As a society we have agreed that certain types of ideas, specifically works of art and inventions, must be protected to encourage their creation. Now that one of these laws has come in to effect, there is a disagreement. Your solution to this is "Why can't we all just not argue about it and stop wasting resources and not argue and just create." The long answer is that there is no motivation to create if there is no reward for it.
Someday, when you're all grown up, you'll learn about a thing called money. Money is pieces of paper that can be exchanged for goods and services. Money is necessary to live. Your Mommy and Daddy trade money for the food you eat and even your Backstreet Boys CD's.
Bogus!
Why do you complain when someone steals your car? Why not just suck it up and create?
Why do you complain when someone steals what you create? Suck it up and create! (they'll creation 2 as well)
If everyone took the attitude "suck it up and create", the first guy who's attitude was "fuck it up and steal" would rule us all.
So things would be exactly the same...
Freedom comes from the end of a gun.
Listen, I didn't say weeks had 7 days for any reason. As it happens, it is probably just because 7 days is a convienient amount of time if you want to do something periodically. So you can have church once a week, and that seems about right. Twice a week and you don't have anything new to talk about, once every two weeks and you forget stuff from the beginning of the period.
At least that is how it seems. I know that I am about through with work by the time the weekend comes along, and it is just barely long enough that I don't bite people on monday morning.
You TOTALLY miss the point here.
A week doesn't need to be split up, it already has convienient units which make it up. It is obvious that you split a week up into days.
what isn't obvious is how to split up a day. There is no reason to pick 12 hours instead of 60 hours, except convienience.
Now look at a week. Suppose we split what we now call a 'week' into 6 units, call each unit a dayX. Notice that a dayX is 1 and 1/6 of a day. This is a shitty unit of time because every dayX starts at a different moment of our earths rotation relative to the last. Thus it is clear that any set of days should be grouped into a number of days, and not arbitrarily divided.
You can't say that about a day, it can be divided any number of ways, none of which are rediculous. We could have 10 hours per day (20 per day + night) and get along fine, or we could have 10 hours per rotation of the earth, and get along fine. 12 hours per day is just convienient and historically has inertia.
You don't need to split a week or month, you can just specify a whole number of days. Do you see how this makes sense? You only need something to be easily divisible if there isn't a natural smaller unit you can just use multiples of.
So instead of saying some fraction of a month, you can just say "5 days" or whatever. If you want to specify a part of a day, how do you do it? Either you say "1/3 day" or you say 4 hours. Now, at one point the length of an hour was longer or shorter depending on what season it was. An hour was literally 1/12 of a day.
"I don't get virus's so there isn't a problem with windows."
So all you do to avoid viruses is:
1. Purchase additional network hardware
2. Avoid using any programs integrated with the OS such as the web browser or the email client.
3. Not trust attachments
4. Modify the OS by shutting off services
*5. Run additional virus scanning software weekly
6. Run additional firewall software
*Now, I won't ask you how you know you don't have a virus or worm, since you say you don't even use a virus scanner you must 'just know'.
These are great ideas if you're stuck with windows, but I just:
1. Run an OS that doesn't suck.
Plus, I get the benifit of:
A shell that isn't crap (bash by default)
Unixness (for those of us that know how to use real OS's)
Plus:
App directories instead of DLL Hell,
And of course it is secure by default/design
This is nonsense.
You're comparing a fully shut down laptop to a G5 in suspend mode?
How about this, My G4 Powerbook boots in about 25 seconds, from a cold start, and it also responds instantly from sleep. My Toshiba Laptop on the other hand takes close to 2 minutes to boot, and takes about 50 seconds to wake from hibernate, and it weighs about 5 pounds more with a screen that has less than half as many pixils and shitty color.
Also, you can run windows "sans-AV". it's called "don't have services you don't need on" and "don't install software you don't trust".
FALSE. Even with all the services off you can still get virii in windows JUST BY HAVING IT CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET. Oh, and through Media Player, and through IE, and through Office, and through Outlook Express. With windows virus's are just one 0-day exploit away.
And for the most part you can configure AV's not to do boot scans but just runtime scans.
Or you can run a Mac, where the only reason to have virus scan at all is as a service to your windows using associates who you might share files with.
Plus, you have dated your knowlege. Virus scanners don't do boot scans anymore, because it isn't necessary. Back in the days of your beloved MS's DOS and Win 3.x virus scanners ran at bootup because they couldn't intercept files before they were loaded at runtime. Now Virusscanners can sit between the disk and software, so bootup scan isn't even an option with Mcaffee. (if it is it is turned off by default). However, the extra overhead of scanning the thousands of files windows touches as it boots might slow it down a bit, don't you think?
So really you're bitching that your properly inconfigured totally turned off laptop [which probably has way slower disk, memory and processing than your DESKTOP G5] is slower to boot then your properly set up desktop G5 in suspend mode.
Why do you love Windows so much? Windows is a pain to use, it's API's are shitty, and it is the least secure OS available today, and hardly a week goes by without a remote exploit being discovered. Meanwhile Mac's are a joy to use, have wonderful hardware, and no security or virus problems to speak of, and MS office for Mac is actually a much better and more stable program than Office for Windows!
Actually there are alot of natural time periods.
They are the year, the day, the half day (the part where there is light), the length of the lunar cycle, the time between the longest and shortest days, the time between the longest and the average day, the time between the first and last freeze of a year, the time it takes a human baby to gestate, the time between planting crops and harvesting them, etc etc. Some of these vary a little, but many don't, and all are very important to people without modern technology.
Now, it was arbitrary that the babelonians picked 60 to be the base of their counting system, thus leading to the 60's with regard to time. However, 60 is a convienient way to break things up.
What number of divisions would let us evenly take a twelth, a sixth, a quarter, a third, a half? If we just take 2*2*3 we get 12, so there is the 12 hour day. If we multiply that by 5 we get 60, and thus we can also take a fifth of an hour or minute evenly.
To recap, the 12 hours in a day let us break the day up into alot of different sizes while avoiding fractions, and the 60 minute hour and 60 second minute let us do the same but more so.
This is less important to us since we can use calculators, but to someone who just wants you to spend ~a third of a day working in this field, and a third in that one it is easier to just say "spend 4 hours in each" than to try to figure out the fractions, especially since when this was devised fractions were poorly understood.
In other words, it is nice to have 5,10,15,20,and 30 minutes be nice fractions of a full hour and still be whole minutes. (respectively 1/12, 1/6, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2), 1/5 of an hour isn't used much, probably because of hour bias towards base 10 with 10 being almost 12 anyway.
Like I said even when its wrong it makes you think about the issues, maybe even more so if you are picking holes in his science. Obviously it got you to THINKING
No, that's just it! I didn't think about it at all, it was obvious from the initial description that it was bogus.
you probably need a bent for the actual science part of science fiction and not so much the fiction part.
No. I take issue with the fiction part of the story. I enjoy science fiction that has no basis in the 'actual science part', such as Lem.
they won Hugo and Nebula awards, apparently some people disagree with you.
Green and Blue won Hugo's only and nothing else of note. This isn't suprising, as the Hugo is selected by a popular vote of the members of WSFS, and as we all know, 90% of everything is crap (sturgeon's law), and that includes members of WSFS.
Now, KSR is a shitty author. He came up with some of the most contrived and ridiculous 'problems' for the people of Mars to face, while totally glossing over the hard stuff. They'll need raw materials early on, this is a hard problem. KSR just gives them 'air miners' which are propositioned. They will need a lot of machinery, but luckily KSR has given them robots which can just be programmed to produce any machinery you want directly from raw materials, thus they literally get all their tools OUT OF THIN AIR.
Next they need water. Do they just pull it out of the air? No, they build a pipeline to the polar ice cap. Does ground control help direct them? No, they have to think of everything themselves, although we find out later when it is convienient for the plot that they are on TV virtually all the time.
Now, there isn't a lot of science in these books, but the science that is there is completely wrong in every way. For example, early in the books they want to terriform the planet. The first attempt is to drop little windmills. The spinning of the windmill powers a small generator, which is connected to a heating coil. Thus, this turns wind energy into heat energy, which we are assured by the sciencey characters will help warm the planet. Except of course that the net effect on temperature is exactly ZERO as this just turns one form of energy (wind) into another (heat) which it would have turned into anyway due to friction. So there is no increase in temperature. Now from a planetary perspective, enough of these devices could actually lower temperature. These devices raise the temperature a lot in one place, whereas the wind would dissipate over a large area raising the temperature very little, but spread out. Thus the heating coils are radiating much higher frequency radiation, which might more easily escape into space if the atmosphere is less able to absorb radiation of that frequency. This is a subtle point, but the not subtle point is that the main super smart physicist in the story doesn't know basic first year college thermodynamics.
KSR gives the characters ridiculous motivations. For example, about half of the Martians don't want to terra-form the planet, and so become terrorists to prevent terra-forming. This flies in the face of 10,000 years of human history, where people have always tried to turn any land they came across into grassland, and never acted against their own interests intentionally, at least not for long.
Then there is the cult of Horiko. She says like 2 things per book, and everyone in the book thinks she is some sort of religious figure, even though every time she opens her mouth she says something ridiculous and unhelpful.
Next we have the later generations, which KSR clearly hoped to use in the sequels. However, they are weirdos and are not developed properly, and apparently KSR decided to abort using them and just make the original characters from his short story immortal! Way to go KSR, that's not a transparent device too salvage what is almost decent.
Then there are probably 100 places where KSR started to go one direction and then abruptly forgets about it without returning, and these really shouldn't be in the story at all, but I'm guessing he was paid by the word thus they stayed in. For example, one of the second generation Martians has this magic power to heat up and control his body temperature. He can also run forever a
Kim Stanely Robinson is a hack. Those books were awful crap. I read both red and green mars back to back, then started blue mars, to "find out what happens" as my wife was also reading them. Red Mars was So-So as sci-fi goes in general, far below Heinlein or Asimovor Lem but about as good as hacks like Ringo and his colaborators.
Then Green Mars. Apparently Kim didn't plan for a sequel, because all the characters who lived through the first book were rather boring weirdos. The big conflict was whether or not to terraform the planet, but also whether or not to become independent from earth. Meanwhile these huge corporations from earth are pumping huge amounts of money into terraforming mars for no apparent reason. Oh, did I mention that he continually pulls out magic to keep the characters alive? They end up being like 300 by the end of the book, and they have perfect recall of EVERYTHING that ever happened to them.
The characters were worthless, the dialog was wooden, the plot was forced throughout. Every 3rd word was "fellfield" and every 5th phrase was "people that might have lived a thousand years" because people who might live a long time have more valuable lives than everyone else apparently.
Avoid this crappy trilogy.
You say But don't call ... us ... "neo-luddites". It's insulting.
Yet you say buy the newest thing, even if you don't need it (best example of this is the Apple fanatics).
Hypocrite!
Ahh, I see that you're no one note wonder! You can sound like an idiot in both economics, and now... politics! You ain't much of one of dem smarties neither!
Oh Bother, Why do you insist on trying to use your brain? It simply doesn't work very well, and you end up embarasing yourself and wasting everyone's time.
A publisher should be no more than stepping stone for an artist. Once the artist is established, they should be able to make direct profit from their creations by starting their own publishing company.
How would the publishing company make money? Why would they risk a large amount of money publishing a new author when as soon as that author becomes popular they lose him? Wouldn't that be a stupid idea? Authors aren't legally obligated to stick with a publisher, they are contracturally obligated. That means that they sign a contract in exchange for money and the services of a publishing house, and give up certain rights in exchange. They do this because it is better than working at McDonalds.
On top of that, his publishing company could then become a stepping stone for other pormising authors in the same genre.
How is that different than the original publishing house recruiting pormising authors?
Listen friend. Perhaps you should spend more time reading and learning, and less time with your mouth open. If you have any potential usefulness to the universe you certainly won't realize it going about things as you are. However, we were all 14 once and so a little impetuousness can be indulged if it is not repeated.