Speaking as a rabid, reactionary, right-wing mega-zealot... Kwazy is right. It's absolutely shameful that Keyes just popped in to have a "Battle of the Darkies" minstrel show. I don't know if it's racist, since I don't know how skin color was supposed to affect this thing one way or the other.
Oh, wait. Now I know... Republicans want to show that they can scrape up a token as well as the democrats can. Okay, so it IS racist... So much for content of your character trumping the color of your skin. Alan Keyes is a major-league non-electable nutball. He's playing this for publicity because the more insanely right-wing religiously-bigoted things he can say, the more his books and radio show appearances sell to his base, his paying audience. So it's a symbiotic relationship, uh, sorta.
The shame of it is the national Republican party could have done a LOT more for REAL racial harmonization of the party by backing Herman Cain here in good old Georgia. I voted for him in the primary because he's the best conservative candidate. He happens to be black. They've set themselves back a fair piece with ol' Alan up there stirring up the yankees.
The first black president will be a conservative Republican...
I did look into this a while back because I (like a lot of other folks) thought I could build a card-counting blackjack bot. So the online prevent this by shuffling after every hand, and use a multideck shoe so that there is never enough info on the table (even with other players there) to give you a good count in the middle of the one hand you get before they reshuffle. Crafty. They have made sure the only games where skill will give you the advantage are games like poker where the house gets paid no matter what.
1) should we have withheld treatment from people who we could be pretty sure would have used it incorrectly and created drug resistant disease pathogens (a question, not a statement) and
2) it's not right to force some people to pay for other peoples' willfull recklessness. I didn't say withhold treatment from the willfully reckless. Anyone who wants to form or contribute to a charity that provides treatment for the willfully reckless should do so.
And, furthermore, you lack any kind of intellectual rigor. You accuse me of being a racist when you don't even know what the definition of the word is: to wit, a racist is someone who holds that one group of people is genetically superior to another. Adolph Hitler was a racist. Many Arab Muslims are racist, because they think that non-Arab Muslims are little better than infidels (see the way non-Arab Muslim guest workers in Saudi Arabia are treated, or the way Arab Muslims are now slaughtering non-Arab Muslims in Sudan.) And many Muslims of all stripes hold that Jews are the children of dogs and monkeys. That's the definition of racist, my fine, morally advanced acquaintenance.
Even if your mushy definition of racism were correct (which it isn't) Thabo Mbeki has staked out an erroneous and culturally inferior position (the denial of the pathogenic origins of AIDS.) People aware of his position choose to democratically re-elect him to the highest public office in South Africa. So how is his view not representative of South African culture as it stands today?
And, worst of all, you are displaying the infantile demands of a typical socialist: you demand that the sweat of my brow and blood in my veins be sacrificed to pay for other people's health care, then refuse to tell me how much sacrifice is enough. You are declaring that de facto slavery of healthy people - not voluntary assistance from caring, enlightened people - is the proper way to handle health care (the only way can it be a "basic human right" is if you plunder some people sufficiently to guarantee some level of health care to others.) And after you've established this, you haven't even got the courage or mental clarity to tell me how much confiscation is sufficient. You don't care about the injustice that would heap on on the virtuous; all you care about is coddling the vicious, and it's wrong. Shame on you.
But you didn't answer the question: if health care is a basic human right, to what lengths can you go to coerce providers to provide it, and third parties to pay for it?
All the middle-class American men I know do what their health-care providers tell them. We're way too scared by all the news footage from drug-ravaged locales (foreign and domestic) to do otherwise
And I'm not a racist; I don't care what a person's DNA looks like compared to mine. I'm a culturist. When the prime minister of South Africa openly questions whether HIV causes AIDS, and uses that as a pretext to recommend witchcraft as a treatment for AIDS and suppress access to retroviral drugs in his country, I consider my culture superior to South Africa's. And I'm correct in that consideration.
Health care is a basic human right? So, who do we take from to provide it? How much of my life do I have to give up to provide retrovirals for truck drivers sub-Saharan Africa who engage in promiscuous aberrant sex practices? To Russian IV drug abusers who are too lazy to clean their needles with bleach between drug fixes? To Americans who have knowingly and willingly engaged in some kind of risky behavior and then come up infected with something?
Since health care is a basic human right, can we force medical practioners to treat people they don't want to treat? To work longer hours than they want to? To travel to dangerous areas when they don't want to? To work for less money than they require?
These aren't rhetorical questions; they need to be answered. How much are you willing to enslave some people to provide a so-called "basic human right" to some other people?
My kids are gonna never believe that "when I was your age, my parents could take me to the doctor and get me a jab with a needle and it would cure any bacterial infection you got."
And when they ask what went wrong do I get to tell them about free clinics giving unsupervised drugs to junkies in the US and Europe, and charity doctors giving unsupervised drugs to people in Africa and Asia who believe more in witch doctors and temple sacrifices than the germ theory of disease?
Is it wrong to think we shoulda withheld medical technology from people incapable of using it properly so it would still work for us?
You can get any time estimate you want for terraforming. this one is delightfully optimistic. The standard redneck way would be to dump a few truckloads of carbon dust on the ice at the poles and let solar heating start things going. Maybe using orbital mirrors to speed it up a bit.
As to shipping billions of people, I think we're talking about different things: I'm talking about shipping a few thousand people to maintain a viable genetic stock to repopulate a devastated planet from. A Mars colony would grow from colonists having babies, not from giant transport ships. Mars wouldn't be a bunker. It would be a pool of reserves.
It's a tough call. We all know a biosphere-killing rock is headed our way sometime soon (at least in geological terms.) We also know that Mars is our best shot at terraforming an emergency fallback position quickly (100-200 years, less than an eyeblink in geologic terms.) We also all know that Wernher von Braun (a guy whose judgement I trust on such things) drew up realistic Mars exploration plans based on early 1950's technology.
So, why haven't we done it yet? The short-circuited race to the moon and the space shuttle? an anti-imperialistic self-loathing? This is a starker choice than guns vs. butter; it's a bon-bons versus houses kind of thing. It looks like we've got a hillbilly mentality: when it's raining, we can't work on the roof and when it's not raining, the roof doesn't leak.
I'm not sure there's been a major microsoft vulnerability that M$ has warned us about before a third party had exposed it somewhere already... We just need to make sure that whistleblowers know how smurfy Slashdot is for communicating vulnerabilites so that they'll be sure to clue us in.
That said, I imagine there's enough slashdot devotees working for Microsoft Premium companies that any lag in a real notification scoop would be negligible. "Will spy for karma!"
This is probably the downside of "Smarter, faster, cheaper." Remember Viking and Voyager? We sent 2 because we figured 1 of them would fail and, Hot Diggety Dog! They both worked. So we got cocky. And now we have this kinda thing happening.
But, you know, for $260,000,000, you oughta get a capsule that can survive a 100 m.p.h. impact. Back in the 1960's we embedded probes inside balsa wood balls for landing on the moon since parachutes won't work there. And at University of Oklahoma, every first year engineering student had to make a shell that would let a raw egg be dropped off the top of our football stadium and survive the impact unbroken.
So, what kind of schools did these Rocket Scientists go to?
The big issue is that this isn't a Microsoft ve Linux-centric discussion. No western migh-value-add company makes money selling in China. Not auto makers, not watch makers, not anyone. There are factories in China right now cranking out counterfeit Mercedes Benzes. Not very good ones, but on a Saturday night in front of the Karoake club, they are fairly impressive. When I lived there, I saw Shanghai Knights playing on monitors set up in the food court of a cinderblick shopping mall before it hit the theaters. Asian cultures are quite happy to fail to see the value in a trademark or a design or other intellectual property, especially when it comes from round eyes. Not saying they're unusually bad, but they're human, and any talk about "self-reliance" is just a fig leaf to cover their piracies. Since you can't steal Linux, it will get a lot of play there but, come on: you can buy Windows XP on a DVD install disk (with genuine fake crappy hologram labels!) for less than 6 dollars in any sidewalk bazaar there. These aren't things I heard or saw on TV; these are things I experienced first hand.
Greens won't let us have it
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is a great idea. The awful truth is that we can build stable, non-bomb-making reactors (pebble bed reactors, for instance) and the loonie left won't even consider it. Give a pebble bed reactor to a city and if the terrorists get it they get... uh... free electricity for a few years. Or a silo full of hot graphite tennis balls that would kill someone... if you hit him with them hard enough.
Exactly. They decided (way back in '89) to go to a press conference instead of a peer-review journal. It might be that they were under too much pressure to produce publishable, marketable results by their bosses at Brigham Young University. And they didn't provide full details of their system so others could duplicate it. Folks had to winkle out an approximation of their design from press photos and airy marketing speak, and then when they couldn't get it to work, Pons and Fleischman went out of their way to ridicule them as too dumb to get it. Remember when there was talk about this being a secret Mormon weapon or conspiracy or somesuch? "Vee Haf Turned Dee Grate Zalt Lake into a Doomsday Device!!! Bwaaa haaa haaa haaa!!"
Absolutely right. The shuttle was built on a lie: that each shuttle could turn around a flight a month for less than the cost of a LEO unmanned disposable rocket. The contractors and NASA both knew the shuttle desiugn we got couldn't do any of that. And it's only got a 98% survivability rate. Which officially puts it in the "Sucks to be us" category of LEO space travel. It's time to get the government out of the shuttle business and, oh, I don't know, outsource it to the winner of the X Prize? I have a LOT more faith in Rutan and company doing a shuttle right than I do the government.
Bill Gates and a small boy were walking through the woods. "It sure is dark and scary in here!" the small boy said. "How do you think I feel?" replied the Bill Gates. "I have to walk back all alone."
That's because JMS made his worst mis-step by trying to keep following a bunch of "I'm a little bit gothy, I'm a little bit crappy-mock-brit-accent-greasy-haired-allegedly-da ngerous-past-kinda-guys" that no one cares about. Or was it the Techno-Mages? "I put the Gay in Gaylen"
B5 gave what I think are the first alien races that weren't a one-dimensional excuse for an episode. The Narn-Centauri stories were amazing, and that's the point I'm trying to get to: there's an awesome B5 series there that doesn't have to involve a single Ranger (ar any human, for that matter.)
And when J'Kar became a philosopher who espoused an atheistic approach that no one could get. I mean, come on! Taking a stab at Victor Frankl in a sci-fi series? There's way too much ass-kicking stuff in B5 for JMS to hit Trek up for another round.
I read my first Heinlein book (Red Planet) when I was 8, and I've read and re-read most if not all of his writing a LOT since then (I'm 34 now and still grab a bit of Heinlein now and then.)
IMHO, everything he wrote before Stranger in a Strange Land is awesome science fiction... And everything there and since is pretty Frakking awful. Except Friday. And now, not only do we have the Friday exception, we have the For Us, The Living exception.
From what I can tell from reading, For Us, The Living as a title is in part an homage to Ayn Rand (We The Living.) Heinlein was so much better when his characters practiced their philosophy instead of preaching it.
If you want to enjoy a great science fiction author, read Heinlein pre-Stranger. Especially The Puppet Masters and Double Star. I've read them both a dozen times and I still tear up like the fanboy I am at the last page of each one.
In fact, I can quote the last line of The Puppet Masters by heart: The free men of Earth are coming to kill you. Death and destruction!
See? Fanboy goosebumps and a tear in the eye. Lazarus Long and Valentine Michael Smith ain't gonna do that for anybody... Frakking hippies.
Wow. Thanks for posting this here!
There was one author (and I wish I could remember who it was) who proposed that the only way to fix George Lucas' total screw-up of the story was to have the real blockbuster in episode 3 as follows: Darth Vader and Yoda are actually conspiring together to hide Luke and Leia from the Emperor... Because they would give the Emperor too much power for a Jedi-free universe to withstand. It's a great idea because it's the only way (I mean the ONLY way) to make the whole Luke's growing up on his Dad's home planet! thing stop sucking.
It certainly is. I thought there might be something wrong with me for thoroughly detesting Honor Harrington. The series has got its fanboys out in force in a lot of places. And David Weber is the kiss of death as a writer when he doesn't have David Drake along to smack him around. So now I have a good quick'n'dirty frame of reference for approaching the style of this book. Which is probably not to my taste.
I love good trashy space opera, but to me that means Lt. Leary Commanding or Hammer's Slammers, not Honor Harrington. The nice thing about this issue is that you can check out both characters/series/universes for free at baen.com in their free library area. To me, sci-fi is a guilty pleasure, and I feel like I'm browsing porno when I'm in the sci-fi section... That is, embarassed that someone I know who doesn't share my bad taste will see me there. Why is that? Because so very much of sci-fi is excrable. For every pre-Stranger Heinlein or Keith Laumer or Iain M Banks book out there there are a hundred Honor Harringtons...
And so how will people judge my taste when they see me with a paperback with a guy/girl in a spacesuit super-imposed over an airbrush painting of a space battle? The same way I'd judge someone coming out of the romance section with a lurid looking "Sweet Savage Something" clutched in her clammy paw.
The gripe I have abour C# versus Java is that C# error handling (Try Catch) is OPTIONAL. So you can ( and my team has) rolled merrily along writing things that if we knew we shoulda trapped for we woulda. I LOVE that Java forces you to admit "Yeah, I'm too lazy/ in a hurry to worry about incorrect input here."
Holy Jesus, Gore's such a gigantic goddamned wanker. Anyone who says (and this is NOT a misquote or made up, check Earth in the Balance): We can't wait for the results of research into global warming. We need to act.
He's a scientific version of Madonna: he changes focus just often enough to embrace the latest fad. If he were president, Iraq would be invading us right now.
Hear hear! If you really love making games, make games. I put one on winsite a couple of years ago (DeckWars, if anyone's interested) for free. Maybe 800 people have played it. It was fun to make and it's fun to play and it looks crappy... Because I'm a software developer, not an artist.
If you have really good ideas and want to make a sexy game, score yourself a copy of DarkBasic or something similar.
If you want to work in established gaming houses, go to one of the game colleges or SCAD or some place like that.
If you want to make an awesome game that requires a lot of collaboration, then welcome to SourceForge and SlashDot. There are a lot of talented people out there who would love to donate their efforts to a world-beating game.
The problem (as usual) is that people out there want to make a pile of money at what they think will be play time, and it's tougher to do than they like. Professional developers will tell you that 70 hour weeks getting the G*ddamned elf to kill the scorpion instead of killing the tile it's standing on are not play time.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as a rabid, reactionary, right-wing mega-zealot... Kwazy is right. It's absolutely shameful that Keyes just popped in to have a "Battle of the Darkies" minstrel show. I don't know if it's racist, since I don't know how skin color was supposed to affect this thing one way or the other.
Oh, wait. Now I know... Republicans want to show that they can scrape up a token as well as the democrats can. Okay, so it IS racist... So much for content of your character trumping the color of your skin. Alan Keyes is a major-league non-electable nutball. He's playing this for publicity because the more insanely right-wing religiously-bigoted things he can say, the more his books and radio show appearances sell to his base, his paying audience. So it's a symbiotic relationship, uh, sorta.
The shame of it is the national Republican party could have done a LOT more for REAL racial harmonization of the party by backing Herman Cain here in good old Georgia. I voted for him in the primary because he's the best conservative candidate. He happens to be black. They've set themselves back a fair piece with ol' Alan up there stirring up the yankees.
The first black president will be a conservative Republican...
I did look into this a while back because I (like a lot of other folks) thought I could build a card-counting blackjack bot. So the online prevent this by shuffling after every hand, and use a multideck shoe so that there is never enough info on the table (even with other players there) to give you a good count in the middle of the one hand you get before they reshuffle. Crafty. They have made sure the only games where skill will give you the advantage are games like poker where the house gets paid no matter what.
And you're not reading what I wrote. I said:
1) should we have withheld treatment from people who we could be pretty sure would have used it incorrectly and created drug resistant disease pathogens (a question, not a statement) and
2) it's not right to force some people to pay for other peoples' willfull recklessness. I didn't say withhold treatment from the willfully reckless. Anyone who wants to form or contribute to a charity that provides treatment for the willfully reckless should do so.
And, furthermore, you lack any kind of intellectual rigor. You accuse me of being a racist when you don't even know what the definition of the word is: to wit, a racist is someone who holds that one group of people is genetically superior to another. Adolph Hitler was a racist. Many Arab Muslims are racist, because they think that non-Arab Muslims are little better than infidels (see the way non-Arab Muslim guest workers in Saudi Arabia are treated, or the way Arab Muslims are now slaughtering non-Arab Muslims in Sudan.) And many Muslims of all stripes hold that Jews are the children of dogs and monkeys. That's the definition of racist, my fine, morally advanced acquaintenance.
Even if your mushy definition of racism were correct (which it isn't) Thabo Mbeki has staked out an erroneous and culturally inferior position (the denial of the pathogenic origins of AIDS.) People aware of his position choose to democratically re-elect him to the highest public office in South Africa. So how is his view not representative of South African culture as it stands today?
And, worst of all, you are displaying the infantile demands of a typical socialist: you demand that the sweat of my brow and blood in my veins be sacrificed to pay for other people's health care, then refuse to tell me how much sacrifice is enough. You are declaring that de facto slavery of healthy people - not voluntary assistance from caring, enlightened people - is the proper way to handle health care (the only way can it be a "basic human right" is if you plunder some people sufficiently to guarantee some level of health care to others.) And after you've established this, you haven't even got the courage or mental clarity to tell me how much confiscation is sufficient. You don't care about the injustice that would heap on on the virtuous; all you care about is coddling the vicious, and it's wrong. Shame on you.
But you didn't answer the question: if health care is a basic human right, to what lengths can you go to coerce providers to provide it, and third parties to pay for it?
Dearest shario:
All the middle-class American men I know do what their health-care providers tell them. We're way too scared by all the news footage from drug-ravaged locales (foreign and domestic) to do otherwise
And I'm not a racist; I don't care what a person's DNA looks like compared to mine. I'm a culturist. When the prime minister of South Africa openly questions whether HIV causes AIDS, and uses that as a pretext to recommend witchcraft as a treatment for AIDS and suppress access to retroviral drugs in his country, I consider my culture superior to South Africa's. And I'm correct in that consideration.
Health care is a basic human right? So, who do we take from to provide it? How much of my life do I have to give up to provide retrovirals for truck drivers sub-Saharan Africa who engage in promiscuous aberrant sex practices? To Russian IV drug abusers who are too lazy to clean their needles with bleach between drug fixes? To Americans who have knowingly and willingly engaged in some kind of risky behavior and then come up infected with something?
Since health care is a basic human right, can we force medical practioners to treat people they don't want to treat? To work longer hours than they want to? To travel to dangerous areas when they don't want to? To work for less money than they require?
These aren't rhetorical questions; they need to be answered. How much are you willing to enslave some people to provide a so-called "basic human right" to some other people?
sincerely,
Clay Sills
I read the article. It seems to me that they would get the same results from comet impacts slowly melting/evaporating in the equatorial regions, too.
I really hope life is there, but nothing short of shipping a bunch of naked apes with petri dishes, nutrients, and microscopes will resolve it.
My kids are gonna never believe that "when I was your age, my parents could take me to the doctor and get me a jab with a needle and it would cure any bacterial infection you got."
And when they ask what went wrong do I get to tell them about free clinics giving unsupervised drugs to junkies in the US and Europe, and charity doctors giving unsupervised drugs to people in Africa and Asia who believe more in witch doctors and temple sacrifices than the germ theory of disease?
Is it wrong to think we shoulda withheld medical technology from people incapable of using it properly so it would still work for us?
I think THIS is the best quote: "Well, OK, that's that genre, and I'll find a really talented person to take it and create it."
If only he'd done that with episodes I,II,III, and VI...
You can get any time estimate you want for terraforming. this one is delightfully optimistic. The standard redneck way would be to dump a few truckloads of carbon dust on the ice at the poles and let solar heating start things going. Maybe using orbital mirrors to speed it up a bit.
As to shipping billions of people, I think we're talking about different things: I'm talking about shipping a few thousand people to maintain a viable genetic stock to repopulate a devastated planet from. A Mars colony would grow from colonists having babies, not from giant transport ships. Mars wouldn't be a bunker. It would be a pool of reserves.
It's a tough call. We all know a biosphere-killing rock is headed our way sometime soon (at least in geological terms.) We also know that Mars is our best shot at terraforming an emergency fallback position quickly (100-200 years, less than an eyeblink in geologic terms.) We also all know that Wernher von Braun (a guy whose judgement I trust on such things) drew up realistic Mars exploration plans based on early 1950's technology.
So, why haven't we done it yet? The short-circuited race to the moon and the space shuttle? an anti-imperialistic self-loathing? This is a starker choice than guns vs. butter; it's a bon-bons versus houses kind of thing. It looks like we've got a hillbilly mentality: when it's raining, we can't work on the roof and when it's not raining, the roof doesn't leak.
I'm not sure there's been a major microsoft vulnerability that M$ has warned us about before a third party had exposed it somewhere already... We just need to make sure that whistleblowers know how smurfy Slashdot is for communicating vulnerabilites so that they'll be sure to clue us in.
That said, I imagine there's enough slashdot devotees working for Microsoft Premium companies that any lag in a real notification scoop would be negligible. "Will spy for karma!"
This is probably the downside of "Smarter, faster, cheaper." Remember Viking and Voyager? We sent 2 because we figured 1 of them would fail and, Hot Diggety Dog! They both worked. So we got cocky. And now we have this kinda thing happening.
But, you know, for $260,000,000, you oughta get a capsule that can survive a 100 m.p.h. impact. Back in the 1960's we embedded probes inside balsa wood balls for landing on the moon since parachutes won't work there. And at University of Oklahoma, every first year engineering student had to make a shell that would let a raw egg be dropped off the top of our football stadium and survive the impact unbroken.
So, what kind of schools did these Rocket Scientists go to?
The big issue is that this isn't a Microsoft ve Linux-centric discussion. No western migh-value-add company makes money selling in China. Not auto makers, not watch makers, not anyone. There are factories in China right now cranking out counterfeit Mercedes Benzes. Not very good ones, but on a Saturday night in front of the Karoake club, they are fairly impressive. When I lived there, I saw Shanghai Knights playing on monitors set up in the food court of a cinderblick shopping mall before it hit the theaters. Asian cultures are quite happy to fail to see the value in a trademark or a design or other intellectual property, especially when it comes from round eyes. Not saying they're unusually bad, but they're human, and any talk about "self-reliance" is just a fig leaf to cover their piracies. Since you can't steal Linux, it will get a lot of play there but, come on: you can buy Windows XP on a DVD install disk (with genuine fake crappy hologram labels!) for less than 6 dollars in any sidewalk bazaar there. These aren't things I heard or saw on TV; these are things I experienced first hand.
This is a great idea. The awful truth is that we can build stable, non-bomb-making reactors (pebble bed reactors, for instance) and the loonie left won't even consider it. Give a pebble bed reactor to a city and if the terrorists get it they get... uh... free electricity for a few years. Or a silo full of hot graphite tennis balls that would kill someone... if you hit him with them hard enough.
Exactly. They decided (way back in '89) to go to a press conference instead of a peer-review journal. It might be that they were under too much pressure to produce publishable, marketable results by their bosses at Brigham Young University. And they didn't provide full details of their system so others could duplicate it. Folks had to winkle out an approximation of their design from press photos and airy marketing speak, and then when they couldn't get it to work, Pons and Fleischman went out of their way to ridicule them as too dumb to get it. Remember when there was talk about this being a secret Mormon weapon or conspiracy or somesuch? "Vee Haf Turned Dee Grate Zalt Lake into a Doomsday Device!!! Bwaaa haaa haaa haaa!!"
Absolutely right. The shuttle was built on a lie: that each shuttle could turn around a flight a month for less than the cost of a LEO unmanned disposable rocket. The contractors and NASA both knew the shuttle desiugn we got couldn't do any of that. And it's only got a 98% survivability rate. Which officially puts it in the "Sucks to be us" category of LEO space travel. It's time to get the government out of the shuttle business and, oh, I don't know, outsource it to the winner of the X Prize? I have a LOT more faith in Rutan and company doing a shuttle right than I do the government.
Bill Gates and a small boy were walking through the woods. "It sure is dark and scary in here!" the small boy said. "How do you think I feel?" replied the Bill Gates. "I have to walk back all alone."
Do you know what this means? The bad guys are going to be... ANIMAL CRACKERS!!!! Bwaaa haa haaa haaa haaa haaa
That's because JMS made his worst mis-step by trying to keep following a bunch of "I'm a little bit gothy, I'm a little bit crappy-mock-brit-accent-greasy-haired-allegedly-da ngerous-past-kinda-guys" that no one cares about. Or was it the Techno-Mages? "I put the Gay in Gaylen"
B5 gave what I think are the first alien races that weren't a one-dimensional excuse for an episode. The Narn-Centauri stories were amazing, and that's the point I'm trying to get to: there's an awesome B5 series there that doesn't have to involve a single Ranger (ar any human, for that matter.)
And when J'Kar became a philosopher who espoused an atheistic approach that no one could get. I mean, come on! Taking a stab at Victor Frankl in a sci-fi series? There's way too much ass-kicking stuff in B5 for JMS to hit Trek up for another round.
IMHO, everything he wrote before Stranger in a Strange Land is awesome science fiction... And everything there and since is pretty Frakking awful. Except Friday. And now, not only do we have the Friday exception, we have the For Us, The Living exception.
From what I can tell from reading, For Us, The Living as a title is in part an homage to Ayn Rand (We The Living.) Heinlein was so much better when his characters practiced their philosophy instead of preaching it.
If you want to enjoy a great science fiction author, read Heinlein pre-Stranger. Especially The Puppet Masters and Double Star. I've read them both a dozen times and I still tear up like the fanboy I am at the last page of each one.
In fact, I can quote the last line of The Puppet Masters by heart: The free men of Earth are coming to kill you. Death and destruction!
See? Fanboy goosebumps and a tear in the eye. Lazarus Long and Valentine Michael Smith ain't gonna do that for anybody... Frakking hippies.
Wow. Thanks for posting this here! There was one author (and I wish I could remember who it was) who proposed that the only way to fix George Lucas' total screw-up of the story was to have the real blockbuster in episode 3 as follows: Darth Vader and Yoda are actually conspiring together to hide Luke and Leia from the Emperor... Because they would give the Emperor too much power for a Jedi-free universe to withstand. It's a great idea because it's the only way (I mean the ONLY way) to make the whole Luke's growing up on his Dad's home planet! thing stop sucking.
It certainly is. I thought there might be something wrong with me for thoroughly detesting Honor Harrington. The series has got its fanboys out in force in a lot of places. And David Weber is the kiss of death as a writer when he doesn't have David Drake along to smack him around. So now I have a good quick'n'dirty frame of reference for approaching the style of this book. Which is probably not to my taste. I love good trashy space opera, but to me that means Lt. Leary Commanding or Hammer's Slammers, not Honor Harrington. The nice thing about this issue is that you can check out both characters/series/universes for free at baen.com in their free library area. To me, sci-fi is a guilty pleasure, and I feel like I'm browsing porno when I'm in the sci-fi section... That is, embarassed that someone I know who doesn't share my bad taste will see me there. Why is that? Because so very much of sci-fi is excrable. For every pre-Stranger Heinlein or Keith Laumer or Iain M Banks book out there there are a hundred Honor Harringtons... And so how will people judge my taste when they see me with a paperback with a guy/girl in a spacesuit super-imposed over an airbrush painting of a space battle? The same way I'd judge someone coming out of the romance section with a lurid looking "Sweet Savage Something" clutched in her clammy paw.
The gripe I have abour C# versus Java is that C# error handling (Try Catch) is OPTIONAL. So you can ( and my team has) rolled merrily along writing things that if we knew we shoulda trapped for we woulda. I LOVE that Java forces you to admit "Yeah, I'm too lazy/ in a hurry to worry about incorrect input here."
Holy Jesus, Gore's such a gigantic goddamned wanker. Anyone who says (and this is NOT a misquote or made up, check Earth in the Balance): We can't wait for the results of research into global warming. We need to act.
He's a scientific version of Madonna: he changes focus just often enough to embrace the latest fad. If he were president, Iraq would be invading us right now.
Hear hear! If you really love making games, make games. I put one on winsite a couple of years ago (DeckWars, if anyone's interested) for free. Maybe 800 people have played it. It was fun to make and it's fun to play and it looks crappy... Because I'm a software developer, not an artist. If you have really good ideas and want to make a sexy game, score yourself a copy of DarkBasic or something similar. If you want to work in established gaming houses, go to one of the game colleges or SCAD or some place like that. If you want to make an awesome game that requires a lot of collaboration, then welcome to SourceForge and SlashDot. There are a lot of talented people out there who would love to donate their efforts to a world-beating game. The problem (as usual) is that people out there want to make a pile of money at what they think will be play time, and it's tougher to do than they like. Professional developers will tell you that 70 hour weeks getting the G*ddamned elf to kill the scorpion instead of killing the tile it's standing on are not play time.