I was going to suggest "A Voyage to Arcturus" but I've been beaten to the draw. I will mention that it is available on project Gutenberg.
Another author you might check out is Charles Williams, whose novels straddle science fiction & Fantasy (though heavily slanted towards the latter). These can be found on Project Gutenberg Australia.
Perhaps there should be a Best Picture category at the Hugos instead.
There already is. The Hugo award for Best Dramatic Presentation has been in operation since 1958. 2001 won the award in 1968, Avatar was nominated in 2010, but lost to Moon (which is arguably a better movie).
I discovered this category a couple of years ago, and have found the list of winners and nominees very instructive. It's alerted me to a lot of good movies which I would otherwise have missed.
To Rise from Earth is an account of the basic physics of space travel. A few years since I've read it, but as I recall it goes over the basic concepts and destinations quite well.
Robert Zubrin has written two books which would be worth a look - The Case for Mars about a practical scheme for mounting expeditions to Mars in the near term, and Entering Space which takes a wider view within our solar system. Finally, John S Lewis' Mining the Sky gives the rationale and practicalities for mining asteroids - how you might do it, and what sorts of materials you would profitably extract from them.
There are any number of other books out there, but these should get you started. Good luck!
This must be why I couldn't use an ATM last Thursday.
I'm with the CBA, and twice in the last few years I've had my card cancelled and reissued. The first time it was because of a data breach like this one - a card skimmer had been used on one of the ATMs in my area and all people who had used ATMs in the vicinity had cards cancelled & reissued. The more recent time it was just me - someone had skimmed my card and used it to make a purchase in London.
Both times the bank was very efficient, and while there was the inconvenience of waiting for a new card and, in the second instance, waiting for the stolen money to be recovered there was otherwise no problem.
We have the technology. It is just impossible to send humans and their living quarters and their supplies and a research station and a return vehicle and return trip supplies on a SINGLE chemical rocket. Once you start using more than one chemical rocket for this list, even at just two, it becomes possible..
The other thing is to exploit the resources at your destination. This is basically the approach advocated by Robert Zubrin in his Mars Direct mission design. The basic scenario is:
Send an (unmanned) return rocket to Mars. It lands with empty fuel tanks.
On board is a small amount of hydrogen, a nuclear power source, and a chemical processing plant. This is used in combination with CO2 from the Martian atmosphere to manufacture methane and oxygen to fuel the rocket for the return trip.
Next launch opportunity (26 months later), send a manned crew vehicle. This lands next to the return vehicle waiting on the Martian surface.
Crew explore Mars, perform research etc, and at the end of their mission hop in the return rocket and head home.
By manufacturing fuel on Mars for the return trip, most of the objections in the original article are dispensed with.
Much more detail is given in the Wikipedia article, and also in Zubrin's book, The Case for Mars (available here). Excellent book.
This is probably blasphemy to a lot of/.ers, but the new seasons, 2005 onwards, are alright. Good a place as any to start.
I'm a Doctor Who fan from way back - I watched the Jon Pertwee (third doctor) episodes when they were first broadcast in the 19070s - but I would more or less agree with the this.
Doctor Who has gone on for a long time, and can be picked up more or less anywhere. So long as you have the basic idea - the Doctor is an alien (a Time Lord) who wanders time and space in his TARDIS, having a series of adventures and accompanied by a changing gaggle of assistants - then you can pick it up more or less anywhere. Because the series changes its main characters on a regular basis most of the stories are pretty much self contained and it is not expected that you follow the whole thing from the beginning. That said, it would be a good idea to start with the debut of a particular Doctor, or a particular assitant, and go in order from there. In the older series you might start with the debut of the third or fourth Doctors, or an assistant like Sarah Jane Smith (who debuted in The Time Warrior in season 11).
I've been meaning to go back and watch the whole Trial of a Timelord season, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Part of the folklore of the series is that everyone's favourite Doctor is whichever one was on air when they were growing up. In my case it's Pertwee (the third doctor), though I also like Tom Baker (the fourth). An older friend of mine prefers Thoughton (the second doctor). That said, some Doctors are better than others and some less good - I would not recommend the Trial of a Timelord series. In the older series I'd recommend either the third or fourth Doctors, but that's my preference.
Do be warned, though - quality does vary somewhat, with some stories more absurd than others, and bear in mind that the older series are somewhat different in character to the newer ones.
Speaking as an older fan, though, I have been (mostly) enjoying the newer series (2005 onwards) and think that's as good a place to start as any.
I'm a bit surprised that there isn't any policy barring this sort of thing. I guess it probably depends what the job is, but if you're just needing access to email and a couple of known sites, whitelisting those sites and blocking everything else isn't that hard.
I remember the last time I had a job with internet, they were pretty clear that the connection belongs to the employer and that any use of it for anything that wasn't specifically sanctioned would lead to discipline.
Oh, there's a policy all right, and a comprehensive system of filtering of content. Without having a copy of the policy in front of me (I'm not browsing Slashdot at work:-), sites such as online email and social media are are prohibited outright and will display a "Blocked" message if you try to access them, others are questionable in some way and will display a "Coached" message, meaning that you can still click through, but be warned that your access is being monitored and you may be called on to justify accessing that site. Other sites, such as online banking & news sites, are specifically allowed in the policy, so long as access is infrequent and brief and does not interfere with regular work.
This occasionally pops up a few unintentional ironies. Last year there was an article in the weekly internal newsletter about the ATO's new Facebook Fan page which included a helpful link. But when you clicked on the link - Blocked! Another time a work related email list I subscribed to posted a link to an XKCD cartoon (this one I think: http://xkcd.com/552/ - I'm a statistician), but clicking on the link brought up the message: Blocked: Category Humour not permitted.
Occasionally it is even useful - is is not uncommon to browse a news site and see the article text just fine, but have many of the ads replaced by Blocked messages.
What is often forgotten is that NASA has already made a start on this. The Apollo 12 mission was targetted to land right next to the Surveyor 3 lander. The astronauts removed bits of the probe and brought them back to Earth for analysis. The picture of this is one of my favourite pictures from the Apollo program.
NASA didn't worry too much about preserving history back then. They were too busy making it.
The sad (and worrying) thing is how these filters fail to work the way they are advertised. An example. I work in an Australian Government office, which has filtering set up on web access and emails. Various sorts of material - illegal, offensive etc. - is proscribed, and automatic filters are in place to prevent it entering the system. The rule of thumb we are told is, if you think your Grandmother would pass it, it passes. If you think she would be offended, don't download/read/send/whatever.
My first brush with this came when I tried to email myself a copy of a text analysis program I had written in a previous job (I had a copy at home). It got stopped, due to "potentially offensive content". After several rounds of emails back & forth, including an approval from my boss, I finally managed to get it released (the means of doing so was by no means easy or transparent). What was the sticking point? Well, the program included some samples of text I had tested it on. What was the oh-so-potentially-offensive text? One of the plays of William Shakespeare...
I confirmed this by sending a copy of the full play (Shakespeare's "All's well that Ends Well") - sorry, it got stopped as "potentially offensive". I leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out just why. (OK, I'll tell if anybody asks).
Since then I have experimented from time to time. The latest "offensive" text I found was the text of the novel "Anne of Green Gables" (yes, the classic story for girls). At least, I think it was classified as offensive, and I think I know why - but all I know for certain is that I sent three different copies of the text, and all three have disappeared without trace, without even a notice of "potentially offensive content". Some things, it seems, are too potentially offensive for government employees even to know about.
... but my son learned to count through a video game. When he was four or so he used to sit on my lap and watch me play an on Mac game called "Scruffy" (or was it Scruffy versus the Martians?), which featured a little dog who jumped about, avoided worms and Martians, and dropped bombs behind him. At the start of every level "Welcome to level nn" was displayed in big letters on the screen, and my son quickly learned to recognise the numerals.
Fortunately for me and my (lack of) game playing skills, he learned to count higher than ten of his own accord.
No. If you have spare cash laying-around and can afford to buy a Gameboy Advance, DS, PSP, and Pandora... go for it! Unfortunately my bank stopped loaning me money, so I just limit myself to whatever is the most popular (GBA and PS2), rather than take a risk on a potential flop. (IMHO)
Personally, I'm tempted by this, not because it's a portable games machine (though that might be handy if I have to amuse the kiddies), but because it is a compact player of high resolution video, and a very long playing music player. The ability to browse the web, read e-books and do my email is further temptation.
In my case, though, I've just had to shell out for root canal work, and my wife is making some very sensible comments about the state of our collective finances...
I think I've come across this in action. I live in Brisbane, Australia, and my daughter is in her second year at high school, where Maths was her best subject. But - she was coming home and complaining of how bored she was in class. Why? Because she had been put into the second level of the subject (I can't remember what they call it) and not the top. She was getting A's, but she complained of severe boredom as the work was too easy for her.
So I called and had chat with her maths teacher, and asked about putting her up to the next level (what they call "accelerated" maths). They were quite co-operative about her changing classes once I made the suggestion and she is now in the "accelerated" maths subject, but I am nevertheless disappointed that the teachers didn't make this suggestion themselves - or put her in the advanced stream in the first place.
The view from Australia is not quite the same, but getting that way. I used to work for one of the big Market Research companies (ACNielsen), and was in charge of developing the lists of numbers used in telephone surveys.
A few years ago I investigated the mobile phone only question, and concluded that it wasn't a problem - yet. As I recall, the numbers (based on a face to face survey) were something like:
97% of households have a lane line.
48% of households had at least one mobile.
Only 1% had a mobile phone only - not enough to skew results. Much. However, the percentage was higher among the younger age groups, and was expected to increase over time.
A far bigger problem was unlisted numbers, either new listings (about 5% of households) or unlisted numbers (about 15%).
Looking at the article, the US has far more issues with calling mobiles than Australia. Here there is no penalty for calling reciever-pays numbers as these are very rare - all (or almost all) calls to mobiles are paid by the caller. This adds to the cost of calling a mobile, and makes some surveyers unwilling to call them (so as to save money when precise results aren't an issue).
The real problem with calling mobiles is getting a list of them. While land line numbers are listed in the phone books by default, mobile phone numbers are silent by default, making it very difficult to gets lists of them.
If the poll is being conducted properly, all telephone numbers will be attempted several times at different times of the day. In the Market Research company I used to work for the usual number of calls was three, with set delays & such between them, to maximise the chances of getting a response.
So the "real world" is really just a second layer in the Matrix. And the true use for humans is more than likely parallel processing on a huge scale.
Another possibility is that Neo is learning to interface with the matrix while still ouside it. How? Perhaps there is more to the connection than simply the plugs. If there was some sort of mechanism that the plugs interfaced with, perhaps Neo is able to exploit this, without the plug in place.
Another thing that I've been wondering about is why Smith tried to contaminate Neo with his blood - remember how in Reloaded the man "possessed" by Smith was cutting his hand when he was about to shake Neo's hand - only to be stopped at the last minute. My guess is that in Revolutions he will get his chance.
What will this achieve? Taking a wild guess, I'm wondering if all the humans have some sort of nano-machines/mini computers in their blood, or something like the critters in Greg Bear's Blood Music, and that it is these that interface with the plugs and make the matrix conections possible. In that case, Smith is trying to get the nano computers in his blood into Neo, so as to take him over from the inside.
In that case, it may well be that the "showdown in the rain" we've seen in the trailers is taking place inside Neo's head.
Slashdot Mirror
Another author you might check out is Charles Williams, whose novels straddle science fiction & Fantasy (though heavily slanted towards the latter). These can be found on Project Gutenberg Australia.
Perhaps there should be a Best Picture category at the Hugos instead.
There already is. The Hugo award for Best Dramatic Presentation has been in operation since 1958. 2001 won the award in 1968, Avatar was nominated in 2010, but lost to Moon (which is arguably a better movie).
I discovered this category a couple of years ago, and have found the list of winners and nominees very instructive. It's alerted me to a lot of good movies which I would otherwise have missed.
Or perhaps why Mrs Little was so keen to adopt him.
The toxic chemicals released from burning all that hardware gave them all cancer.
HA HA.
... which leads straight into the XKCD cartoon about just his phenomenon.
To Rise from Earth is an account of the basic physics of space travel. A few years since I've read it, but as I recall it goes over the basic concepts and destinations quite well.
Robert Zubrin has written two books which would be worth a look - The Case for Mars about a practical scheme for mounting expeditions to Mars in the near term, and Entering Space which takes a wider view within our solar system. Finally, John S Lewis' Mining the Sky gives the rationale and practicalities for mining asteroids - how you might do it, and what sorts of materials you would profitably extract from them.
There are any number of other books out there, but these should get you started. Good luck!
I'm with the CBA, and twice in the last few years I've had my card cancelled and reissued. The first time it was because of a data breach like this one - a card skimmer had been used on one of the ATMs in my area and all people who had used ATMs in the vicinity had cards cancelled & reissued. The more recent time it was just me - someone had skimmed my card and used it to make a purchase in London.
Both times the bank was very efficient, and while there was the inconvenience of waiting for a new card and, in the second instance, waiting for the stolen money to be recovered there was otherwise no problem.
http://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/inbiz-watch-this-space-21/id73330642?i=93335899
Thanks for the heads up.
We have the technology. It is just impossible to send humans and their living quarters and their supplies and a research station and a return vehicle and return trip supplies on a SINGLE chemical rocket. Once you start using more than one chemical rocket for this list, even at just two, it becomes possible. .
The other thing is to exploit the resources at your destination. This is basically the approach advocated by Robert Zubrin in his Mars Direct mission design. The basic scenario is:
By manufacturing fuel on Mars for the return trip, most of the objections in the original article are dispensed with.
Much more detail is given in the Wikipedia article, and also in Zubrin's book, The Case for Mars (available here). Excellent book.
This is probably blasphemy to a lot of /.ers, but the new seasons, 2005 onwards, are alright. Good a place as any to start.
I'm a Doctor Who fan from way back - I watched the Jon Pertwee (third doctor) episodes when they were first broadcast in the 19070s - but I would more or less agree with the this.
Doctor Who has gone on for a long time, and can be picked up more or less anywhere. So long as you have the basic idea - the Doctor is an alien (a Time Lord) who wanders time and space in his TARDIS, having a series of adventures and accompanied by a changing gaggle of assistants - then you can pick it up more or less anywhere. Because the series changes its main characters on a regular basis most of the stories are pretty much self contained and it is not expected that you follow the whole thing from the beginning. That said, it would be a good idea to start with the debut of a particular Doctor, or a particular assitant, and go in order from there. In the older series you might start with the debut of the third or fourth Doctors, or an assistant like Sarah Jane Smith (who debuted in The Time Warrior in season 11).
I've been meaning to go back and watch the whole Trial of a Timelord season, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Part of the folklore of the series is that everyone's favourite Doctor is whichever one was on air when they were growing up. In my case it's Pertwee (the third doctor), though I also like Tom Baker (the fourth). An older friend of mine prefers Thoughton (the second doctor). That said, some Doctors are better than others and some less good - I would not recommend the Trial of a Timelord series. In the older series I'd recommend either the third or fourth Doctors, but that's my preference.
Do be warned, though - quality does vary somewhat, with some stories more absurd than others, and bear in mind that the older series are somewhat different in character to the newer ones.
Speaking as an older fan, though, I have been (mostly) enjoying the newer series (2005 onwards) and think that's as good a place to start as any.
I actually disagree -- at $1 a pop, I can accept what is essentially a one-time-use license.
I second that. At present my local library charges 80c to reserve a book. This is not much more than that, and you get to read the book again later.
I'm a bit surprised that there isn't any policy barring this sort of thing. I guess it probably depends what the job is, but if you're just needing access to email and a couple of known sites, whitelisting those sites and blocking everything else isn't that hard. I remember the last time I had a job with internet, they were pretty clear that the connection belongs to the employer and that any use of it for anything that wasn't specifically sanctioned would lead to discipline.
Oh, there's a policy all right, and a comprehensive system of filtering of content. Without having a copy of the policy in front of me (I'm not browsing Slashdot at work :-), sites such as online email and social media are are prohibited outright and will display a "Blocked" message if you try to access them, others are questionable in some way and will display a "Coached" message, meaning that you can still click through, but be warned that your access is being monitored and you may be called on to justify accessing that site. Other sites, such as online banking & news sites, are specifically allowed in the policy, so long as access is infrequent and brief and does not interfere with regular work.
This occasionally pops up a few unintentional ironies. Last year there was an article in the weekly internal newsletter about the ATO's new Facebook Fan page which included a helpful link. But when you clicked on the link - Blocked! Another time a work related email list I subscribed to posted a link to an XKCD cartoon (this one I think: http://xkcd.com/552/ - I'm a statistician), but clicking on the link brought up the message: Blocked: Category Humour not permitted.
Occasionally it is even useful - is is not uncommon to browse a news site and see the article text just fine, but have many of the ads replaced by Blocked messages.
Check out "Malcolm":
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091464/
Doesn't it?
What is often forgotten is that NASA has already made a start on this. The Apollo 12 mission was targetted to land right next to the Surveyor 3 lander. The astronauts removed bits of the probe and brought them back to Earth for analysis. The picture of this is one of my favourite pictures from the Apollo program. NASA didn't worry too much about preserving history back then. They were too busy making it.
My first brush with this came when I tried to email myself a copy of a text analysis program I had written in a previous job (I had a copy at home). It got stopped, due to "potentially offensive content". After several rounds of emails back & forth, including an approval from my boss, I finally managed to get it released (the means of doing so was by no means easy or transparent). What was the sticking point? Well, the program included some samples of text I had tested it on. What was the oh-so-potentially-offensive text? One of the plays of William Shakespeare...
I confirmed this by sending a copy of the full play (Shakespeare's "All's well that Ends Well") - sorry, it got stopped as "potentially offensive". I leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out just why. (OK, I'll tell if anybody asks).
Since then I have experimented from time to time. The latest "offensive" text I found was the text of the novel "Anne of Green Gables" (yes, the classic story for girls). At least, I think it was classified as offensive, and I think I know why - but all I know for certain is that I sent three different copies of the text, and all three have disappeared without trace, without even a notice of "potentially offensive content". Some things, it seems, are too potentially offensive for government employees even to know about.
I don't think my Grandmother would approve.
Fortunately for me and my (lack of) game playing skills, he learned to count higher than ten of his own accord.
No. If you have spare cash laying-around and can afford to buy a Gameboy Advance, DS, PSP, and Pandora... go for it! Unfortunately my bank stopped loaning me money, so I just limit myself to whatever is the most popular (GBA and PS2), rather than take a risk on a potential flop. (IMHO)
Personally, I'm tempted by this, not because it's a portable games machine (though that might be handy if I have to amuse the kiddies), but because it is a compact player of high resolution video, and a very long playing music player. The ability to browse the web, read e-books and do my email is further temptation.
In my case, though, I've just had to shell out for root canal work, and my wife is making some very sensible comments about the state of our collective finances...
The problem with email and chat rooms is that those writing have ten fingers, but only one brain.
So I called and had chat with her maths teacher, and asked about putting her up to the next level (what they call "accelerated" maths). They were quite co-operative about her changing classes once I made the suggestion and she is now in the "accelerated" maths subject, but I am nevertheless disappointed that the teachers didn't make this suggestion themselves - or put her in the advanced stream in the first place.
The problem when it comes to email is that people have ten fingers, but only one brain ...
This reminds me of the old joke:
Q: What is the difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman?
A: 1) A user car salesman can probably drive.
2) A user car salesman knows when he is lying.
It may provide tantalising evidence that powered flight evolved twice.
As I recall, powered flight has evolved independantly a number of times.
Insects
Birds
Pterosaurs
Bats
and if I not mistaken, fruit bats evolved flight separately to insect-eating "true" bats. That's at least four if not five times.
A few years ago I investigated the mobile phone only question, and concluded that it wasn't a problem - yet. As I recall, the numbers (based on a face to face survey) were something like:
97% of households have a lane line.
48% of households had at least one mobile.
Only 1% had a mobile phone only - not enough to skew results. Much. However, the percentage was higher among the younger age groups, and was expected to increase over time.
A far bigger problem was unlisted numbers, either new listings (about 5% of households) or unlisted numbers (about 15%).
Looking at the article, the US has far more issues with calling mobiles than Australia. Here there is no penalty for calling reciever-pays numbers as these are very rare - all (or almost all) calls to mobiles are paid by the caller. This adds to the cost of calling a mobile, and makes some surveyers unwilling to call them (so as to save money when precise results aren't an issue).
The real problem with calling mobiles is getting a list of them. While land line numbers are listed in the phone books by default, mobile phone numbers are silent by default, making it very difficult to gets lists of them.
Another possibility is that Neo is learning to interface with the matrix while still ouside it. How? Perhaps there is more to the connection than simply the plugs. If there was some sort of mechanism that the plugs interfaced with, perhaps Neo is able to exploit this, without the plug in place.
Another thing that I've been wondering about is why Smith tried to contaminate Neo with his blood - remember how in Reloaded the man "possessed" by Smith was cutting his hand when he was about to shake Neo's hand - only to be stopped at the last minute. My guess is that in Revolutions he will get his chance.
What will this achieve? Taking a wild guess, I'm wondering if all the humans have some sort of nano-machines/mini computers in their blood, or something like the critters in Greg Bear's Blood Music, and that it is these that interface with the plugs and make the matrix conections possible. In that case, Smith is trying to get the nano computers in his blood into Neo, so as to take him over from the inside.
In that case, it may well be that the "showdown in the rain" we've seen in the trailers is taking place inside Neo's head.