Anyway, as for writing, it's like anything else on a computer. I don't think of it as "using a computer" - it's just a tool that lets me do what I want.
I think Dave Gorman's quote about trying to write a novel is quite apt:
"My computer is attached to the Internet. The Internet contains everything in the whole wide world ever. I don't know about you, but I sometimes find everything in the whole wide world ever to be a bit distracting."
I'd love to hear how other people work around this. Personally, I get almost all my fiction writing done using an eee PC while I commute to work and back by train. Using text mode only (vim in FreeDOS), my text editor takes up the full screen so there are no distractions.
He's also used emacs. Personally, I like the idea that anyone can download it for free and be on an equal footing with someone who's used it to write such great novels. Isn't that inspiring?
The Natural History Museum and Science Musuem are practically next door to each other, and are both essential to any good trip to London. Google Maps link
How about the even more simple explanation of just being distracted by the beautiful woman and imagining her naked with her legs wrapped around you is taking up all of your resources? "Trying to impress" doesn't need to come into it at all
Wait a minute, is that what men do when distracted by a beautiful woman? I'd assumed it was just infatuation, but do you actually picture such scenarios whenever you talk to someone you're attracted to? That sounds like an awfully resource draining thing to have to do all the time.
I know a lot of women who dumb themselves down in the presence of a man they're interested in because they believe that men are intimidated by smart women.
Ah, but that's pretending to be less intelligent rather than genuinely being forgetful because you're besotted by someone.
Perhaps they don't choose their feelings, but surely surgery is a choice?
Oh, yes, hormone therapy, sex reassignment surgery, hair removal, voice exercises are all choices. But it's not like we have a relaxed attitude about it, like it's equivalent to a career choice or migrating or something like that. The transsexual suicide rate is apparently about 31%, which I believe is the highest amongst a minority group. (Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong here.) It's a serious medical condition.
"Unlike trannies (no offense intended to any TG folk reading this), we intersexed people do not choose to be in the situation we are in."
I'm not sure if you're using those phrases to refer to just cross dressers or to transsexuals as well... but I can tell you for a fact that transsexuals don't choose to be in the situation they're in. (I gather cross dressers don't either, but the main difference here is that with transsexuals, your brian and body actually don't match, so it's to do with your gender and your physical sex, not at all about your sexuality. A better analogy might actually be comparing transsexuals to people who feel they should be amputees. It's all about the brain's genuine self-image.)
I'm probably not that articulate about this right now, but I've written a personal piece about this, Transitioning, and a story about it, Identity.
(And now I need to ramble on for ages because Slashdot's software claims I have too few characters per line... A curious requirement. Just ignore this paragraph, it contains absolutely no meaningful information at all. Seriously, though, check out the above YouTube clips if nothing else. Really, Cosmos and A Short History of Nearly Everything should be given to everyone at birth...)
Seeing as everyone else has Adam Savage, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins pretty well covered, and you already know about Carl Sagan and presumably Richard Feynman and J. Bronowski, I should probably add Brian Cox to the list.
He's a particle physicist at CERN, and has an unrealistic level of enthusiasm for absolutely everything. It seems a good bet that the physicist in Sunshine was based on him, especially considering that he was the science consultant for the film. He's in a whole bunch of documentaries enthusing about how great the latest scientific discoveries are.
If you want to pay some people money before they make a film, so that it can be released under a creative commons license, then go ahead. Such a project already exists.
In case anyone wants to watch it in context, here's a torrent of the whole keynote speech he made at The Last HOPE. He talks about the censorship of RFID hacking 45 minutes into it.
Why not just go the whole hog, and sell people more cores than they actually need, then let them use BOINC-style software to rent out their otherwise unused CPU power to other people? Surely with our current technology in terms of the Internet and encryption, it should be relatively safe to farm out certain CPU intensive tasks to strangers and pay them for the privilege of using their processing power, as long as protocols and software exist to avoid the obvious security risks to both parties.
Amongst a lot of other good things (such as incremental backups of the worldwide web), archive.org also hosts a lot of music by various netlabels. This gives you access to much more good music than you're likely to have time to listen to, in a variety of genres. In particular, the chiptune inspired dance music of the label 8bitpeoples should go down well with the Slashdot crowd.
However, for places where the price of software keeps obtaining legitimate versions out of most people's reach, a rental program may be a useful alternative.
So basically this translates as: "We make up an arbitrary price for software, which costs next to nothing to mass produce. If you can't afford this high price, we'll charge you a smaller amount on a recurring basis, so that in the long term you end up paying more than other people who have more money than you do." How thoughtful of them.
True, but the original file sometimes is. I've bought several faulty audiobooks from iTunes in the past. In each case, I told them about the problem via the handy web form, and after a while of them not listening and just sending the same faulty file to me again, they eventually listened to what I was saying and gave me the money back. So sometimes a downloaded file can be faulty, and they already give the consumer their money back.
How can they ensure that the file is deleted after you return it?
As far as I know, they don't. The files still seem to work, but I'm honest so I delete them pretty quickly anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
At least, superficially related in that it's to do with how the brain interprets visual data, which covers a similar topic to the New Yorker article:
TED Talk: Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see.
Here's her TED Talk on the subject.
How do you keep your privacy while using Google? You don't.
Anyway, as for writing, it's like anything else on a computer. I don't think of it as "using a computer" - it's just a tool that lets me do what I want.
I think Dave Gorman's quote about trying to write a novel is quite apt:
"My computer is attached to the Internet. The Internet contains everything in the whole wide world ever. I don't know about you, but I sometimes find everything in the whole wide world ever to be a bit distracting."
I'd love to hear how other people work around this. Personally, I get almost all my fiction writing done using an eee PC while I commute to work and back by train. Using text mode only (vim in FreeDOS), my text editor takes up the full screen so there are no distractions.
For what it's worth, according to his book In The Beginning... Was the Command Line, Neal Stephenson said he used a BeBox for a while.
He's also used emacs. Personally, I like the idea that anyone can download it for free and be on an equal footing with someone who's used it to write such great novels. Isn't that inspiring?
The Natural History Museum and Science Musuem are practically next door to each other, and are both essential to any good trip to London. Google Maps link
If you're in the UK and you want to show politicians you're against this, feel free to sign a petition saying so. Thank you.
If any UK citizens wish to protest this, feel free to take a look at my petition to legalise filesharing. Thanks.
...then food could possibly one day be copyrighted on the genetic or even molecular level. I wrote a story which hints at this a short while ago.
If anyone's interested, Charles Darwin's book The Voyage of the Beagle is available from Gutenberg, free in both senses of the word.
If you're concerned about copyright and live in the UK, please take a look at my petition. Thanks!
Wait a minute, is that what men do when distracted by a beautiful woman? I'd assumed it was just infatuation, but do you actually picture such scenarios whenever you talk to someone you're attracted to? That sounds like an awfully resource draining thing to have to do all the time.
Ah, but that's pretending to be less intelligent rather than genuinely being forgetful because you're besotted by someone.
Perhaps they don't choose their feelings, but surely surgery is a choice?
Oh, yes, hormone therapy, sex reassignment surgery, hair removal, voice exercises are all choices. But it's not like we have a relaxed attitude about it, like it's equivalent to a career choice or migrating or something like that. The transsexual suicide rate is apparently about 31%, which I believe is the highest amongst a minority group. (Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong here.) It's a serious medical condition.
"Unlike trannies (no offense intended to any TG folk reading this), we intersexed people do not choose to be in the situation we are in."
I'm not sure if you're using those phrases to refer to just cross dressers or to transsexuals as well... but I can tell you for a fact that transsexuals don't choose to be in the situation they're in. (I gather cross dressers don't either, but the main difference here is that with transsexuals, your brian and body actually don't match, so it's to do with your gender and your physical sex, not at all about your sexuality. A better analogy might actually be comparing transsexuals to people who feel they should be amputees. It's all about the brain's genuine self-image.)
I'm probably not that articulate about this right now, but I've written a personal piece about this, Transitioning, and a story about it, Identity.
In addition to names of the people themselves, can anybody recommend any good science documentaries/talks/books? I'd recommend the following:
If anyone can add to this list, I'd appreciate it. It'd be nice to seek out more science shows and related things.
I'd also recommend the following on YouTube:
(And now I need to ramble on for ages because Slashdot's software claims I have too few characters per line... A curious requirement. Just ignore this paragraph, it contains absolutely no meaningful information at all. Seriously, though, check out the above YouTube clips if nothing else. Really, Cosmos and A Short History of Nearly Everything should be given to everyone at birth...)
Seeing as everyone else has Adam Savage, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins pretty well covered, and you already know about Carl Sagan and presumably Richard Feynman and J. Bronowski, I should probably add Brian Cox to the list.
He's a particle physicist at CERN, and has an unrealistic level of enthusiasm for absolutely everything. It seems a good bet that the physicist in Sunshine was based on him, especially considering that he was the science consultant for the film. He's in a whole bunch of documentaries enthusing about how great the latest scientific discoveries are.
If you want to pay some people money before they make a film, so that it can be released under a creative commons license, then go ahead. Such a project already exists.
In case anyone wants to watch it in context, here's a torrent of the whole keynote speech he made at The Last HOPE. He talks about the censorship of RFID hacking 45 minutes into it.
But what about the Ballmer Peak?
Jason Scott (of BBS: The Dcoumentary fame) gave an interesting speech about the failings of Wikipedia, including the inclusionist versus deletionist debate.
Why not just go the whole hog, and sell people more cores than they actually need, then let them use BOINC-style software to rent out their otherwise unused CPU power to other people? Surely with our current technology in terms of the Internet and encryption, it should be relatively safe to farm out certain CPU intensive tasks to strangers and pay them for the privilege of using their processing power, as long as protocols and software exist to avoid the obvious security risks to both parties.
Amongst a lot of other good things (such as incremental backups of the worldwide web), archive.org also hosts a lot of music by various netlabels. This gives you access to much more good music than you're likely to have time to listen to, in a variety of genres. In particular, the chiptune inspired dance music of the label 8bitpeoples should go down well with the Slashdot crowd.
However, for places where the price of software keeps obtaining legitimate versions out of most people's reach, a rental program may be a useful alternative.
So basically this translates as: "We make up an arbitrary price for software, which costs next to nothing to mass produce. If you can't afford this high price, we'll charge you a smaller amount on a recurring basis, so that in the long term you end up paying more than other people who have more money than you do." How thoughtful of them.
A digital download is never faulty.
True, but the original file sometimes is. I've bought several faulty audiobooks from iTunes in the past. In each case, I told them about the problem via the handy web form, and after a while of them not listening and just sending the same faulty file to me again, they eventually listened to what I was saying and gave me the money back. So sometimes a downloaded file can be faulty, and they already give the consumer their money back.
How can they ensure that the file is deleted after you return it?
As far as I know, they don't. The files still seem to work, but I'm honest so I delete them pretty quickly anyway.