he REAL thing that these awards do is that they introduce new people to reading these authors.
Right. Can you recommend some of Ray Harryhausen and Steven Spilebrg's books so I can get started -- In the last 40 years of reading SF I somehow managed to miss their no-doubt estimable contributions.
Spielberg's big gift to Sci-Fi is that he's gotten more people into it than anyone else. Even if he bastardises the novel for the sake of the big screen, he exposes countless people to Sci-Fi who would never ever pick up a book (without at lease some inspiration).
Thus, he belongs in the hall of fame.
NO HE DOES NOT. A "Hall of Fame" is for people who CREATE, not PUBLICISE. Is this the triumph of marketing over creativity? Otherwise, there are many publishers and editors who did much more to create and nourish the field who deserve recognition than Hollywood names who are guaranteed to get good press.
But it could be that your quote itself explains why [Herbert]'s not there. It's the "Science Fiction" hall of fame, not the Fantasy hall of fame.
Right. And what science fiction has Ray Harryhausen ever done? And looking at earlier literary inductees, before they went Hollywood, we have Michael Moorcock, who is far over in the fantasy side. Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance have certainly done some SF, but are both better known for fantasy. Since it's authors, not works, being honoured, Herbert has quite a few that qualify as SF under most criteria; regardless, I'd classify Dune as SF myself. He uses chemically enhanced mental powers rather than magic to explain things like FTL, and there is a very thorough working out of the way Arrakis's climate and ecology works, (how realistic to a real scientist in the field I don't know, but he made the effort rather than just waving his hands).
Does the fact that they're finally inducting PKD tell you nothing?
It tells me it's a sop to literary SF, to cover up their sell out to Hollywood sci-fi's version, where directors of movies based on SF writer's books are honoured. And Ray Harryhousen?? For God's sake, he was a great special effects guy, but what the hell has that to do with SF? And most moves he worked on I can reall were straigh-out fantasy, animated skeletons, etc.P>
If they are going to hounour contributors to movie SF they should have started with the Lumiere Brothers.
Anyway, this marks the end of any credibility of this so-called "Hall of Fame" in my eyes, call me a snob if you will.
Not to mention that in countries where male babies mean more future family wealth, and girls mean nothing, having more males even for a short time would create a large class-gap since in all probability only the well off would be able to afford such technology and would be better off because of it.
You don't need expensive technology. You just smother female babies. That's how they do it in rural China and India. The urbanites can have a relatively cheap ultrasound and abort them.
Alternatively, this could make [Girls ] a illegally traded commodity...underground markets often develop to illegally trade this commodity.
In China women and young girls are often kidnapped and transported to rural regions with a shortage of women (due to the abortion or infanticide of girl babies) and sold to be wives of farmers.
It costs a fortune to go to these fertility clinics, at least currently, developing countries would have to become developed ones to take much advantage.
It doesn't cost a fortune to have an ultrasound, and these are available all over India and China, followed by abortions if the gender is wrong (i.e. female).
If the culture becomes more male-dominated, violent
behavior becomes more accepted...
Women, except for a few wives, like Madame Mao, have never and do ot now hold any important roles in the power structure in China. The Communist government was dominted for the first 40 or so years by the guerrila leaders till they finally started to reluctantly retire or die off; all male. Now business elites are getting more powerful, also male dominated, though not quite as much.
The Chinese government was MUCH more aggressive a few decades ago (invading Tibet, supporting North Korea and North Vietnam in their wars) than now.
What I call "good looks", correlates with brains quite well.
From those in my Maths course at a university of high repute, sadly while a few of the best and brightest were physically attractive, most, male and female, would quite naturally be instantly visually classified as "geeks", (though none actually did bite off chicken heads to my knowledge).
The characters were completely without any emotion, and at the end I really didn't care if he got arrested or not
I've heard the same criticism of 2001. And to both the answer is that one of the major points of both movies was how dehumanising technology can be; and this was illustrated by the way the protagonists acted (in both senses of the word).
wait till asian countries like China do this, they * do * have very strong cultural bias regarding gender of baby
You don't have to wait. In India and China the sex imbalance has been growing for over a decade. The peasants used to just smother unwanted girls at birth, now the middle class has ultrasounds and aborts them. That's one reason why there is a market for kidnapping and selling women to be wives of men in rural areas where there aren't enough to go around.
China grapples with legacy of its 'missing girls' "From a relatively normal ratio of 108.5 boys to 100 girls in the early 80s, the male surplus progressively rose to 111 in 1990, 116 in 2000, and is now is close to 120 boys for each 100 girls at the present time"
Ratio of girls to boys in India continues to decline "The sex ratio, calculated as number of girls per 1000 boys in the 0-6 age group, declined from 945 girls per 1000 boys in the 1991 census to 927 during the 2001 census... In 2001, four states--Punjab, Haryana, Himachal, and Gujarat--fell into the category of having fewer than 800 girls per 1000 boys for the first time. In Punjab the decline was in 10 of the 17 districts, whereas in Haryana state almost all districts recorded fewer than 850 girls. In Fatehgarh, in Punjab, the number of girls declined to 754 per 1000 boys."
Umm what about 3rd party applications that rely on the media player api or IE API? Lot of apps i've seen...
There's nothng stopping anyone who wants to from downloading and installng MS's player into the "Media Reduced Windows". It's just not ther out of the box. And if you do, you have the advantage of having the latest patched version, not the one that was current X months or years ago when the CD was mastered; if you went online and did an update on the "normal" Windows as recommended you'd have to dowload probably exactly the same size file, but have the possible hassle of fragments of the old install clutterinf g up the disk and registry.
Just to reiterate: You are not prevented from using the MS player, you just have to make the conscious choice to do so.
Actually, I think using third-world countries' TLDs and pretending they stand for something quite different (eg TV [Tuvalu] "television", etc) is prety neo-colonial. Not to mention the country can arbitrarily increase their fees or revoke your domain.
The thing with fastmail is that (AFAIK) while they provide IMAP access, you have to pay to send mail through their SMTP server. So unless you're actually running a mail server yourself (and if so, why bother using a free email service?) or you want to pay money, you're going to have trouble sending replies to all your nicely filtered mail!
I use the third option with pop and never have any false positives
I tried that but had so many false positives I turned it off. I live in Hong Kong and apparently, like many simple-minded bigoted US ISPs (notably AOL), they simply assume all mail from Hong Kong is spam.
They have 'free' pop access and forwarding. You have to sign to something called 'Yahoo! Delivers',
I used to do that with Yahoo.com, but you have to pay for POP wiht them now -- I see you're Canadian so I tihnk you can still do it.
I just tried signing up for it by selecting 'send me info only for topics I select below' and not selecting any topic below!
I had to select at least one category to receive spam in, so I did, but I described nyself as very old, unemployed and uneducated and they never did send me any.
It is actually Yahoo Canada that I have my accounts with. But it seems odd that they would offer it and not yahoo.com
Getting POP is the only reason I've been paying them $20/year for the last 3 or 4 years. Nice to know about Yahoo.ca, hope they don't doscriminate against non-canucks by IP number. gmx.net is also a free POP, but the site is only in German -- probably could struggle through it with Babelfish. I was suckered into Yahoo when it was all free, and have kept it through inertia.
Maybe Yahoo will start Free POP3 Access if they find out that Google does.
They used to, if you signed up for some spam (but I apparently described myself as poor enough not to be a desirable target, so I never got any). But about two years ago they cut that out and you had to pay about $20/year to get POP, along with some other features. But the POP was the decider for me, and if they did that free I'd downgrade my account.
if I were Microsoft, I'd pull out of the EU market. It's insane how far the EU is going in this. I'd say, fine... we're done. Enjoy, and walk
Idiotic. They're making billions now; they'd be making bilions if they fully complied with the EU rules; which are designed to stop MS mponopolising NEW markets, not to make it lose its current ones.
And strategically, having several rich European countries switching to Linux or MacOSX would be the death knell for MS. With that market, any of a dozen Europe-based distros (Mandrake, SuSE, etc) woud ramp up and be a Windows killer within two years. That's why Bill and Steve are on the executive jet and off to hand out massive discounts to any municiplity or other large purchaser threatening to pull the plug on Windows; whether in India, Thailand, China, UK, Munich, just to name a few I've read about recently.
How many times has someone made a change to one part of an application only to find out that it breaks something else? It seems to me that this type of problem is the very reason MS didn't want to pull out MP in the first place.
It seems to me it's the reasone they embedded MP and IE into Windows.
And why on Earth would anyone want to embed video clips into MS Word documents? Just because it's possible?
But Slashdot's problem - to the extent that it has one - is its success. If technocrat.net gets as popular, my guess is that you'll get the same S/N ratio there aswell.
I disagree, I think the biggest problem with Slashdot is the carelessness of the editors. Dupes, spelling, grammar, hoaxes published with no checking. (Whatever happened to "Slashback" to review recent stories (and mistakes) -- used to be regular, did it get to embarrassing?)
Surely the comments are infested with stupidity and trolls, but one thing that does work is moderation, the crap generally disappears quickly (unless you get the gun nuts or creationists started, which can lay waste to the whole discussion).
I hang around for the comments, a lot of interesting and useful stuff comes up there. For instance, now I know about Technocrat, it looks good.
I wish I had mod points for you. If this was MS, everyone here would be screaming bloody murder. Instead GoogleGuy gets moded +5 Informative
It's EXTREMELY informative, because it tells you what Google's offical position is. Whether you like it or not, you need to know that. "Informative" doesn't mean "good".
If Bill Gates posted here in defence of some MS policy, it would hopefully similarly be modded "informative".
When I post an issue in Bugzilla.mozilla.org, the system gives me a list of potential duplicates.
How can't that be done for slashdot?
What about using google?
Amazing that they've created the elaborate moderation system, throttling, "lameness filters", all to reduce the amount of crap comments; but they don't apply any of the same thought to their own articles, not even spellcheck.
The RIAA AND any band that is affected will gladly take up suit in their defense. This guy likes playing with nitro.
Johansen's app doesn't help to steal music, but allows non-Mac users to BUY it from iTunes. Apple doesn't like it, but it's debatable if even they have been injured in a legal sense.
And yesterday we had "a major Australian newspaper" omitting to mention it was the "Melbourne Age". It seems that foreigners aren't worthy of having names, so it's just a waste of space to use them. But "they" really rubbed it in with this one, mentioning Ramanujan's nationality twice and still avoiding the name -- though perhaps it would have been more insulting if they'd tried to use it, considering the quality of spelling here.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. Can you recommend some of Ray Harryhausen and Steven Spilebrg's books so I can get started -- In the last 40 years of reading SF I somehow managed to miss their no-doubt estimable contributions.
NO HE DOES NOT. A "Hall of Fame" is for people who CREATE, not PUBLICISE. Is this the triumph of marketing over creativity? Otherwise, there are many publishers and editors who did much more to create and nourish the field who deserve recognition than Hollywood names who are guaranteed to get good press.
Right. And what science fiction has Ray Harryhausen ever done? And looking at earlier literary inductees, before they went Hollywood, we have Michael Moorcock, who is far over in the fantasy side. Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance have certainly done some SF, but are both better known for fantasy. Since it's authors, not works, being honoured, Herbert has quite a few that qualify as SF under most criteria; regardless, I'd classify Dune as SF myself. He uses chemically enhanced mental powers rather than magic to explain things like FTL, and there is a very thorough working out of the way Arrakis's climate and ecology works, (how realistic to a real scientist in the field I don't know, but he made the effort rather than just waving his hands).
It tells me it's a sop to literary SF, to cover up their sell out to Hollywood sci-fi's version, where directors of movies based on SF writer's books are honoured. And Ray Harryhousen?? For God's sake, he was a great special effects guy, but what the hell has that to do with SF? And most moves he worked on I can reall were straigh-out fantasy, animated skeletons, etc.P> If they are going to hounour contributors to movie SF they should have started with the Lumiere Brothers.
Anyway, this marks the end of any credibility of this so-called "Hall of Fame" in my eyes, call me a snob if you will.
You don't need expensive technology. You just smother female babies. That's how they do it in rural China and India. The urbanites can have a relatively cheap ultrasound and abort them.
In China women and young girls are often kidnapped and transported to rural regions with a shortage of women (due to the abortion or infanticide of girl babies) and sold to be wives of farmers.
I got my free iPod!
Spammer
It doesn't cost a fortune to have an ultrasound, and these are available all over India and China, followed by abortions if the gender is wrong (i.e. female).
Women, except for a few wives, like Madame Mao, have never and do ot now hold any important roles in the power structure in China. The Communist government was dominted for the first 40 or so years by the guerrila leaders till they finally started to reluctantly retire or die off; all male. Now business elites are getting more powerful, also male dominated, though not quite as much.
The Chinese government was MUCH more aggressive a few decades ago (invading Tibet, supporting North Korea and North Vietnam in their wars) than now.
From those in my Maths course at a university of high repute, sadly while a few of the best and brightest were physically attractive, most, male and female, would quite naturally be instantly visually classified as "geeks", (though none actually did bite off chicken heads to my knowledge).
I've heard the same criticism of 2001. And to both the answer is that one of the major points of both movies was how dehumanising technology can be; and this was illustrated by the way the protagonists acted (in both senses of the word).
You don't have to wait. In India and China the sex imbalance has been growing for over a decade. The peasants used to just smother unwanted girls at birth, now the middle class has ultrasounds and aborts them. That's one reason why there is a market for kidnapping and selling women to be wives of men in rural areas where there aren't enough to go around.
China grapples with legacy of its 'missing girls' "From a relatively normal ratio of 108.5 boys to 100 girls in the early 80s, the male surplus progressively rose to 111 in 1990, 116 in 2000, and is now is close to 120 boys for each 100 girls at the present time"
Ratio of girls to boys in India continues to decline "The sex ratio, calculated as number of girls per 1000 boys in the 0-6 age group, declined from 945 girls per 1000 boys in the 1991 census to 927 during the 2001 census... In 2001, four states--Punjab, Haryana, Himachal, and Gujarat--fell into the category of having fewer than 800 girls per 1000 boys for the first time. In Punjab the decline was in 10 of the 17 districts, whereas in Haryana state almost all districts recorded fewer than 850 girls. In Fatehgarh, in Punjab, the number of girls declined to 754 per 1000 boys."
There's nothng stopping anyone who wants to from downloading and installng MS's player into the "Media Reduced Windows". It's just not ther out of the box. And if you do, you have the advantage of having the latest patched version, not the one that was current X months or years ago when the CD was mastered; if you went online and did an update on the "normal" Windows as recommended you'd have to dowload probably exactly the same size file, but have the possible hassle of fragments of the old install clutterinf g up the disk and registry.
Just to reiterate: You are not prevented from using the MS player, you just have to make the conscious choice to do so.
You got somethng against Micronesians?
Actually, I think using third-world countries' TLDs and pretending they stand for something quite different (eg TV [Tuvalu] "television", etc) is prety neo-colonial. Not to mention the country can arbitrarily increase their fees or revoke your domain.
What ISP doesn't have an SMTP server?
I tried that but had so many false positives I turned it off. I live in Hong Kong and apparently, like many simple-minded bigoted US ISPs (notably AOL), they simply assume all mail from Hong Kong is spam.
I used to do that with Yahoo.com, but you have to pay for POP wiht them now -- I see you're Canadian so I tihnk you can still do it.
I just tried signing up for it by selecting 'send me info only for topics I select below' and not selecting any topic below!
I had to select at least one category to receive spam in, so I did, but I described nyself as very old, unemployed and uneducated and they never did send me any.
Getting POP is the only reason I've been paying them $20/year for the last 3 or 4 years. Nice to know about Yahoo.ca, hope they don't doscriminate against non-canucks by IP number. gmx.net is also a free POP, but the site is only in German -- probably could struggle through it with Babelfish. I was suckered into Yahoo when it was all free, and have kept it through inertia.
They used to, if you signed up for some spam (but I apparently described myself as poor enough not to be a desirable target, so I never got any). But about two years ago they cut that out and you had to pay about $20/year to get POP, along with some other features. But the POP was the decider for me, and if they did that free I'd downgrade my account.
Idiotic. They're making billions now; they'd be making bilions if they fully complied with the EU rules; which are designed to stop MS mponopolising NEW markets, not to make it lose its current ones.
And strategically, having several rich European countries switching to Linux or MacOSX would be the death knell for MS. With that market, any of a dozen Europe-based distros (Mandrake, SuSE, etc) woud ramp up and be a Windows killer within two years. That's why Bill and Steve are on the executive jet and off to hand out massive discounts to any municiplity or other large purchaser threatening to pull the plug on Windows; whether in India, Thailand, China, UK, Munich, just to name a few I've read about recently.
It seems to me it's the reasone they embedded MP and IE into Windows.
And why on Earth would anyone want to embed video clips into MS Word documents? Just because it's possible?
I disagree, I think the biggest problem with Slashdot is the carelessness of the editors. Dupes, spelling, grammar, hoaxes published with no checking. (Whatever happened to "Slashback" to review recent stories (and mistakes) -- used to be regular, did it get to embarrassing?)
Surely the comments are infested with stupidity and trolls, but one thing that does work is moderation, the crap generally disappears quickly (unless you get the gun nuts or creationists started, which can lay waste to the whole discussion).
I hang around for the comments, a lot of interesting and useful stuff comes up there. For instance, now I know about Technocrat, it looks good.
It's EXTREMELY informative, because it tells you what Google's offical position is. Whether you like it or not, you need to know that. "Informative" doesn't mean "good".
If Bill Gates posted here in defence of some MS policy, it would hopefully similarly be modded "informative".
Slashdot does have a search:
e.g. http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=irish finds it.
Amazing that they've created the elaborate moderation system, throttling, "lameness filters", all to reduce the amount of crap comments; but they don't apply any of the same thought to their own articles, not even spellcheck.
Johansen's app doesn't help to steal music, but allows non-Mac users to BUY it from iTunes. Apple doesn't like it, but it's debatable if even they have been injured in a legal sense.
And yesterday we had "a major Australian newspaper" omitting to mention it was the "Melbourne Age". It seems that foreigners aren't worthy of having names, so it's just a waste of space to use them. But "they" really rubbed it in with this one, mentioning Ramanujan's nationality twice and still avoiding the name -- though perhaps it would have been more insulting if they'd tried to use it, considering the quality of spelling here.