He made a brilliant start, then disappeared from sight when he became a Hollywood writer -- he says he was extremely well paid for writing scripts that never actually got produced.
However, he's recently come back to books and did Steel Beach in his "Eight Worlds" series, not as imaginative as his early stuff, but still good.
There's no question that Clarke, in person, has been described by various journalists as having been a SF God for too long
Long before that. Back when he was a callow youth and publishig his forst stories his nickname was "Ego".
But after working in publishing, I can say that an author's degree of obnoxiousness has no relation to his "genius". Big egos are no indication of having or lacking talent.
The question was universes, so I think that implies a series of stories in the same imagined future.
Being Australian, I start with, Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind series. (Particularly his planet Norstrilia, "Old North Australia", like Dune settled by outback Australians instead of Bedouins.) And then A Bertram Chandler's Rimworld series about tramp spaceships on the edge of the galaxy.
More classically, Edgar Rice Burroughs' worlds: Pellucidar [the hollow Earth], Barsoom [Mars], Amtor [Venus] and Tarzan's Africa [and all its lost cities].
One of the largest and most coherent universes must be Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic League/Terran Empire. Read some Dominic Flandry and forget about Star Wars.
Of course Heinlein's "Future History" (apparently he invented the term), and Niven's "Known Space" are up there, but suffiently well known not to need my endorsement.
"Classic" Star Wars????" Give me a break. Pretty on the screen, but you don't call somethinbg that's totally derivative (ERB's Barsoom, Dune, Flash Gordon, etc, etc) classic, no matterhow well executed.
If you have a real case, anyone can get great representation. Lawyers work on contingency. I did it and I sued a Fortune 500 company and won.
Of course if you have a real case against a Fortune 500 company you can get great representation. If you have a great case against a shitty little company that could fold up and disappear if it gets a large judgement against it, it's harer to get anyone to take an interest.
However if you're the founder and owner of the business, then no matter how much you earn you cannot be guilty of stealing from yourself.
Unless the owner/CEO is paying your salary three months' late, and later every month, because he knows the job situationis tight and you have to take it or nothing.
Happened to me, till I finally found a new job and took the fucker to court. But after a year in spite of blatant law breaking, he only had to pay me the money I was owned, no penalty imposed. If I'd helped myself to his money as he did to mine I'd have been in jail in a minute.
My point was simply that disallowing the public to bear arms does not actually reduce gun related crime. The issue is that when you make the possession of weapons illegal, only criminals have weapons. This is great news for criminals, as they are guaranteed that their prey are defenseless.
B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.
Here in Hong Kong it's big news if a crime is commited with a "pistol-like object", so-called because in fact many are actually imitation guns, as real ones are hard to find and possession will land you in jail for a few years. As their "prey" is unarmed and "defenceless" there is rarely any need for the criminals to actually kill people. The police have guns and they catch the criminals, no posses or vigilantes. This seems like a good division of labour to me.
(BTW, if you watch HK movies you'd get the impression that there are gunfights in the street on a daily basis, but not so.)
From the news article:
A subsequent search of Priest's home resulted in the seizure of 74 more firearms, including more AR-15 assault rifles, revolvers and semi-automatic pistols.
Priest, 48, was arrested on a charge of trafficking cannabis, a first-degree felony punishable by up to 30 years in prison, according to Riddick. He also faces charges of manufacture of cannabis and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
For growing psychedelic herbs, 30 years. For possessing (and selling!) 76 guns, enough for a small army, it's only a problem because he's a "convicted felon". Good to know the US Justice system has its eye on the real threats to public safety.
In fact, the majority of web sites that I use somehow have managed to stay in business for years despite NOT having banner ads and pop ups.
If you think about for a moment, what sites have lots of popups already? These sites are the market for "anti-leech". So look to be locked out of porn sites when you visit for freebies. Also if it does catch on, look soon after for a work-around that accepts a popup but doesn't actually display it.
Also, did anyone look at their image protection product that supposedly prevents "stealing" images? Had no problem finding their example image in my cache.
Not that Amnesty wouldn't be doing the right thing defending those who really suffer, but when they began to cradle lifestyle anarchists[1], they lost their credibility in my eyes.
Apparently you didn't RTFA. They're defending (or actually, as their name implies, asking for leniency for) "33 people detained in recent years for downloading or distributing politically subversive information via the Internet, three of whom died in custody. Many of these detainees are associated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement and with pro-democracy activities."
corporations exist for one reason: to make money. For good or for ill, there are no moral obligations placed on them
You've just stated there is no legal obligation. Probably true. Amnesty's modus operandi is basically to ask governments and corporations to consider the morality of what they do. Further, it can make it a business issue for the company if it doesn't care by making it lose sales elsewhere. Companies, like Apple, were pressured by boycotts to stop selling services to the murderous Burmese junta by that means.
I was using a Unix system back in 1978, I seem to recall there was a spell checking utility. Maybe they could look around on Sourceforge and see if this is still maintained. Perhaps a venture capitalist might invest in this, there really seems to be a place in the market for such an innovation.
People are being PAID to be editors and they can't be fucked to check the three or four paragraphs of text they post a day.
woah...the greenhouse effect was first detected on mars?
No, Venus where it's 8-900 degrees at the surface.
But using the greenhouse effect to warm up Mars to a more comfortable temperature is a viable idea (melt the CO2, maybe make CFCs on purpose, etc) if we don't degenerate to a rerun of the 100-years war.
given the current economic trend of the world, the space program makes little sense anyways.
As Carl Sagan pointed out a few years ago, for 10% of the cost OVERRUNS on a single missile program we could have had people on Mars 10 years ago.
And currently, for a similar percentage of what is going to be spent over the next decade so Bush can avenge his dad, you could have solar power satellites beaming energy down to earth, economic solar power, and a dozen other ways to negate the oil dependency that is the root of the Middle East "problem".
If you don't try to hold your breath, exposure to space for half a minute or so is unlikely to produce permanent injury. Holding your breath is likely to damage your lungs, something scuba divers have to watch out for when ascending, and you'll have eardrum trouble if your Eustachian tubes are badly plugged up, but theory predicts -- and animal experiments confirm -- that otherwise, exposure to vacuum causes no immediate injury. You do not explode. Your blood does not boil. You do not freeze. You do not instantly lose consciousness.
Various minor problems (sunburn, possibly "the bends", certainly some [mild, reversible, painless] swelling of skin and underlying tissue) start after ten seconds or so. At some point you lose consciousness from lack of oxygen. Injuries accumulate. After perhaps one or two minutes, you're dying. The limits are not really known.
You do not explode and your blood does not boil because of the containing effect of your skin and circulatory system. You do not instantly freeze because, although the space environment is typically very cold, heat does not transfer away from a body quickly. Loss of consciousness occurs only after the body has depleted the supply of oxygen in the blood. If your skin is exposed to direct sunlight without any protection from its intense ultraviolet radiation, you can get a very bad sunburn.
Anyone recall the Alien movies version of this? In #1 the Alien is ejected into space and seemingly unaffected and wriggling around. In #4 it's sucked out through a tiny hole in a window. The 1st seems quite likely for something with an exoskeleton -- they should be able to stay active for as long as they do underwater, which is quite a long time. The #4 scene seems like bullshit.
RTFA: "[PPC] A bootable operating system installer CD for OSX-capable Apple computers, which installs Darwin-6.0.2 and includes our enhancements. Available soon!
"GNU-Darwin-x86 operating system
A bootable operating system installer CD for Intel-based computers, which installs Darwin-1.4 and includes our enhancements."
an [sic] confidential inhouse one, and an obfuscated one to give to the company.... Pretty smart!
Pretty dumb. When they look at it, which they will immediately of course, they'll see you're trying to screw with them, and start looking for another vendor.
Norton Commander (still one of the best file managers).
I've still got NC for when I have to boot to DOS and/or from a floppy. Its main drawback these days is that it doesn't understand long file names, so if you move files around with it you get a lot of ~1 names. However, there are many very good apps that mimic it to a greater or lesser extent. I like Far which runs under Win32 (but not DOS). On *.ix there's MC (Midnight Commander) which also has a DOS version, though it's a bit clunky there. A full survey of what the author calls Orthodox File Managers is here. Many seem to from Russia, home of hard core functional hackers.
Well the "you"s are Americans, the majority on Slashdot, though I'm not one either, thank God. Unfortunately our (Australia) PM fawns on Bush and is taking us into war on his coattails -- as happened in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Slashdot Mirror
However, he's recently come back to books and did Steel Beach in his "Eight Worlds" series, not as imaginative as his early stuff, but still good.
Long before that. Back when he was a callow youth and publishig his forst stories his nickname was "Ego".
But after working in publishing, I can say that an author's degree of obnoxiousness has no relation to his "genius". Big egos are no indication of having or lacking talent.
Being Australian, I start with, Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind series. (Particularly his planet Norstrilia, "Old North Australia", like Dune settled by outback Australians instead of Bedouins.) And then A Bertram Chandler's Rimworld series about tramp spaceships on the edge of the galaxy.
More classically, Edgar Rice Burroughs' worlds: Pellucidar [the hollow Earth], Barsoom [Mars], Amtor [Venus] and Tarzan's Africa [and all its lost cities].
One of the largest and most coherent universes must be Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic League/Terran Empire. Read some Dominic Flandry and forget about Star Wars.
Of course Heinlein's "Future History" (apparently he invented the term), and Niven's "Known Space" are up there, but suffiently well known not to need my endorsement.
"Classic" Star Wars????" Give me a break. Pretty on the screen, but you don't call somethinbg that's totally derivative (ERB's Barsoom, Dune, Flash Gordon, etc, etc) classic, no matterhow well executed.
Larry Niven's acronymous exclamation: tanj (There Ain't No Justice)
Of course if you have a real case against a Fortune 500 company you can get great representation. If you have a great case against a shitty little company that could fold up and disappear if it gets a large judgement against it, it's harer to get anyone to take an interest.
Unless the owner/CEO is paying your salary three months' late, and later every month, because he knows the job situationis tight and you have to take it or nothing.
Happened to me, till I finally found a new job and took the fucker to court. But after a year in spite of blatant law breaking, he only had to pay me the money I was owned, no penalty imposed. If I'd helped myself to his money as he did to mine I'd have been in jail in a minute.
Please "received" not "recieved".
sneakemail
B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.
Here in Hong Kong it's big news if a crime is commited with a "pistol-like object", so-called because in fact many are actually imitation guns, as real ones are hard to find and possession will land you in jail for a few years. As their "prey" is unarmed and "defenceless" there is rarely any need for the criminals to actually kill people. The police have guns and they catch the criminals, no posses or vigilantes. This seems like a good division of labour to me.
(BTW, if you watch HK movies you'd get the impression that there are gunfights in the street on a daily basis, but not so.)
Priest, 48, was arrested on a charge of trafficking cannabis, a first-degree felony punishable by up to 30 years in prison, according to Riddick. He also faces charges of manufacture of cannabis and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
For growing psychedelic herbs, 30 years. For possessing (and selling!) 76 guns, enough for a small army, it's only a problem because he's a "convicted felon". Good to know the US Justice system has its eye on the real threats to public safety.
If you think about for a moment, what sites have lots of popups already? These sites are the market for "anti-leech". So look to be locked out of porn sites when you visit for freebies. Also if it does catch on, look soon after for a work-around that accepts a popup but doesn't actually display it.
Also, did anyone look at their image protection product that supposedly prevents "stealing" images? Had no problem finding their example image in my cache.
Apparently you didn't RTFA. They're defending (or actually, as their name implies, asking for leniency for) "33 people detained in recent years for downloading or distributing politically subversive information via the Internet, three of whom died in custody. Many of these detainees are associated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement and with pro-democracy activities."
You've just stated there is no legal obligation. Probably true. Amnesty's modus operandi is basically to ask governments and corporations to consider the morality of what they do. Further, it can make it a business issue for the company if it doesn't care by making it lose sales elsewhere. Companies, like Apple, were pressured by boycotts to stop selling services to the murderous Burmese junta by that means.
- seams -> seems
- obsticals ->obstacles
- line of site -> line of sight
I was using a Unix system back in 1978, I seem to recall there was a spell checking utility. Maybe they could look around on Sourceforge and see if this is still maintained. Perhaps a venture capitalist might invest in this, there really seems to be a place in the market for such an innovation.but not
People are being PAID to be editors and they can't be fucked to check the three or four paragraphs of text they post a day.
No, Venus where it's 8-900 degrees at the surface.
But using the greenhouse effect to warm up Mars to a more comfortable temperature is a viable idea (melt the CO2, maybe make CFCs on purpose, etc) if we don't degenerate to a rerun of the 100-years war.
As Carl Sagan pointed out a few years ago, for 10% of the cost OVERRUNS on a single missile program we could have had people on Mars 10 years ago.
And currently, for a similar percentage of what is going to be spent over the next decade so Bush can avenge his dad, you could have solar power satellites beaming energy down to earth, economic solar power, and a dozen other ways to negate the oil dependency that is the root of the Middle East "problem".
Actually I can't take the credit, it was Google.
Ripped off from Dirty Old Man: Part 2 on Free Erotic Stories by emerson fitz.
RTFA:
"[PPC] A bootable operating system installer CD for OSX-capable Apple computers, which installs Darwin-6.0.2 and includes our enhancements. Available soon!
"GNU-Darwin-x86 operating system A bootable operating system installer CD for Intel-based computers, which installs Darwin-1.4 and includes our enhancements."
Pretty dumb. When they look at it, which they will immediately of course, they'll see you're trying to screw with them, and start looking for another vendor.
I've still got NC for when I have to boot to DOS and/or from a floppy. Its main drawback these days is that it doesn't understand long file names, so if you move files around with it you get a lot of ~1 names. However, there are many very good apps that mimic it to a greater or lesser extent. I like Far which runs under Win32 (but not DOS). On *.ix there's MC (Midnight Commander) which also has a DOS version, though it's a bit clunky there. A full survey of what the author calls Orthodox File Managers is here. Many seem to from Russia, home of hard core functional hackers.
Floppy Disk Drive
Well the "you"s are Americans, the majority on Slashdot, though I'm not one either, thank God. Unfortunately our (Australia) PM fawns on Bush and is taking us into war on his coattails -- as happened in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan.