From Topless Robot: "Okay, I'm getting a little pedantic here, but the fact remains that by making the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles aliens, Bay is needlessly changing one of the core components of the series -- one of their three fundamental adjectives, one might say -- for no discernible reason or benefit whatsoever. You know, I used to think that Bay was just an immensely successful idiot, but honestly, now I think he's our nerd satan. Here we are, enjoying Game of Thrones and the Avengers movie and unparalleled nerd art and prestige, and Bay is the Anti-Nerd, the serpent in our paradise, the one who will stop at nothing until all nerd goodness is ruined with aliens and pissing and balls and humping dogs and steaming piles of shit. Seriously, Michael Bay is the Nerd Devil"
Well first of all, it's not like the basic idea was original to Battle Royale either. Before that the same or similar concepts were explored by "The Most Dangerous Game," "Running Man," "Lord of the Flies," and i'm sure numerous other works that i'm not as familiar with. There is room for multiple stories about Deadly Games just like there is room for multiple stories about any other trope. (Or do you think Star Wars shouldn't have been made because it was just reiterating ideas that originated in things like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and the Lensmen?)
I've never read Battle Royale, and i've only seen parts of the movie, but from what i understand it was all about the arena. It starts with the kids going on a trip, getting gassed, and waking up in the games. From there on out it's all about them trying to kill each other. It theoretically takes place in an alternate timeline, but there's not really much detail given about that alternate timeline. Either you've got to watch a lot of kids trying to kill each other or there's not much point to it.
There are numerous differences in the Hunger Games. First, we spend a lot of time in the outside world before the games start, allowing us to see what the world is like and giving the reader time to bond with the protagonists. First we're introduced to a post-apocalyptic world where most of humanity has been wiped out and the survivors are struggling to get by. Except more observant readers will notice that there isn't any obvious reason why everyone should be struggling. Whatever wiped out so much of the human race before doesn't seem to be a problem now, and the environment seems to be in perfectly good shape. It's only the oppression of the capital that's preventing a perfectly reasonable economy from being established in which everyone has enough to eat. Then after the "winners" who will participate in the games are chosen the view moves to the capital, where the reader is allowed to see the comfort and excess the people running the system live in. It also shows how while the districts as a whole have a complicated love/gate relationship with the games (because the districts that win the games get free food) the capital just views it as entertainment and a chance to gamble on the outcome.
So even before the combat starts you're more interested in the world and the characters than you were with Battle Royale. Then once the games start there are again several differences. First the games are being televised to everyone in the capital and the districts. (The capital watches for the fun of it, for teh districts it's compulsory.) And people watching the game are allowed to donate money towards their favorite for the use of providing them with gifts, and a heavily escalating cost depending on the usefulness of the gift. So all the competitors know that they should be putting on a good show if they want to be rewarded. Conversely if things get too boring, instead of a silly "we'll just kill all of you if no one dies within 24 hours" the people running the game will start manipulating the environment, either to put the competitors into dangerous situations or to maneuver them into conflict with each other. So even though after the games start there's no direct communication with the outside world there is information traveling both ways, and it makes the games seem much "larger." Also even when the managers aren't influencing the environment of the games directly, each arena was specifically designed just for that competition with various traps and pitfalls, so it's more interesting than just being dumped in a jungle somewhere.
So after hearing about Battle Royale and seeing bits of the movie i thought "i'm not that interested in just reading about/watching a bunch of kids try to kill each other." After hearing about the Hunger Games i was interested enough to try it, and after reading the first book i wanted to find out more about the world they lived in.
Woosh is... er, well i'm sure it's got to be discriminatory against someone! Maybe short people? Maybe you're saying you're implying that the joke went over his head because he's short!
You don't even have to actively choose the friend after you've written the message, you can just type "+[friend's name]" in the message itself and it will automatically tag them (or whatever the appropriate verb is.)
Well this isn't the first time i've heard a Google employee (ex or otherwise) complain about Google+ distorting Google's priorities. Given the size of the company and the fact that, as you say, the 20% thing is rather vaguely defined, i expect that the perspective of the average Googler on what is allowed/encouraged in that regard varies a lot depending on what area of the company they're in and who they report to. And certainly Whittaker was reporting to a very different set of managers than the "common joe" googler.
Person #1 said: "Is it going to take decades for people to figure out that eating two #1 meals at McD's twice a day is probably not conducive to a long healthy life?"
You responded: "A McDonalds Quarter Pounder is not bad for you. The Pasta you made at home is."
That was your first logical flaw. They said "two #1 meals at McD's twice a day" and you simplified it to a single Quarter Pounder. Even disregarding their hyperbole about two meals twice a day, you're completely ignoring the entire rest of the meal to focus on the Quarter Pounder.
Person #2 (not the same as person #1) responded with several different arguments about why pasta isn't bad for you and McDonald's meals possibly are. Including the bit "A McD's quarter pounder value meal (with fries and soda), consumed on a regular basis, along with other high-calorie, low satisfaction food choices, and the sedentary lifestyle of the average American, IS unhealthy for you, and far more so than the same-sized plate of pasta made at home you could eat instead of the McD value meal." Which emphasizes the fact that the original discussion was about a full McDonalds meal and not just the cheeseburger.
You responded in a rather insulting manner and said "Saying that eating carbs (french fries and soda) is less healthy than eating carbs derails any point you are tying to make."
So the first time the person said "A McDonalds meal is unhealthy" and you changed the goalposts by saying that a McDonalds cheeseburger is more healthy than pasta. Someone else tried to correct you by saying a full McDonalds meal is less healthy than pasta, and you changed the goalposts in the other direction by focusing on the sides rather than the cheeseburger.
Then i responded to you, and note that i am neither Person #1 nor Person #2, although you seem to be assuming that i am, and pointed out that the nutritional contents of french fries and soda are very different from the nutritional content of pasta. I explicitly pointed out that french fries contain a lot of fat, while leaving it implied that non-diet soda contains a lot of simple sugars, unlike the complex carbohydrates of pasta.
Your response was: "The carbs in french fries are the same as the carbs in home made pasta. The fat in french fries are something different."
First of all, that's about the intellectual equivalent of saying "Salads are on my diet but hamburgers aren't, so i'll just put a hamburger on top of my salad and then it will be on my diet." You can't argue that fries and pasta are the same because the carbs are the same and just ignore everything else about them that's different. If we're going to argue that way than a Quarter Pounder is just as unhealthy as you claim pasta is, because the carbs in the hamburger bun are the same as the carbs in pasta. The protein and fat in the hamburger and cheese are something different.
And note that Person #2 never said that the carbs in french fries are different from the carbs in pasta. They said that french fries and soda _with_ a cheeseburger are less healthy than pastas. You're the one who changed the goalposts once by dropping the cheeseburger part in response to Person #1 and then changed them a second time when responding to Person #2 by trying to make the argument about only the fries and soda and then constructed a strawman argument by saying it was just about the carbs in the french fries vs the carbs in pasta (conveniently ignoring the entirely different kind of carbs in soda) without addressing any of the other nutritional factors.
Finally you claim that since you've "proven" that one part of the argument is intellectually dishonest, via changing the goalposts and a strawman argument, that you then don't need to address the rest of the points. I'm pretty sure that's some kind of logical fallacy itself. Not to mention the fact that when you accuse someone like Person #2 of being intellectually dishonest through a faulty argument but say nothing
Well i certainly agree that in terms of actually _producing_ new technology Microsoft is pretty far behind the curve. However it does seem like Whittaker feels that currently Google is actually suppressing innovation in areas that it doesn't believe will help it in the social/Google+ arena. It is possible that he feels he'd rather work at a company that does interesting research that never sees the light of day than at a company that he feels has become to focused on "directed" research intended to produce or bolster revenue generation.
It definitely does seem like Google is in a lose-lose situation, with people like the ones in the article yesterday complaining they're blowing too much money on stuff like automated cars and people like Whittaker complaining they're killing too much blue sky research.
Uh, i'm sorry, the rants about Google innovating too much are down the hall? Whittaker is complaining that Google _used_ to be innovative, but now they're not. He's claiming that they used to let the engineers spend 20% of their time on whatever they thought was cool, but now there's an ultimatum (it's not clear if it's official or not) that everything has to be subservient to the goal of pushing "social" and "sharing" in general and Google+ in particular or it gets thrown under the bus. He's not complaining that they're innovating too much, he's complaining that things like Google Labs and other experimental projects have been killed.
I know that not RTFA is considered the norm, but how did you manage to interpret even the blurb as the exact opposite of what it said? Or did you just assume that if two different parties complained about google within 24 hours then they must be complaining about the same thing?
I could keep going, but the big annoyance I see with Slashdot's moderation is the sheer repetition of comments. Somebody occasionally makes a good comment, it gets modded up, then we see that comment repeated over and over and over again, modded up over here and over there. I don't consider that a 'great source of insightful comments', I see a game everybody plays to earn points. There is way too much posing going on.
And that still makes it better than just about every other comment system out there, since even the posing has to adhere to some level of quality in order to get promoted.
And, yes, I'm one of the jerks that does this. How else would I post at +2?
I dunno, you could do like i do. Try to post things that you personally believe or think are funny. Try not to insult other people (at least unless they insult you first =) Try not to repeat things that have already been said in the conversation unless you have something new to add. And then just sit back and watch the mod points slowly accumulate.
There's even a small chance that some of the people you're accusing of being repetitive are just reiterating their own personally held beliefs each time the subject comes up and not just mindlessly parroting what was popular before.
Really, you think if something is (barely) more than 24 hours old it's not worth posting? If slashdot hadn't posted this article i never even would have heard of the guy, so it definitely counts as news for me.
Damn, you had me excited for a minute, but then i actually went and looked. Of the mid-scale publishers on that list that i know of, Ace has 1 book, Bantam Spectra has 1 book, Del Rey has 3 books, and Tor has 18 books listed... but only six of those are currently buyable.
I mean it's great that they're adding other publishers, but it doesn't really seem like they're making a lot of inroads with mid-line publishers, much less the big ones named in the antitrust action.
They seem to be trying to pick up a lot of older authors as well and republish their stuff. I know they've recently been adding some Heinlein and Keith Laumer books and i'm sure there are others who i haven't been actively following. Between new authors and old authors it looks like they're currently adding about 20 books a month, judging by the New Arrivals section. That's certainly more than _i_ can read in a month, but perhaps others read faster than i do or have more free time for books.
This is why at least three quarters of my ebook purchases are from Baen. They price their regular books fairly reasonably, "hardback" books are about $10 than list price, and when they come out in paperback they're about $2-3 off the list price. And for a lot of books if you're willing to pay a small premium they'll let you get the ARC version ("Advance Reader Copy") before the publication date. They also do monthly bundles of books, five or more books packaged together for the price of two or three books, well worth it if you know you really want at least two of the books in the bundle. Plus they have a free library that will let you try out a large number of books for free (in the hopes that you'll buy more books from that author later of course) and their books are DRM free, because they understand that piracy isn't a real problem.
Hopefully if Baen continues to do well eventually the big publishers will learn from their example.
I finally got off my ass and registered for the World Science Fiction Convention last year and read the nominees for best novel so i could vote for the Hugo awards. In doing so i read two novels that i might never have picked up otherwise, and was tipped me off to a third one that was actually by one of my favorite authors under a pseudonym. (I presume i eventually would have stumbled across that one one way or another.)
The realization that i hadn't heard of three of those books before and might never have read them caused me to go back and review the complete list of Hugo awards and Nebula awards for best novel.
There are a lot of old favorites on there, but there are also a lot of other books that i know of but never gotten around to reading and a lot more that i've never even heard of, especially for the earlier years. Unless you're a lot more knowledgeable than me you've probably never heard of a lot of them either. All the books in those lists were considered one of the best books that year either by the fans or the writers, and a lot of them probably still hold up well today. I've now got a plan, or at least a desire, to try and start working through those older books a few at a time. (Though how i'm going to manage that when i can't even keep up with all the _new_ books coming out i don't know.)
"a task so challenging archaeologists say it probably happened only once, in one place."
Am i missing something, or don't we know that it happened at least twice since native americans made small toys with wheels on them? Although i'd be willing to believe that it happened just once in the americas and just once in europe/africa/asia.
If you think that carbs (McDonalds french fries and soda) are the same as carbs (home cooked pasta) then you clearly have very little knowledge about nutrition. McDonalds french fries have almost as much fat as they do carbs. The fact that you could only find one bit of his argument to nicpick, and then didn't even get that right, isn't really helping your case.
It's called McCarthyism for a reason. When you're the most famous and prominent person pushing a particular agenda then there's a serious possibility that the whole movement is going to become identified with you and vice versa. It doesn't really matter now which groups of people were on McCarthy's particular list, he popularized the whole "i've got a list of the bad people" thing.
(Well okay, maybe he needs to split that particular honor with Santa Claus.)
I'm not saying it's good and i'm not saying it's bad, but "what you can get away with depends on how good of friends you are with the people who won the last big war" isn't called double standards, it's called how diplomacy has operated for pretty much all of human history.
What would the point be? The people in question are already suffering from an insidious slow-acting poison called "not having any food." Do you think the people in North Korea who are actually causing the problems are suffering from any food shortages?
Arguably the most evil thing we could do would be to give them a _lot_ of good and healthy food for a couple years, and then unexpectedly stop. Kind of the inverse of the "give a man a fish/teach a man to fish" thing.
I believe there have already been very limited tests of telomerase in humans, but one of the big fears is indeed that it will increase the odds of cancer. It'll be interesting to see what happens when (if?) we have cures for most kinds of cancer.
I agree with both of you, and i'll expand it yet a little more.
Barring those who are actually suffering from a mental illness i believe that everyone is a rational actor, although most of us suffer from a limited amount of information with which to make our rational choices.
Thus if you ignore the concepts of "morals" or "honor", everyone will base their decisions on a risk vs. reward evaluation. For the rich there aren't a lot of risks, especially for minor offenses like speeding. As everyone else has pointed out for the very rich a speeding ticket is less than an hour's salary, while for the poor it could put them behind for an entire month, or possibly longer.
On the other hand given the chance to commit a major felony for a "moderate" benefit, say $10,000, the rich won't be tempted at all. It's just pocket change for them after all. For the middle class it's a pretty fair amount of money, but getting caught would mean huge legal bills, and probably losing their job, which makes them significantly more than $10,000 a year. For the very poor however, the chance to score $10,000 is a huge benefit, especially if they don't fully understand the odds of getting caught or the consequences if they do.
So there are a lot of people who will cheat at the kind of relatively trivial morality tests this experiment was testing for if they're convinced they're wealthy or powerful, and thus feel they can get away with it. They aren't any less moral than they were before, they were just given the opportunity to express their true morals.
It would be interesting to see what happened if you took a bunch of rich people, stuck them in a freezing hovel without food for a month, forcing them to live off whatever they could scavenge, and then told them you'd give them a warm home and a fridge stuffed with food if they stabbed a stranger under conditions where they felt like they could get away with it. If you could actually run such an experiment i think they might find the opposite results from this one.
(And i too would like to think my character is deeper than that and that i would remain moral if i acquired a lot of money, but can't be sure if that's true or not. Anyone want to give me about ten million dollars so we can find out? =)
I agree, the proposal to do it one limb at a time, presumably from four different donors due to the amount of time between operations, isn't very feasible.
However it seems like starting with two arms would be the way to go. First because they draw less blood than the legs, so there would be less for the vascular system to adapt to. Second because if i was a quadriplegic and had the choice of getting just my arms back or just my legs back, i'd definitely opt for the arms. If you've just got arms you can always use a wheelchair to get yourself around. If you've just got legs... well i guess you could do a few "manual" tasks using your toes, but it doesn't seem like the optimum way to do things.
Slashdot Mirror
From Topless Robot: "Okay, I'm getting a little pedantic here, but the fact remains that by making the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles aliens, Bay is needlessly changing one of the core components of the series -- one of their three fundamental adjectives, one might say -- for no discernible reason or benefit whatsoever. You know, I used to think that Bay was just an immensely successful idiot, but honestly, now I think he's our nerd satan. Here we are, enjoying Game of Thrones and the Avengers movie and unparalleled nerd art and prestige, and Bay is the Anti-Nerd, the serpent in our paradise, the one who will stop at nothing until all nerd goodness is ruined with aliens and pissing and balls and humping dogs and steaming piles of shit. Seriously, Michael Bay is the Nerd Devil"
Awwww, you guys are making me sad :(
Well first of all, it's not like the basic idea was original to Battle Royale either. Before that the same or similar concepts were explored by "The Most Dangerous Game," "Running Man," "Lord of the Flies," and i'm sure numerous other works that i'm not as familiar with. There is room for multiple stories about Deadly Games just like there is room for multiple stories about any other trope. (Or do you think Star Wars shouldn't have been made because it was just reiterating ideas that originated in things like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and the Lensmen?)
I've never read Battle Royale, and i've only seen parts of the movie, but from what i understand it was all about the arena. It starts with the kids going on a trip, getting gassed, and waking up in the games. From there on out it's all about them trying to kill each other. It theoretically takes place in an alternate timeline, but there's not really much detail given about that alternate timeline. Either you've got to watch a lot of kids trying to kill each other or there's not much point to it.
There are numerous differences in the Hunger Games. First, we spend a lot of time in the outside world before the games start, allowing us to see what the world is like and giving the reader time to bond with the protagonists. First we're introduced to a post-apocalyptic world where most of humanity has been wiped out and the survivors are struggling to get by. Except more observant readers will notice that there isn't any obvious reason why everyone should be struggling. Whatever wiped out so much of the human race before doesn't seem to be a problem now, and the environment seems to be in perfectly good shape. It's only the oppression of the capital that's preventing a perfectly reasonable economy from being established in which everyone has enough to eat. Then after the "winners" who will participate in the games are chosen the view moves to the capital, where the reader is allowed to see the comfort and excess the people running the system live in. It also shows how while the districts as a whole have a complicated love/gate relationship with the games (because the districts that win the games get free food) the capital just views it as entertainment and a chance to gamble on the outcome.
So even before the combat starts you're more interested in the world and the characters than you were with Battle Royale. Then once the games start there are again several differences. First the games are being televised to everyone in the capital and the districts. (The capital watches for the fun of it, for teh districts it's compulsory.) And people watching the game are allowed to donate money towards their favorite for the use of providing them with gifts, and a heavily escalating cost depending on the usefulness of the gift. So all the competitors know that they should be putting on a good show if they want to be rewarded. Conversely if things get too boring, instead of a silly "we'll just kill all of you if no one dies within 24 hours" the people running the game will start manipulating the environment, either to put the competitors into dangerous situations or to maneuver them into conflict with each other. So even though after the games start there's no direct communication with the outside world there is information traveling both ways, and it makes the games seem much "larger." Also even when the managers aren't influencing the environment of the games directly, each arena was specifically designed just for that competition with various traps and pitfalls, so it's more interesting than just being dumped in a jungle somewhere.
So after hearing about Battle Royale and seeing bits of the movie i thought "i'm not that interested in just reading about/watching a bunch of kids try to kill each other." After hearing about the Hunger Games i was interested enough to try it, and after reading the first book i wanted to find out more about the world they lived in.
Whoosh.
Woosh is... er, well i'm sure it's got to be discriminatory against someone! Maybe short people? Maybe you're saying you're implying that the joke went over his head because he's short!
You don't even have to actively choose the friend after you've written the message, you can just type "+[friend's name]" in the message itself and it will automatically tag them (or whatever the appropriate verb is.)
Well this isn't the first time i've heard a Google employee (ex or otherwise) complain about Google+ distorting Google's priorities. Given the size of the company and the fact that, as you say, the 20% thing is rather vaguely defined, i expect that the perspective of the average Googler on what is allowed/encouraged in that regard varies a lot depending on what area of the company they're in and who they report to. And certainly Whittaker was reporting to a very different set of managers than the "common joe" googler.
Okay, let's look at this logically.
Person #1 said: "Is it going to take decades for people to figure out that eating two #1 meals at McD's twice a day is probably not conducive to a long healthy life?"
You responded: "A McDonalds Quarter Pounder is not bad for you. The Pasta you made at home is."
That was your first logical flaw. They said "two #1 meals at McD's twice a day" and you simplified it to a single Quarter Pounder. Even disregarding their hyperbole about two meals twice a day, you're completely ignoring the entire rest of the meal to focus on the Quarter Pounder.
Person #2 (not the same as person #1) responded with several different arguments about why pasta isn't bad for you and McDonald's meals possibly are. Including the bit "A McD's quarter pounder value meal (with fries and soda), consumed on a regular basis, along with other high-calorie, low satisfaction food choices, and the sedentary lifestyle of the average American, IS unhealthy for you, and far more so than the same-sized plate of pasta made at home you could eat instead of the McD value meal." Which emphasizes the fact that the original discussion was about a full McDonalds meal and not just the cheeseburger.
You responded in a rather insulting manner and said "Saying that eating carbs (french fries and soda) is less healthy than eating carbs derails any point you are tying to make."
So the first time the person said "A McDonalds meal is unhealthy" and you changed the goalposts by saying that a McDonalds cheeseburger is more healthy than pasta. Someone else tried to correct you by saying a full McDonalds meal is less healthy than pasta, and you changed the goalposts in the other direction by focusing on the sides rather than the cheeseburger.
Then i responded to you, and note that i am neither Person #1 nor Person #2, although you seem to be assuming that i am, and pointed out that the nutritional contents of french fries and soda are very different from the nutritional content of pasta. I explicitly pointed out that french fries contain a lot of fat, while leaving it implied that non-diet soda contains a lot of simple sugars, unlike the complex carbohydrates of pasta.
Your response was: "The carbs in french fries are the same as the carbs in home made pasta. The fat in french fries are something different."
First of all, that's about the intellectual equivalent of saying "Salads are on my diet but hamburgers aren't, so i'll just put a hamburger on top of my salad and then it will be on my diet." You can't argue that fries and pasta are the same because the carbs are the same and just ignore everything else about them that's different. If we're going to argue that way than a Quarter Pounder is just as unhealthy as you claim pasta is, because the carbs in the hamburger bun are the same as the carbs in pasta. The protein and fat in the hamburger and cheese are something different.
And note that Person #2 never said that the carbs in french fries are different from the carbs in pasta. They said that french fries and soda _with_ a cheeseburger are less healthy than pastas. You're the one who changed the goalposts once by dropping the cheeseburger part in response to Person #1 and then changed them a second time when responding to Person #2 by trying to make the argument about only the fries and soda and then constructed a strawman argument by saying it was just about the carbs in the french fries vs the carbs in pasta (conveniently ignoring the entirely different kind of carbs in soda) without addressing any of the other nutritional factors.
Finally you claim that since you've "proven" that one part of the argument is intellectually dishonest, via changing the goalposts and a strawman argument, that you then don't need to address the rest of the points. I'm pretty sure that's some kind of logical fallacy itself. Not to mention the fact that when you accuse someone like Person #2 of being intellectually dishonest through a faulty argument but say nothing
Well i certainly agree that in terms of actually _producing_ new technology Microsoft is pretty far behind the curve. However it does seem like Whittaker feels that currently Google is actually suppressing innovation in areas that it doesn't believe will help it in the social/Google+ arena. It is possible that he feels he'd rather work at a company that does interesting research that never sees the light of day than at a company that he feels has become to focused on "directed" research intended to produce or bolster revenue generation.
It definitely does seem like Google is in a lose-lose situation, with people like the ones in the article yesterday complaining they're blowing too much money on stuff like automated cars and people like Whittaker complaining they're killing too much blue sky research.
Uh, i'm sorry, the rants about Google innovating too much are down the hall? Whittaker is complaining that Google _used_ to be innovative, but now they're not. He's claiming that they used to let the engineers spend 20% of their time on whatever they thought was cool, but now there's an ultimatum (it's not clear if it's official or not) that everything has to be subservient to the goal of pushing "social" and "sharing" in general and Google+ in particular or it gets thrown under the bus. He's not complaining that they're innovating too much, he's complaining that things like Google Labs and other experimental projects have been killed.
I know that not RTFA is considered the norm, but how did you manage to interpret even the blurb as the exact opposite of what it said? Or did you just assume that if two different parties complained about google within 24 hours then they must be complaining about the same thing?
I could keep going, but the big annoyance I see with Slashdot's moderation is the sheer repetition of comments. Somebody occasionally makes a good comment, it gets modded up, then we see that comment repeated over and over and over again, modded up over here and over there. I don't consider that a 'great source of insightful comments', I see a game everybody plays to earn points. There is way too much posing going on.
And that still makes it better than just about every other comment system out there, since even the posing has to adhere to some level of quality in order to get promoted.
And, yes, I'm one of the jerks that does this. How else would I post at +2?
I dunno, you could do like i do. Try to post things that you personally believe or think are funny. Try not to insult other people (at least unless they insult you first =) Try not to repeat things that have already been said in the conversation unless you have something new to add. And then just sit back and watch the mod points slowly accumulate.
There's even a small chance that some of the people you're accusing of being repetitive are just reiterating their own personally held beliefs each time the subject comes up and not just mindlessly parroting what was popular before.
Really, you think if something is (barely) more than 24 hours old it's not worth posting? If slashdot hadn't posted this article i never even would have heard of the guy, so it definitely counts as news for me.
Damn, you had me excited for a minute, but then i actually went and looked. Of the mid-scale publishers on that list that i know of, Ace has 1 book, Bantam Spectra has 1 book, Del Rey has 3 books, and Tor has 18 books listed... but only six of those are currently buyable.
I mean it's great that they're adding other publishers, but it doesn't really seem like they're making a lot of inroads with mid-line publishers, much less the big ones named in the antitrust action.
You're right, i think did. Good thing i'm on the "reading books" end of the spectrum rather than the "writing books" end :)
They seem to be trying to pick up a lot of older authors as well and republish their stuff. I know they've recently been adding some Heinlein and Keith Laumer books and i'm sure there are others who i haven't been actively following. Between new authors and old authors it looks like they're currently adding about 20 books a month, judging by the New Arrivals section. That's certainly more than _i_ can read in a month, but perhaps others read faster than i do or have more free time for books.
This is why at least three quarters of my ebook purchases are from Baen. They price their regular books fairly reasonably, "hardback" books are about $10 than list price, and when they come out in paperback they're about $2-3 off the list price. And for a lot of books if you're willing to pay a small premium they'll let you get the ARC version ("Advance Reader Copy") before the publication date. They also do monthly bundles of books, five or more books packaged together for the price of two or three books, well worth it if you know you really want at least two of the books in the bundle. Plus they have a free library that will let you try out a large number of books for free (in the hopes that you'll buy more books from that author later of course) and their books are DRM free, because they understand that piracy isn't a real problem.
Hopefully if Baen continues to do well eventually the big publishers will learn from their example.
I finally got off my ass and registered for the World Science Fiction Convention last year and read the nominees for best novel so i could vote for the Hugo awards. In doing so i read two novels that i might never have picked up otherwise, and was tipped me off to a third one that was actually by one of my favorite authors under a pseudonym. (I presume i eventually would have stumbled across that one one way or another.)
The realization that i hadn't heard of three of those books before and might never have read them caused me to go back and review the complete list of Hugo awards and Nebula awards for best novel.
There are a lot of old favorites on there, but there are also a lot of other books that i know of but never gotten around to reading and a lot more that i've never even heard of, especially for the earlier years. Unless you're a lot more knowledgeable than me you've probably never heard of a lot of them either. All the books in those lists were considered one of the best books that year either by the fans or the writers, and a lot of them probably still hold up well today. I've now got a plan, or at least a desire, to try and start working through those older books a few at a time. (Though how i'm going to manage that when i can't even keep up with all the _new_ books coming out i don't know.)
"a task so challenging archaeologists say it probably happened only once, in one place."
Am i missing something, or don't we know that it happened at least twice since native americans made small toys with wheels on them? Although i'd be willing to believe that it happened just once in the americas and just once in europe/africa/asia.
If you think that carbs (McDonalds french fries and soda) are the same as carbs (home cooked pasta) then you clearly have very little knowledge about nutrition. McDonalds french fries have almost as much fat as they do carbs. The fact that you could only find one bit of his argument to nicpick, and then didn't even get that right, isn't really helping your case.
Wow, two "Score: 2, Troll" comments, the defenders of McCarthy are out in force today! ...which seems kind of ironic or something.
It's called McCarthyism for a reason. When you're the most famous and prominent person pushing a particular agenda then there's a serious possibility that the whole movement is going to become identified with you and vice versa. It doesn't really matter now which groups of people were on McCarthy's particular list, he popularized the whole "i've got a list of the bad people" thing.
(Well okay, maybe he needs to split that particular honor with Santa Claus.)
I'm not saying it's good and i'm not saying it's bad, but "what you can get away with depends on how good of friends you are with the people who won the last big war" isn't called double standards, it's called how diplomacy has operated for pretty much all of human history.
What would the point be? The people in question are already suffering from an insidious slow-acting poison called "not having any food." Do you think the people in North Korea who are actually causing the problems are suffering from any food shortages?
Arguably the most evil thing we could do would be to give them a _lot_ of good and healthy food for a couple years, and then unexpectedly stop. Kind of the inverse of the "give a man a fish/teach a man to fish" thing.
I believe there have already been very limited tests of telomerase in humans, but one of the big fears is indeed that it will increase the odds of cancer. It'll be interesting to see what happens when (if?) we have cures for most kinds of cancer.
I agree with both of you, and i'll expand it yet a little more.
Barring those who are actually suffering from a mental illness i believe that everyone is a rational actor, although most of us suffer from a limited amount of information with which to make our rational choices.
Thus if you ignore the concepts of "morals" or "honor", everyone will base their decisions on a risk vs. reward evaluation. For the rich there aren't a lot of risks, especially for minor offenses like speeding. As everyone else has pointed out for the very rich a speeding ticket is less than an hour's salary, while for the poor it could put them behind for an entire month, or possibly longer.
On the other hand given the chance to commit a major felony for a "moderate" benefit, say $10,000, the rich won't be tempted at all. It's just pocket change for them after all. For the middle class it's a pretty fair amount of money, but getting caught would mean huge legal bills, and probably losing their job, which makes them significantly more than $10,000 a year. For the very poor however, the chance to score $10,000 is a huge benefit, especially if they don't fully understand the odds of getting caught or the consequences if they do.
So there are a lot of people who will cheat at the kind of relatively trivial morality tests this experiment was testing for if they're convinced they're wealthy or powerful, and thus feel they can get away with it. They aren't any less moral than they were before, they were just given the opportunity to express their true morals.
It would be interesting to see what happened if you took a bunch of rich people, stuck them in a freezing hovel without food for a month, forcing them to live off whatever they could scavenge, and then told them you'd give them a warm home and a fridge stuffed with food if they stabbed a stranger under conditions where they felt like they could get away with it. If you could actually run such an experiment i think they might find the opposite results from this one.
(And i too would like to think my character is deeper than that and that i would remain moral if i acquired a lot of money, but can't be sure if that's true or not. Anyone want to give me about ten million dollars so we can find out? =)
I agree, the proposal to do it one limb at a time, presumably from four different donors due to the amount of time between operations, isn't very feasible.
However it seems like starting with two arms would be the way to go. First because they draw less blood than the legs, so there would be less for the vascular system to adapt to. Second because if i was a quadriplegic and had the choice of getting just my arms back or just my legs back, i'd definitely opt for the arms. If you've just got arms you can always use a wheelchair to get yourself around. If you've just got legs... well i guess you could do a few "manual" tasks using your toes, but it doesn't seem like the optimum way to do things.