You do know that the Enterprise was never actually built, don't you? All of that footage was either a 6 inch model or some cheesy computer graphics?
And then what, they used a replicator or something to scale the model up to full size once they got it into space? That would make sense; even in the future it wouldn't make sense to lift something the size of the Enterprise into space if you didn't have to.
Ah, well, I considered that possibility, but discarded it for the sake of a good flame. So not upset, until I found out that my flame was itself failure because I misunderstood what I was replying to.:(
" When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor's degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys."
Yet on the other hand: "In 2001-2, only 28 percent of all undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women. By 2004-5, the number had declined to only 22 percent."
Which, anecdotally, matches my experience at Michigan (which was a few years prior to the latest numbers), where women in CE classes were quite rare, but extremely common in ME and ChemE. I didn't take any ChemE courses, but I had lectures in the building and friends in the senior/graduate level classes that I peeked in on. Also, I participated in some minority and women in engineering programs, so I knew a lot of women engineering students. None of them were CE.
Not quite. No one cares about gender equality in those jobs because they're women-dominated. Meanwhile, the pay is generally low because they're women-dominated -- it's a pretty vicious cycle of shunting women towards lower-paying jobs, and then artificially keeping the status of them low to justify the low wages. And because the status and wages are low, men aren't encouraged to pursue that line of work. The two biggest examples of this are teaching and nursing.
Actually, nursing is a perfect example of why that isn't true. Nursing is a well-paying profession, and people do care about the gender gap in nursing, with active attempts to recruit more men and combat the prejudices that lead to the gap. It mirrors the situation with CS very well -- though, as I understand it, with nursing a lot of the prejudice still comes from other men in the medical field rather than female nurses.
Also, there are male-dominated fields that are low paying where nobody cares if there is gender equality.
So while the negative feedback cycles you mention do exist in some jobs, it's mostly confined to the ones that are already low-paying.
Wow, to think that all these years the wind-power industry could have been asking slashdot instead of wasting all that time and money on research! Don't worry, I'm going to forward this entire thread to Vestas, GE, Enercon and the rest. I'm sure they'll be delighted to learn that slashdot has enroled their best minds to help with this problem.
You're attempt at making a snarky comment regarding slashdotters thinking they're smarter than people working in the field is, to put it mildly, an EPIC FAILURE, seeing as how I'm not saying anything that hasn't been known in the field for a long time, nor am I claiming too. On the one hand, I'm describing things that are already done in deployed windmills, and on the other hand I'm describing the motivation behind this new invention.
I have no idea what made you think this was my attempt at engineering a better windmill, rather than explaining the principle behind what's already been done by clever engineers.
But I feel safe assuming it involves stupidity, and probably insecurity. Good show.
A very large windmill moves at a much lower RPM than a small one, but that does not necessarily mean that the blade tip speed on the big one is lower than on the small one.
It's rotational velocity that I'm talking about, and which has been shown to reduce bird deaths.
Just out of curiousity, and I haven't RTFA yet so maybe the answer is there, but couldn't you vary the pitch of the vanes on the turbine to maintain a constant RPM in varying wind conditions, much the way a constant speed propeller on an airplane works?
They do that too, even on existing windmills. The problem is that when the wind speed is low, there's nothing you can do to make it go fast, so if you wanted to maintain constant RPM in the generator, you'd have to pitch the blades to give very low speed in high winds, which is rather counter-productive. Adjusting the resistance of the generator so it works across a wider band of RPMs, combined with adjusting blade pitch, provides much better results.
But, we are all going to have to get over seeing them as ugly or migratory-bird killers for this program to work.
And to do my part, I'll point out as I do in most wind turbine threads that windmills are not significant bird killers any more. In fact the very worst wind farm ever, Altamont Pass, killed fewer birds per year than a typical 3-story office building. And that was combining multiple worst-case factors, like an outdated scaffold design that encouraged raptors to nest on them, smaller fast-moving blades that are proven to be more difficult for birds to see and avoid, and a highly disadvantageous location in a choke point for bird migrations.
Modern wind mills have monolithic poles with rounded tops that birds can't nest or sit on, and have much larger, slower moving blades* that birds can see and avoid. I believe now they also do some cursory environmental studies to make sure they aren't putting the windmills directly in bird migratory paths, but with the other two improvements this probably isn't even that big a deal.
I'm a bird nerd. I love birds. If you can accept the bird deaths caused by glass windows in cities, windmills are not an issue.
Oh, and I think they're rather beautiful.:)
*Largely for efficiency reasons, the bigger the blade the more efficient. IIRC, the way they choose the sizes for windmill blades these days is by what will fit on the largest legally allowed trailer. I've seen convoys of trucks, each with very long trailers, each carrying *one* blade.
"The design could not only lower the cost of wind turbines but increase their power output by 50 percent to as much as 100 percent, in some locations."
100%? Why stop there?!
Because, due to this having not a damn fucking thing to do with perpetual motion or snide remarks regarding such, there's only so much energy that can be extracted from the wind. Getting a 1.5x to 2x boost -- over the course of a year, meaning combining periods where the windmill was operating efficiently, and those times where it was not -- is great. I don't know why you phrased your question the way you did.
Oh, and, uh.. why is this whole article about windmills? Couldn't these improvements in generator efficiency be used across the board?
Not really. The majority of turbine generators are designed to operate at a single, optimal frequency. Wind however is by its nature variable, so to get peak efficiency across various RPMs requires some extra ingenuity. Maybe this could be applied to your car's alternator, I don't know.
And trying to force it is only going to hurt people. It's getting to the point that if girls are particularly capable of doing math/science they get pushed to even if they don't want to in the name of equality.
For gods sake let people choose for themselves even if they don't make the choices you think they should!
I agree completely with your sentiment.
However, you're crazy if you think that if we only got rid of the influences pushing women towards CS, then the situation would represent women choosing for themselves, without anyone else trying to force them into making the decisions others think they should.
You don't get paid based on how much you or anyone else thinks you deserve. You get paid based on what salary you can command, which is regulated by supply and demand.
I don't think that they were saying that it's an outrage that HR workers don't make as much money as other professions. The outrage comes from the overall male vs female income, which female-dominated relatively-low-income professions like HR skews, and thus gives an inaccurate picture.
However even if I misinterpret the sentence starting with the word "outrage", one thing I'm sure I comprehend, and that they're correct on: The reason nobody gives a rat's ass about gender equality in those jobs is because nobody is envious of those job's salaries. Nobody cares about the gender gap in day laborers even though it's huge. If CS was a low-paying job, nobody would care about the gender gap in CS.
As for your point: would that also be a reason why there are so few males going into nursing?
I don't know the answer to that, but I would like to point out that the lack of men in nursing, and discrimination against men in nursing, was and, to a lesser degree because the situation is improving, is considered a serious issue by some, just as women in CS is considered an issue.
Ah, but that would mean it is somehow their fault, rather than the women's.
I look forward to yet another slashdot thread where a bunch of men state with authority a selection of the following: 1) Women don't want to be in CS. 2) Women's skills lie in different areas. 3) Women have it easier anyway, so if they do want to be in CS but can't hack it that's their own problem.
And of course deny that having the males in a male-dominated field openly expressing these opinions (as though they are obvious biological facts) could have anything to do with it.
Good times. Good times. Call me in thirty years where this sounds as ludicrous to everyone as when the exact same arguments were made against women being doctors, lawyers, and business executives do today.
Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
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Ender in Exile
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· Score: 1
The artist is not the work.
Well it's the artist, not the work, who gets the royalties if I buy a book.
Also, his views on homosexuality have been exaggerate by detractors, if that is what bothers you.
Having read his own words on the subject, I disagree.
Re:They are the same thing.
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Ender in Exile
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Yes. And I even corrected it.
I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean, but you could demonstrate understanding by answering it.
No. You do not understand.
I understand completely that you think that things operating outside of established limitations for the purposes of continuing the plot is in any way related to, specific to, unique to, or even particularly problematic in sci-fi. No. Plot devices are as universal as hack writers.
Because it does not have limits is what makes it magic.
But it does. Not well-defined ones, yet clearly it has limitations. I was asking you how specific those limitations had to be before you'd accept it as "not-magic". But I guess they'd have to be a lot more specific, since I guess you don't see them at all. Yet they are there.
If it is needed to transport something further than you have specified, it is done. And it is done because it is magic.... Previously "established" limitations will be ignored if the plot requires them. It is magic./i>
When did that ever happen? Or are you just saying that there could hypothetically be some hack writer for an episode who would make it happen, and that justifies saying that the limitation doesn't exist even though, as far as what has actually been written, it does?
If a car needs to drive farther on a tank of gas than is physically possible, and the author wants it to, it is done. So cars are magic? If a gun needs to fire more bullets than even the story itself establishes as being in a clip, then it does. So guns are magic? Sure. Because your usage of the word "magic" simply means "plot contrivance", and has nothing to do with the genres of sci-fi or fantasy despite your attempts to segregate the term, because anything can be used as a plot device. Which is my point. It's as possible to create self-consistent sci-fi or fantasy settings where rules are established and obeyed as it is to do the same with any other kind of fiction, and as easy to ignore those rules. Because ultimately no rule is followed except by the will of the author, and if a hack author finds a given rule inconvenient, it's gone with the stroke of a pen.
You apparently just have a prejudice or blind spot that only allows you to see this when it's sci-fi.
Magic/not-magic doesn't matter. Hackery matters.
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Ender in Exile
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That depends upon whether you understand my initial post in this thread.
Do you understand the question? You question the parameters of a transporter. How accurate do said limitations need to be before it ceases to be "magic" in your parlance? Because if it has some at least implied limitations, and writers stay mostly within that, then that's just fine writing as far as I care. Sure there are obvious exceptions in Trek to the behavior of transporters (far be it from me to never accuse Trek writers of hackery), but none of them have to do with it transporting ridiculous amounts of material over ridiculous distances and thus violating two of the parameters you mentioned.
If it is magic then it does not matter because it will always function EXACTLY as the plot requires it to. Or not function. Or function incorrectly.
No. Every device will function exactly as the plot requires it to, or not function, or function incorrectly.
And such functioning / non-fuctioning / mis-functioning will be entirely independent of ANY OTHER FACTORS.
You're acting like in a "non-magic" story there's a physics simulation is going on in the author's head, and no matter how much he needs the teapot to boil over at the exact moment the detective knocks on the door, well damn, thermodynamics says it can't yet so it doesn't. Wrong. It will. Other factors be damned. Does that make the teapot "magic"?
No. That's the point. It is magic. With a car, people understand the limitations and the writer has to work within those limitations.
Limitations that they can bend and mold as they see fit on a whim. If they need the car to crash, it will crash. If they need it to leap over a river that it would be physically impossible for it to in real life, it will.
That's covered under "cliche". And cliches are another mark of a bad writer.
I never said this wasn't bad writing, I said it made no difference if it was a "magic" transporter or a car -- plot contrivances are plot contrivances, cliche or not, reality bends to the will of the author.
When the car crashes into a tree, the writer has to explain WHY it crashed. In a way that is acceptable to the reader (who is probably a driver himself). Not just say that there was a crash and an evil twin of the driver materializes in the passenger seat. And the evil twin can only be destroyed by putting both of them back into the crashed car and driving backwards.
So the two sentences of made-up crap written to explain why the car crashed in an extremely unlikely and completely contrived way -- there was a pot hole here, and a loose lug nut here, and heretofore unknown stress fractures in the axle here, which ensured that it would crash into the culvert with the concealed cave entrance where the next step of the plot begins -- is oh so much better than two sentences of made-up crap involving techno-babble? In either case, it's completely contrived reverse-engineering of the outcome the author wanted to happen.
What's the difference? Effort? Some hypothetical but really almost insanely improbably connection to modern-day reality?
Again, the point is that MAGIC means a lazy writer who is probably going for a light story with a moral (look before you leap) rather than anything more involved. And any writer who tries magic in an involved story will miss aspects that would have rendered the plot moot because the protagonist would have more options open to him than the writer thought of.
Again, the point is that plot contrivances don't require magic. They require an author who is more concerned with making what they want to have happen, happen, than in showing a self-consistent world where the characters take reasonable actions, rather than convenient one. Because even in the most realistic of stories, characters have more options open to them than the writer thought of. And the ones that the writer does think of, and which would render the plot moot, don't work for some completely contrived (but because the words used relate to reality in some way, okay?) reason. Plot devices of this nature abound in realistic fiction. MAGIC doesn't enter into it.
And then worry about reducing the size to fit your cybernetic eyeball.
Well since as far as I can tell, she's not intending to wire this webcam into her optic nerve (the technology to do this exists but is rather preliminary at this point), who cares? I say get the best eyeball-sized wireless webcam she can get today, and then in two years, get the new greatest eyeball-sized webcam, and so forth. Maybe by the time she feels she's done all she can with successive webcam upgrades, the synthetic eye technology will be advanced enough that she can make the jump to actually replacing her missing eye with a wireless webcam so she can see out of it while simultaneously recording what she sees.
The entire concept of mapping space using coordinates is pretty insane. Everything is moving relative to everything else. Good luck space cartographers!
It works pretty well if you use polar coordinates, your point of reference is distant from the things you are locating, and you aren't expecting the coordinates to remain accurate over a long period of time. I.e. locating stars relative to earth with latitude, longitude, and distance works very well since even the closest extra-solar stars don't move much with respect to earth's rotation around the sun nor a years worth of their own movement. Sure in a thousand years the coordinates won't be accurate any more, but whatever civilization is around to care about that can update them over time. For planets/comets orbiting a star, this probably doesn't make sense, so give the coordinates as the star, with additional information defining the orbit.
Yeah, it'll be complex and I don't envy the jobs, but it's not insane.
Re:Please Read _Speaker_!
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Ender in Exile
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· Score: 1
I was a huge fan of Ender's Game. I avoided Speaker for the Dead for decades--DECADES!--despite it winning the hugo and nebula because "sequals always suck".
I was sooo wrong. Please, please, please read Speaker for the Dead!
Well, that's largely because Speaker for the Dead isn't really a "sequel", it's a story unto itself which happens to require the backstory of Ender the Genocide. I too was surprised by how good Speaker was, with a completely different feel than Ender's Game. Later I learned that originally Speaker was the novel he wanted to write, and Ender's Game was just the set-up, and wasn't originally intended to be a full novel.
The sequels to Speaker are much more like traditional sequels, carrying on the story directly, and aren't nearly as great as the first two books. I enjoyed them, but you may not if sequels aren't your thing.
Re:Transporters are a perfect example of that.
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Ender in Exile
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What's the minimum range? Maximum range? Minimum amount of material that can be moved? Maximum amount of material that can be moved? Etc.
The next room over. At least the distance of a typical (whatever that is for a star ship) orbit, but not as far as from one planet in a system to another. Not much, but this rarely seems important. Quite a bit, but not so much that they can transport entire buildings at a time. Etc.
Does it really matter exactly what the specifics are, as long as there are orders-of-magnitude limitations? Or are you really going to complain if the Enterprise transports 15% more cargo in a single transport than it should be able to? I say as long as they don't defeat the Klingons by transporting the anti-matter from their engine into the bridge, they're good.
I mean there are cases where the clearly bend the rules when convenient (the shields thing), but the limitations you're discussing here strike me as almost entirely irrelevant.
The problem is that since they are not based upon any current technology, any plot that would be instantly invalidated by them simply requires that the writer render them non-functional for the duration. Try to number the different problems with the transporters in all the TV shows and movies.
Yeah, because authors don't find arbitrary reasons to cause actual, contemporary pieces of technology to stop working whenever it's convenient for the plot. Is there really an important distinction between "Oh damn, the battery on my 67 Mustang inexplicably died so I can't just drive away from danger", and "Oh damn, the electrical storm that inexplicably formed on the planet's surface is blocking the transporter signal so I can't just transport my crew away from danger"? The only difference I can see is that we have a basis for knowing that a dead battery would prevent a Mustang from starting, while we just have to assume the transporter doesn't work through a storm. Big whoop; either way it's a plot device.
Sure, your 67 Mustang is never going to cause an evil-you to be summoned from an alternate dimensions (unless there's a Stephen King story I haven't read), but well that's sci-fi in the Trek world for you.
Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
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Ender in Exile
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I think he's an annoying editorial writer with back-asswards views, but this atheist can still enjoy his works.
I find his personal politics abhorrent, but I can't really find any fault with how those views may be expressed in his works. I mean, his personal politics are quite absolutist and shallow, yet in his books we have people of differing opinions trying to make moral and practical choices in extremely difficult situations, and often pay a heavy price for whatever choice they do make. It's the depth of the moral conflicts in the books that interested me.
That said, I only found out about his personal politics after having already acquired and read as many of his books as I cared to (because it seemed the quality was dropping off). If I was going out to buy Ender's Game for the first time today, knowing what I do about the author, I may reconsider the purchase.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, that's a pretty damn regimented sleep time. I guess there's no quickly checking /. before bed.
According to the expanded flight plan, checking /. is scheduled for 11:47 to 11:55.
You do know that the Enterprise was never actually built, don't you? All of that footage was either a 6 inch model or some cheesy computer graphics?
And then what, they used a replicator or something to scale the model up to full size once they got it into space? That would make sense; even in the future it wouldn't make sense to lift something the size of the Enterprise into space if you didn't have to.
Glad you cleared that up!
Ah, well, I considered that possibility, but discarded it for the sake of a good flame. So not upset, until I found out that my flame was itself failure because I misunderstood what I was replying to. :(
From TFA:
" When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor's degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys."
Yet on the other hand:
"In 2001-2, only 28 percent of all undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women. By 2004-5, the number had declined to only 22 percent."
Which, anecdotally, matches my experience at Michigan (which was a few years prior to the latest numbers), where women in CE classes were quite rare, but extremely common in ME and ChemE. I didn't take any ChemE courses, but I had lectures in the building and friends in the senior/graduate level classes that I peeked in on. Also, I participated in some minority and women in engineering programs, so I knew a lot of women engineering students. None of them were CE.
Not quite. No one cares about gender equality in those jobs because they're women-dominated. Meanwhile, the pay is generally low because they're women-dominated -- it's a pretty vicious cycle of shunting women towards lower-paying jobs, and then artificially keeping the status of them low to justify the low wages. And because the status and wages are low, men aren't encouraged to pursue that line of work. The two biggest examples of this are teaching and nursing.
Actually, nursing is a perfect example of why that isn't true. Nursing is a well-paying profession, and people do care about the gender gap in nursing, with active attempts to recruit more men and combat the prejudices that lead to the gap. It mirrors the situation with CS very well -- though, as I understand it, with nursing a lot of the prejudice still comes from other men in the medical field rather than female nurses.
Also, there are male-dominated fields that are low paying where nobody cares if there is gender equality.
So while the negative feedback cycles you mention do exist in some jobs, it's mostly confined to the ones that are already low-paying.
Which is why nobody cares about gender equality in HR... What was your point again?
Wow, to think that all these years the wind-power industry could have been asking slashdot instead of wasting all that time and money on research! Don't worry, I'm going to forward this entire thread to Vestas, GE, Enercon and the rest. I'm sure they'll be delighted to learn that slashdot has enroled their best minds to help with this problem.
You're attempt at making a snarky comment regarding slashdotters thinking they're smarter than people working in the field is, to put it mildly, an EPIC FAILURE, seeing as how I'm not saying anything that hasn't been known in the field for a long time, nor am I claiming too. On the one hand, I'm describing things that are already done in deployed windmills, and on the other hand I'm describing the motivation behind this new invention.
I have no idea what made you think this was my attempt at engineering a better windmill, rather than explaining the principle behind what's already been done by clever engineers.
But I feel safe assuming it involves stupidity, and probably insecurity. Good show.
A very large windmill moves at a much lower RPM than a small one, but that does not necessarily mean that the blade tip speed on the big one is lower than on the small one.
It's rotational velocity that I'm talking about, and which has been shown to reduce bird deaths.
Just out of curiousity, and I haven't RTFA yet so maybe the answer is there, but couldn't you vary the pitch of the vanes on the turbine to maintain a constant RPM in varying wind conditions, much the way a constant speed propeller on an airplane works?
They do that too, even on existing windmills. The problem is that when the wind speed is low, there's nothing you can do to make it go fast, so if you wanted to maintain constant RPM in the generator, you'd have to pitch the blades to give very low speed in high winds, which is rather counter-productive. Adjusting the resistance of the generator so it works across a wider band of RPMs, combined with adjusting blade pitch, provides much better results.
But, we are all going to have to get over seeing them as ugly or migratory-bird killers for this program to work.
And to do my part, I'll point out as I do in most wind turbine threads that windmills are not significant bird killers any more. In fact the very worst wind farm ever, Altamont Pass, killed fewer birds per year than a typical 3-story office building. And that was combining multiple worst-case factors, like an outdated scaffold design that encouraged raptors to nest on them, smaller fast-moving blades that are proven to be more difficult for birds to see and avoid, and a highly disadvantageous location in a choke point for bird migrations.
Modern wind mills have monolithic poles with rounded tops that birds can't nest or sit on, and have much larger, slower moving blades* that birds can see and avoid. I believe now they also do some cursory environmental studies to make sure they aren't putting the windmills directly in bird migratory paths, but with the other two improvements this probably isn't even that big a deal.
I'm a bird nerd. I love birds. If you can accept the bird deaths caused by glass windows in cities, windmills are not an issue.
Oh, and I think they're rather beautiful. :)
*Largely for efficiency reasons, the bigger the blade the more efficient. IIRC, the way they choose the sizes for windmill blades these days is by what will fit on the largest legally allowed trailer. I've seen convoys of trucks, each with very long trailers, each carrying *one* blade.
"The design could not only lower the cost of wind turbines but increase their power output by 50 percent to as much as 100 percent, in some locations."
100%? Why stop there?!
Because, due to this having not a damn fucking thing to do with perpetual motion or snide remarks regarding such, there's only so much energy that can be extracted from the wind. Getting a 1.5x to 2x boost -- over the course of a year, meaning combining periods where the windmill was operating efficiently, and those times where it was not -- is great. I don't know why you phrased your question the way you did.
Oh, and, uh.. why is this whole article about windmills? Couldn't these improvements in generator efficiency be used across the board?
Not really. The majority of turbine generators are designed to operate at a single, optimal frequency. Wind however is by its nature variable, so to get peak efficiency across various RPMs requires some extra ingenuity. Maybe this could be applied to your car's alternator, I don't know.
If the women wanted to make the same money as an engineer, they could tough it out through engineering school.
They do... just not CE or CS. HMMMMMMMMMMM.
And trying to force it is only going to hurt people.
It's getting to the point that if girls are particularly capable of doing math/science they get pushed to even if they don't want to in the name of equality.
For gods sake let people choose for themselves even if they don't make the choices you think they should!
I agree completely with your sentiment.
However, you're crazy if you think that if we only got rid of the influences pushing women towards CS, then the situation would represent women choosing for themselves, without anyone else trying to force them into making the decisions others think they should.
You don't get paid based on how much you or anyone else thinks you deserve. You get paid based on what salary you can command, which is regulated by supply and demand.
I don't think that they were saying that it's an outrage that HR workers don't make as much money as other professions. The outrage comes from the overall male vs female income, which female-dominated relatively-low-income professions like HR skews, and thus gives an inaccurate picture.
However even if I misinterpret the sentence starting with the word "outrage", one thing I'm sure I comprehend, and that they're correct on: The reason nobody gives a rat's ass about gender equality in those jobs is because nobody is envious of those job's salaries. Nobody cares about the gender gap in day laborers even though it's huge. If CS was a low-paying job, nobody would care about the gender gap in CS.
As for your point: would that also be a reason why there are so few males going into nursing?
I don't know the answer to that, but I would like to point out that the lack of men in nursing, and discrimination against men in nursing, was and, to a lesser degree because the situation is improving, is considered a serious issue by some, just as women in CS is considered an issue.
Ah, but that would mean it is somehow their fault, rather than the women's.
I look forward to yet another slashdot thread where a bunch of men state with authority a selection of the following:
1) Women don't want to be in CS.
2) Women's skills lie in different areas.
3) Women have it easier anyway, so if they do want to be in CS but can't hack it that's their own problem.
And of course deny that having the males in a male-dominated field openly expressing these opinions (as though they are obvious biological facts) could have anything to do with it.
Good times. Good times. Call me in thirty years where this sounds as ludicrous to everyone as when the exact same arguments were made against women being doctors, lawyers, and business executives do today.
The artist is not the work.
Well it's the artist, not the work, who gets the royalties if I buy a book.
Also, his views on homosexuality have been exaggerate by detractors, if that is what bothers you.
Having read his own words on the subject, I disagree.
Yes. And I even corrected it.
I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean, but you could demonstrate understanding by answering it.
No. You do not understand.
I understand completely that you think that things operating outside of established limitations for the purposes of continuing the plot is in any way related to, specific to, unique to, or even particularly problematic in sci-fi. No. Plot devices are as universal as hack writers.
Because it does not have limits is what makes it magic.
But it does. Not well-defined ones, yet clearly it has limitations. I was asking you how specific those limitations had to be before you'd accept it as "not-magic". But I guess they'd have to be a lot more specific, since I guess you don't see them at all. Yet they are there.
If it is needed to transport something further than you have specified, it is done. And it is done because it is magic. ...
Previously "established" limitations will be ignored if the plot requires them. It is magic./i>
When did that ever happen? Or are you just saying that there could hypothetically be some hack writer for an episode who would make it happen, and that justifies saying that the limitation doesn't exist even though, as far as what has actually been written, it does?
If a car needs to drive farther on a tank of gas than is physically possible, and the author wants it to, it is done. So cars are magic? If a gun needs to fire more bullets than even the story itself establishes as being in a clip, then it does. So guns are magic? Sure. Because your usage of the word "magic" simply means "plot contrivance", and has nothing to do with the genres of sci-fi or fantasy despite your attempts to segregate the term, because anything can be used as a plot device. Which is my point. It's as possible to create self-consistent sci-fi or fantasy settings where rules are established and obeyed as it is to do the same with any other kind of fiction, and as easy to ignore those rules. Because ultimately no rule is followed except by the will of the author, and if a hack author finds a given rule inconvenient, it's gone with the stroke of a pen.
You apparently just have a prejudice or blind spot that only allows you to see this when it's sci-fi.
That depends upon whether you understand my initial post in this thread.
Do you understand the question? You question the parameters of a transporter. How accurate do said limitations need to be before it ceases to be "magic" in your parlance? Because if it has some at least implied limitations, and writers stay mostly within that, then that's just fine writing as far as I care. Sure there are obvious exceptions in Trek to the behavior of transporters (far be it from me to never accuse Trek writers of hackery), but none of them have to do with it transporting ridiculous amounts of material over ridiculous distances and thus violating two of the parameters you mentioned.
If it is magic then it does not matter because it will always function EXACTLY as the plot requires it to. Or not function. Or function incorrectly.
No. Every device will function exactly as the plot requires it to, or not function, or function incorrectly.
And such functioning / non-fuctioning / mis-functioning will be entirely independent of ANY OTHER FACTORS.
You're acting like in a "non-magic" story there's a physics simulation is going on in the author's head, and no matter how much he needs the teapot to boil over at the exact moment the detective knocks on the door, well damn, thermodynamics says it can't yet so it doesn't. Wrong. It will. Other factors be damned. Does that make the teapot "magic"?
No. That's the point. It is magic. With a car, people understand the limitations and the writer has to work within those limitations.
Limitations that they can bend and mold as they see fit on a whim. If they need the car to crash, it will crash. If they need it to leap over a river that it would be physically impossible for it to in real life, it will.
That's covered under "cliche". And cliches are another mark of a bad writer.
I never said this wasn't bad writing, I said it made no difference if it was a "magic" transporter or a car -- plot contrivances are plot contrivances, cliche or not, reality bends to the will of the author.
When the car crashes into a tree, the writer has to explain WHY it crashed. In a way that is acceptable to the reader (who is probably a driver himself). Not just say that there was a crash and an evil twin of the driver materializes in the passenger seat. And the evil twin can only be destroyed by putting both of them back into the crashed car and driving backwards.
So the two sentences of made-up crap written to explain why the car crashed in an extremely unlikely and completely contrived way -- there was a pot hole here, and a loose lug nut here, and heretofore unknown stress fractures in the axle here, which ensured that it would crash into the culvert with the concealed cave entrance where the next step of the plot begins -- is oh so much better than two sentences of made-up crap involving techno-babble? In either case, it's completely contrived reverse-engineering of the outcome the author wanted to happen.
What's the difference? Effort? Some hypothetical but really almost insanely improbably connection to modern-day reality?
Again, the point is that MAGIC means a lazy writer who is probably going for a light story with a moral (look before you leap) rather than anything more involved. And any writer who tries magic in an involved story will miss aspects that would have rendered the plot moot because the protagonist would have more options open to him than the writer thought of.
Again, the point is that plot contrivances don't require magic. They require an author who is more concerned with making what they want to have happen, happen, than in showing a self-consistent world where the characters take reasonable actions, rather than convenient one. Because even in the most realistic of stories, characters have more options open to them than the writer thought of. And the ones that the writer does think of, and which would render the plot moot, don't work for some completely contrived (but because the words used relate to reality in some way, okay?) reason. Plot devices of this nature abound in realistic fiction. MAGIC doesn't enter into it.
And then worry about reducing the size to fit your cybernetic eyeball.
Well since as far as I can tell, she's not intending to wire this webcam into her optic nerve (the technology to do this exists but is rather preliminary at this point), who cares? I say get the best eyeball-sized wireless webcam she can get today, and then in two years, get the new greatest eyeball-sized webcam, and so forth. Maybe by the time she feels she's done all she can with successive webcam upgrades, the synthetic eye technology will be advanced enough that she can make the jump to actually replacing her missing eye with a wireless webcam so she can see out of it while simultaneously recording what she sees.
Maybe linking to a few pictures of girls in bikini's is karma-whoring
I forgive you!
The entire concept of mapping space using coordinates is pretty insane. Everything is moving relative to everything else. Good luck space cartographers!
It works pretty well if you use polar coordinates, your point of reference is distant from the things you are locating, and you aren't expecting the coordinates to remain accurate over a long period of time. I.e. locating stars relative to earth with latitude, longitude, and distance works very well since even the closest extra-solar stars don't move much with respect to earth's rotation around the sun nor a years worth of their own movement. Sure in a thousand years the coordinates won't be accurate any more, but whatever civilization is around to care about that can update them over time. For planets/comets orbiting a star, this probably doesn't make sense, so give the coordinates as the star, with additional information defining the orbit.
Yeah, it'll be complex and I don't envy the jobs, but it's not insane.
I was a huge fan of Ender's Game. I avoided Speaker for the Dead for decades--DECADES!--despite it winning the hugo and nebula because "sequals always suck".
I was sooo wrong. Please, please, please read Speaker for the Dead!
Well, that's largely because Speaker for the Dead isn't really a "sequel", it's a story unto itself which happens to require the backstory of Ender the Genocide. I too was surprised by how good Speaker was, with a completely different feel than Ender's Game. Later I learned that originally Speaker was the novel he wanted to write, and Ender's Game was just the set-up, and wasn't originally intended to be a full novel.
The sequels to Speaker are much more like traditional sequels, carrying on the story directly, and aren't nearly as great as the first two books. I enjoyed them, but you may not if sequels aren't your thing.
What's the minimum range? Maximum range? Minimum amount of material that can be moved? Maximum amount of material that can be moved? Etc.
The next room over. At least the distance of a typical (whatever that is for a star ship) orbit, but not as far as from one planet in a system to another. Not much, but this rarely seems important. Quite a bit, but not so much that they can transport entire buildings at a time. Etc.
Does it really matter exactly what the specifics are, as long as there are orders-of-magnitude limitations? Or are you really going to complain if the Enterprise transports 15% more cargo in a single transport than it should be able to? I say as long as they don't defeat the Klingons by transporting the anti-matter from their engine into the bridge, they're good.
I mean there are cases where the clearly bend the rules when convenient (the shields thing), but the limitations you're discussing here strike me as almost entirely irrelevant.
The problem is that since they are not based upon any current technology, any plot that would be instantly invalidated by them simply requires that the writer render them non-functional for the duration. Try to number the different problems with the transporters in all the TV shows and movies.
Yeah, because authors don't find arbitrary reasons to cause actual, contemporary pieces of technology to stop working whenever it's convenient for the plot. Is there really an important distinction between "Oh damn, the battery on my 67 Mustang inexplicably died so I can't just drive away from danger", and "Oh damn, the electrical storm that inexplicably formed on the planet's surface is blocking the transporter signal so I can't just transport my crew away from danger"? The only difference I can see is that we have a basis for knowing that a dead battery would prevent a Mustang from starting, while we just have to assume the transporter doesn't work through a storm. Big whoop; either way it's a plot device.
Sure, your 67 Mustang is never going to cause an evil-you to be summoned from an alternate dimensions (unless there's a Stephen King story I haven't read), but well that's sci-fi in the Trek world for you.
I think he's an annoying editorial writer with back-asswards views, but this atheist can still enjoy his works.
I find his personal politics abhorrent, but I can't really find any fault with how those views may be expressed in his works. I mean, his personal politics are quite absolutist and shallow, yet in his books we have people of differing opinions trying to make moral and practical choices in extremely difficult situations, and often pay a heavy price for whatever choice they do make. It's the depth of the moral conflicts in the books that interested me.
That said, I only found out about his personal politics after having already acquired and read as many of his books as I cared to (because it seemed the quality was dropping off). If I was going out to buy Ender's Game for the first time today, knowing what I do about the author, I may reconsider the purchase.