And I don't think the problem with space dumping is the image of Columbia blowing up. Waste baskets can be made that whitstand such blasts. It's more of the awarness that we can't already pollute the space, since we fuc*** up mother Earth.
Bear in mind that I have no particular knowledge of space or astrophysics. But since there's very little friction to reduce velocity in space, couldn't we just aim the little capsules towards Sol and shoot em off there? It doesn't matter if our aim's a bit off, since when it got sufficiently close I'd get pulled in anyway, and it's not going to harm anyone, or clutter up the spaceways, if it's sitting in the middle the sun.
I believe they're called New York, Tennessee Avenue and St. James Place.
No, they're called Vine Street, Marlborough Street and Bow Street. The BBC is, funnily enough, British. Why should they use the American version of the game for their list?
And personally my biggest WTF is #29. When faced with danger, the octopus can wrap six of its legs around its head to disguise itself as a fallen coconut shell and escape by walking backwards on the other two legs, scientists discovered.
How the hell do they know it was trying to pretned to be a coconut shell? Were these research scientists cast members of Monty Python's Flying Circus by any chance?
Actually, we have em to make money. Polling stations are usually setup at schools. The school gets a couple of parents to come down and organize a barbecue. You get a good couple of thousand people through even a small polling station, that's a pretty darn big market for the cost of gas and a few sausages.
For what it's worth, the one I go to sells lamingtons.
While I (as an Australian citizen) would be first to say this is a good thing, let's not get all excited. What this is giving us is nothing more than what our yankee friends have had for years - the ability to time-shift and format-shift. And what's more, they're talking of making us pay for it, in the form of a media levy.
On the other hand, it is a pleasant surprise to see a government actually taking a look at reality, and adjusting it's laws thusly, rather than trying to do it the other way around.
They worked with that for a while - one of Daniel's main duties on the team was as linguist when they encountered new societies. Then they just gave it up, probably because it was too clunky to deal with all the time; when you've only got 45 minutes to tell a story, you can't be dicked around with foreign languages all the time. What they really needed to do was just find a bit of alien translation hardware, just for a convenient excuse.
That James Poniewozik dude is also responsible for Hitler being the "Time - Man of the Year '39"
You say that like it's a bad thing. Very few people have had as lasting an impact on the human consciousness as Hitler. As long as the award is for "most notable", and not "most racially tolerant" or "most philanthropic", it was a good choice. You shouldn't just ignore the effect people have on history just because they're evil, genocidal psychopaths - if you ignore them, then you become less equipped to deal with them in the future.
The multitude of rings of space junk launched by humans is stupid. That which cannot be retrieved for space museum purposes should be swept up and removed, before it becomes impossible to get into space at all.
This is actually the premise for one of my favourite anime series; Planetes. The main characters are all members of what is basically a stellar garbage collection service. One of the more original sci-fi series I've seem for a while, mostly because it doesn't run like sci-fi, just like life in the future:)
Gold farming bots are usually supervised by humans. A CAPTCHA feature would only annoy the farmers as much as it annoyed the rest of the general population of WoW, and I imagine a number of people would be mightily annoyed by such a feature. Plus, due to limited inventory space, farm bots don't pick up everything that drops, just the most valuable stuff. So a gold farmer wouldn't have to CAPTCHA every time a bot killed a mob, just every time a decent item dropped.
Except that Ender didn't just fight one battle, like Midway. He fought dozens, most of them outnumbered. And he had to win them all. The premise that earth is engaged in a war against a superior foe that requires a general of extra-ordinary ability isn't as farfetched as you make out, for a sci-fi story.
MySQL is only better for SMALL websites where speed is more of a deciding factor.
I wouldn't say small websites, but rather simple ones. MySQL scales reasonably well to very large large tables, the place it falls down is its featureset (and at least now it has foreign key support, which it didn't when I first encountered it!). A simple site that doesn't have a complex web of relationships that need to be protected by triggers and stored procedures will do well with MySQL up to the size where the database needs to be spread over multiple machines - and that's pretty damn big!
That's "less than 200" employees. The number probably isn't there to give an accurate account over the number of employees in this hypothetical business, but rather to give an indication of which segment of the market the business falls in.
Nobody will mind the destruction of the bugger homeworld, but they may well object to Ender's habit of barehanded manslaughter.
Which, incidentally, is what Ender himself says in the book. As he listens to the courts discuss his murder of two children, he reflects on the fact that everyone is upset about those two murders, not his genocide of an alien race.
The premise of it - that war in space is so enormously more difficult than other forms of warfare, that you needed not only life-long training, but to be actually genetically engineered to do it - was ludicrous.
That wasn't the premise at all. It wasn't because space-fighting was so difficult that they instituted the Battle School program. It was because they were fighting a more numerous, better-equipped enemy, and the only advantage they had was individual human brilliance vs the conservativism of the hive-mind. They needed life-long training and genetic engineering to try and squeeze the very best general out of the human gene pool so that humanity had a snowball's chance in hell against the buggers.
And yeah, the final battle in Ender's Game was fairly simple, mostly because Ender's kamikaze tactic was simplistic. But you can be fairly sure that the battles that drove the other kids into nervous breakdowns before that weren't so simplistic - all the ones where Ender's ships were outnumbered and didn't have a nice planet full of matter to nuke. Those were the battles that needed Ender's tactical brilliance.
I agree. Jackson did a fantastic job of telling the _story_ of LoTR, but he butchered the individual characters. He completely maimed Gimli (and to a lesser extent Legolas).
Even in the original books though, there wasn't a huge amount of character development. The major part was the relationship between Frodo and Sam, there was a little bit of Pippin maturing, there were hints with Gimli as his attitude towards elves changed, but most of it was fairly subtle and incidental. I agree that making Legolas and Gimli into stand-up comedians/action heroes distorts their characters a bit, but I wouldn't say it's at the cost of character development.
"we" and "I" are not mutually exclusive. If they were both interviewed, it would be perfectly true for Jamie to say "I was interviewed" and true for Adam to say "we were interviewed". It comes down to interpretation of the question: Adam interpreted the question as a question about the two of them, and he answers for both of them. Jamie interprets the question as directed solely at him, and only answers for himself.
I think the original poster may have been referring to Stilson and Bonzo. Ender beats them both to death, remember? And through some authorial legerdemain, it's not really his fault and he gets to feel real bad about it because, y'know, they made him do it. That didn't strike you as a bit of a stacked deck on Card's part?
Yeah, it was a stacked deck on Card's part, but then, he stacked it both ways. Ender draws the conclusion (correctly in his case) that he is totally on his own, that authority will never step in to solve his problems for him. In his fight with Bonzo it is most likely kill or be killed. Bonzo was going to do serious harm to Ender, and possibly kill him. Bonzo backed him into a corner. In the case of Stilson, the consequences were less dire, but in Ender's 6-year-old mind, he really did fear for his life. That may or may not be an excuse, but it is a reason.
Of course, none of that translates into real life. In real life, there is always an authority that will step in. People don't generally watch adolescents commit murder just to toughen them up. In any real-world circumstance, Ender's actions would have been far less excusable, because there would be authority to appeal to, authority that would take action. It opens another option that Ender didn't have.
But both those cases serve to illustrate the later genocide of the buggers. When Ender reflects on Stilson's death, he sees how ridiculous it was for him to take it so seriously. When he reflects on Bonzo's death, he realizes how much Bonzo's inground sense honour dominated him, and feels sorry for him. When he makes contact with the buggers, he realizes that they really weren't monsters, but had a motivation and a frame of reference humans couldn't understand. When he reflects on Peter, he realizes that he wasn't a monster after all, but human. What Card seems to be saying is that war, and human conflict in general, is driven by lack of communication, lack of empathy.
or even the tacked-on abortive second novel in the last fifteen pages.
Yes, well, if you ignore the ending of the book it does rather change it's meaning. Those "tacked on" fifteen pages (also known as an "epilogue") are precisely where Card writes about Ender's self-appointed life-long quest: "And always Ender carried with him a dry white cocoon, looking for a world where the hive-queen could awaken and thrive in peace. He looked a long time."
The world makes Ender a hero for committing his genocide - and he ignores their worship and does penance instead, because he knows he is a murderer and not a hero.
The kuro5hin link doesn't mention his book at all - it's mostly a personal attack against Card.
The "Innocent Killer" article, which I've read before, bases it's conclusions on several premises. If you agree with these premises, then the conclusions it presents follow on logically. If you don't, then the conclusions it makes are irrelevent.
One of premises the essay makes is the assertion that no blame is attached to Ender's genocide or murders, and that Ender's own feelings of guilt and remorse are just a writer's trick to make us feel sympathy for Ender. I don't agree with this - I think Ender did blame himself for the acts he committed and the point Card is making is that despite society's exoneration, the fact that Ender feels guilty about these acts means that he does attach blame to himelf for them.
Because I don't agree with the premise, I reject the conclusion. But that sort of article is exactly the sort of thing good fiction should inspire; it's exactly the sort of argument Card is writing for in the book. The whole book is "flamebait", if you like; it seeks to stir up discussion and argument about a certain theme. While ever essays like "Innocent Killer" are published, defended and refuted, Ender's Game is serving it's purpose.
Nonsense. In literature criticism, you need to put in intentions of the author in mind.
So you're saying that if I read a book, and get out of it a certain meaning, that meaning is suddenly no longer valid when I discover the author didn't mean to put it there? I don't know what school of literature criticism you went to.
Who cares what Card intend Ender's Game to be? Unless you treat the text as the only authority on it's own meaning, analysis just becomes a constant game of second-guessing the author. Your analysis of the text becomes nothing more than an analysis of the author, a subject on which you can never have all the facts.
And considering the main character of Ender's Game becomes a pacifist at the end of the novel, there's not too much free assosciation needed to come up with that theory. And as for it being an utopia, that must be why the main character sinks into depression and insanity after the final battle, and when he recovers, starts a life-long journey to undo what he's just done.
Card wasn't presenting the war in his book as the best way of interacting with other beings, he presented it as the ultimate way to wage war - without diplomacy, without mercy, without belief in innocence, and to the ultimate end. But note that in the book, the ultimate military victory also becomes recognized as the vilest act humanity ever committed.
Slashdot Mirror
And I don't think the problem with space dumping is the image of Columbia blowing up. Waste baskets can be made that whitstand such blasts. It's more of the awarness that we can't already pollute the space, since we fuc*** up mother Earth.
Bear in mind that I have no particular knowledge of space or astrophysics. But since there's very little friction to reduce velocity in space, couldn't we just aim the little capsules towards Sol and shoot em off there? It doesn't matter if our aim's a bit off, since when it got sufficiently close I'd get pulled in anyway, and it's not going to harm anyone, or clutter up the spaceways, if it's sitting in the middle the sun.
TNG had an episode to show how stupid judging people on their sexual preferences is but showing a race that is purely homosexual
Never saw the ep, but it sounds like a bit of a rip off of Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness.
I believe they're called New York, Tennessee Avenue and St. James Place.
No, they're called Vine Street, Marlborough Street and Bow Street. The BBC is, funnily enough, British. Why should they use the American version of the game for their list?
And personally my biggest WTF is #29. When faced with danger, the octopus can wrap six of its legs around its head to disguise itself as a fallen coconut shell and escape by walking backwards on the other two legs, scientists discovered.
How the hell do they know it was trying to pretned to be a coconut shell? Were these research scientists cast members of Monty Python's Flying Circus by any chance?
Actually, we have em to make money. Polling stations are usually setup at schools. The school gets a couple of parents to come down and organize a barbecue. You get a good couple of thousand people through even a small polling station, that's a pretty darn big market for the cost of gas and a few sausages.
For what it's worth, the one I go to sells lamingtons.
While I (as an Australian citizen) would be first to say this is a good thing, let's not get all excited. What this is giving us is nothing more than what our yankee friends have had for years - the ability to time-shift and format-shift. And what's more, they're talking of making us pay for it, in the form of a media levy.
On the other hand, it is a pleasant surprise to see a government actually taking a look at reality, and adjusting it's laws thusly, rather than trying to do it the other way around.
They worked with that for a while - one of Daniel's main duties on the team was as linguist when they encountered new societies. Then they just gave it up, probably because it was too clunky to deal with all the time; when you've only got 45 minutes to tell a story, you can't be dicked around with foreign languages all the time. What they really needed to do was just find a bit of alien translation hardware, just for a convenient excuse.
That James Poniewozik dude is also responsible for Hitler being the "Time - Man of the Year '39"
You say that like it's a bad thing. Very few people have had as lasting an impact on the human consciousness as Hitler. As long as the award is for "most notable", and not "most racially tolerant" or "most philanthropic", it was a good choice. You shouldn't just ignore the effect people have on history just because they're evil, genocidal psychopaths - if you ignore them, then you become less equipped to deal with them in the future.
Or he's just a cautious investor and wanted to diversify? Don't keep all your eggs in the same basket, and all that.
Most likely to be the subject of lame and obvious flamebait.
The multitude of rings of space junk launched by humans is stupid. That which cannot be retrieved for space museum purposes should be swept up and removed, before it becomes impossible to get into space at all.
:)
This is actually the premise for one of my favourite anime series; Planetes. The main characters are all members of what is basically a stellar garbage collection service. One of the more original sci-fi series I've seem for a while, mostly because it doesn't run like sci-fi, just like life in the future
Gold farming bots are usually supervised by humans. A CAPTCHA feature would only annoy the farmers as much as it annoyed the rest of the general population of WoW, and I imagine a number of people would be mightily annoyed by such a feature. Plus, due to limited inventory space, farm bots don't pick up everything that drops, just the most valuable stuff. So a gold farmer wouldn't have to CAPTCHA every time a bot killed a mob, just every time a decent item dropped.
Except that Ender didn't just fight one battle, like Midway. He fought dozens, most of them outnumbered. And he had to win them all. The premise that earth is engaged in a war against a superior foe that requires a general of extra-ordinary ability isn't as farfetched as you make out, for a sci-fi story.
I wouldn't want to be the geek caught lugging that WMD mod to my local LAN party.
MySQL is only better for SMALL websites where speed is more of a deciding factor.
I wouldn't say small websites, but rather simple ones. MySQL scales reasonably well to very large large tables, the place it falls down is its featureset (and at least now it has foreign key support, which it didn't when I first encountered it!). A simple site that doesn't have a complex web of relationships that need to be protected by triggers and stored procedures will do well with MySQL up to the size where the database needs to be spread over multiple machines - and that's pretty damn big!
That's "less than 200" employees. The number probably isn't there to give an accurate account over the number of employees in this hypothetical business, but rather to give an indication of which segment of the market the business falls in.
Nobody will mind the destruction of the bugger homeworld, but they may well object to Ender's habit of barehanded manslaughter.
Which, incidentally, is what Ender himself says in the book. As he listens to the courts discuss his murder of two children, he reflects on the fact that everyone is upset about those two murders, not his genocide of an alien race.
The premise of it - that war in space is so enormously more difficult than other forms of warfare, that you needed not only life-long training, but to be actually genetically engineered to do it - was ludicrous.
That wasn't the premise at all. It wasn't because space-fighting was so difficult that they instituted the Battle School program. It was because they were fighting a more numerous, better-equipped enemy, and the only advantage they had was individual human brilliance vs the conservativism of the hive-mind. They needed life-long training and genetic engineering to try and squeeze the very best general out of the human gene pool so that humanity had a snowball's chance in hell against the buggers.
And yeah, the final battle in Ender's Game was fairly simple, mostly because Ender's kamikaze tactic was simplistic. But you can be fairly sure that the battles that drove the other kids into nervous breakdowns before that weren't so simplistic - all the ones where Ender's ships were outnumbered and didn't have a nice planet full of matter to nuke. Those were the battles that needed Ender's tactical brilliance.
I agree. Jackson did a fantastic job of telling the _story_ of LoTR, but he butchered the individual characters. He completely maimed Gimli (and to a lesser extent Legolas).
Even in the original books though, there wasn't a huge amount of character development. The major part was the relationship between Frodo and Sam, there was a little bit of Pippin maturing, there were hints with Gimli as his attitude towards elves changed, but most of it was fairly subtle and incidental. I agree that making Legolas and Gimli into stand-up comedians/action heroes distorts their characters a bit, but I wouldn't say it's at the cost of character development.
Luck of the draw I'm afraid. The sad fact is, whichever direction you're first moderated seems to be the direction you'll go after that.
Heh, the quote of the moment at the bottom of slashdot when I posted this seems appropriate, given our topic of conversation.
What we wish, that we readily believe. -- Demosthenes
"we" and "I" are not mutually exclusive. If they were both interviewed, it would be perfectly true for Jamie to say "I was interviewed" and true for Adam to say "we were interviewed". It comes down to interpretation of the question: Adam interpreted the question as a question about the two of them, and he answers for both of them. Jamie interprets the question as directed solely at him, and only answers for himself.
It's probably the system they use to jam 101+ keycodes on to a 53-key keyboard.
I think the original poster may have been referring to Stilson and Bonzo. Ender beats them both to death, remember? And through some authorial legerdemain, it's not really his fault and he gets to feel real bad about it because, y'know, they made him do it. That didn't strike you as a bit of a stacked deck on Card's part?
Yeah, it was a stacked deck on Card's part, but then, he stacked it both ways. Ender draws the conclusion (correctly in his case) that he is totally on his own, that authority will never step in to solve his problems for him. In his fight with Bonzo it is most likely kill or be killed. Bonzo was going to do serious harm to Ender, and possibly kill him. Bonzo backed him into a corner. In the case of Stilson, the consequences were less dire, but in Ender's 6-year-old mind, he really did fear for his life. That may or may not be an excuse, but it is a reason.
Of course, none of that translates into real life. In real life, there is always an authority that will step in. People don't generally watch adolescents commit murder just to toughen them up. In any real-world circumstance, Ender's actions would have been far less excusable, because there would be authority to appeal to, authority that would take action. It opens another option that Ender didn't have.
But both those cases serve to illustrate the later genocide of the buggers. When Ender reflects on Stilson's death, he sees how ridiculous it was for him to take it so seriously. When he reflects on Bonzo's death, he realizes how much Bonzo's inground sense honour dominated him, and feels sorry for him. When he makes contact with the buggers, he realizes that they really weren't monsters, but had a motivation and a frame of reference humans couldn't understand. When he reflects on Peter, he realizes that he wasn't a monster after all, but human. What Card seems to be saying is that war, and human conflict in general, is driven by lack of communication, lack of empathy.
or even the tacked-on abortive second novel in the last fifteen pages.
Yes, well, if you ignore the ending of the book it does rather change it's meaning. Those "tacked on" fifteen pages (also known as an "epilogue") are precisely where Card writes about Ender's self-appointed life-long quest: "And always Ender carried with him a dry white cocoon, looking for a world where the hive-queen could awaken and thrive in peace. He looked a long time."
The world makes Ender a hero for committing his genocide - and he ignores their worship and does penance instead, because he knows he is a murderer and not a hero.
The kuro5hin link doesn't mention his book at all - it's mostly a personal attack against Card.
The "Innocent Killer" article, which I've read before, bases it's conclusions on several premises. If you agree with these premises, then the conclusions it presents follow on logically. If you don't, then the conclusions it makes are irrelevent.
One of premises the essay makes is the assertion that no blame is attached to Ender's genocide or murders, and that Ender's own feelings of guilt and remorse are just a writer's trick to make us feel sympathy for Ender. I don't agree with this - I think Ender did blame himself for the acts he committed and the point Card is making is that despite society's exoneration, the fact that Ender feels guilty about these acts means that he does attach blame to himelf for them.
Because I don't agree with the premise, I reject the conclusion. But that sort of article is exactly the sort of thing good fiction should inspire; it's exactly the sort of argument Card is writing for in the book. The whole book is "flamebait", if you like; it seeks to stir up discussion and argument about a certain theme. While ever essays like "Innocent Killer" are published, defended and refuted, Ender's Game is serving it's purpose.
Nonsense. In literature criticism, you need to put in intentions of the author in mind.
So you're saying that if I read a book, and get out of it a certain meaning, that meaning is suddenly no longer valid when I discover the author didn't mean to put it there? I don't know what school of literature criticism you went to.
Who cares what Card intend Ender's Game to be? Unless you treat the text as the only authority on it's own meaning, analysis just becomes a constant game of second-guessing the author. Your analysis of the text becomes nothing more than an analysis of the author, a subject on which you can never have all the facts.
And considering the main character of Ender's Game becomes a pacifist at the end of the novel, there's not too much free assosciation needed to come up with that theory. And as for it being an utopia, that must be why the main character sinks into depression and insanity after the final battle, and when he recovers, starts a life-long journey to undo what he's just done.
Card wasn't presenting the war in his book as the best way of interacting with other beings, he presented it as the ultimate way to wage war - without diplomacy, without mercy, without belief in innocence, and to the ultimate end. But note that in the book, the ultimate military victory also becomes recognized as the vilest act humanity ever committed.
We're not talking about Orson Scott Card at all - we're talking about a book called Ender's Game.
Whatever conclusions you can draw about Orson Scott Card from his behaviour have absolutely no weight when discussing the themes of his book.