The author had a strong premise (religeon destroying civilization) and he undercut it near the end, refusing let the blame stay where it belonged. Cowardly, I suspect.
The cult in Nightfall has more than clue about what is about to happen. The scientists can only grope for an answer and they are running out of time. It isn't religion which destroys their civilization, it is the darkness which reveals the elemental truth about their world.
I suppose 2001, one of my favorite movies, would be a complete failure if it were to be shown to todays public.
It would be hard to think of a movie more crammed with special effects than 2001. It would also be hard to imagine a movie looking more like a drug induced hallucination at the end. So much for understanding. 2001 is chillingly cold and remote, an intellectual exercise for the geek. Rather like the Foundation Trilogy in that respect.
But, his science related fiction was NOT space opera. That is an entirely new phenomenon, which probably had it's beginning with "Lost in Space", then "Star Trek".
The Skylark of Space was serialized in 1928. Buck Rogers also makes his first appearance in Amazing Stories in 1928, and on the comic pages in 1929. Alex Raymund's Flash Gordon arrives in 1934. Buck Rogers had a fifteen year run on radio, beginning in 1932. When Worlds Collide is published in 1933. The genre has an immediate, cinematic, appeal and has defined Sci-Fi in pop culture for eighty years.
It could fuel a lamp, stove, furnace, a stationary engine, a motorcycle, an air ship or an ocean liner.
The internal combustion engine means no more boiler explosions. It means you can shed all the complexities and dangers of coal and steam.
Petroleum products could be easily transported by ship, barge, pipeline, tank car, truck or aircraft to anywhere they were needed - in small amounts, by the barrel or the can. There is no "post-processing" required.
The Model T Ford could transport a family of four twenty-five miles on a gallon of gas.
That is a day trip by horse and buggy - without the expense of caring for the horse. Without - someone - having to remove 50 pounds of manure a day.
The Ford cruise safely and comfortably at 45 mph on a hard surfaced road - almost non-existent outside the cities, of course. But quite competitive with the suburban streetcar line or commuter railroad.
Meaning the user more interested in the out-of-the-box experience than in ideological purity. The user who just might make the "Year of Linux" on the desktop a reality.
What if CmdrTaco made a post on the front page tomorrow asking every visitor to Slashdot to send EA a message that they will refuse to purchase any game with DRM. One email won't do it. 100 emails won't do it. But a few thousand emails in a single day is hard to ignore. .
Congratulations.
You have just re-invented the crap flood.
The lobbyist's mass mail-in campaign is as old as the postage stamp. It is the longest running gag in MAD magazine: The form letter in which you insert your favorite cliches and bits of jargon. It is the review geeks post in full mob force to Amazon.com before a game has been released.
I can't believe people still fire revolutionary war era weapons in a modern world. Why the things haven't rusted into uselessness I just don't understand.;)
Most of them have. The "replica" long rifle - as a presentation piece or a gentleman's sporting gun with over-elaborate inlaid decoration in brass or silver - appears as early as 1825. Something more authentic can be had today for $600-$700. Pennsylvania Rifles
I seem to recall sometime in about 2000 there was a report that a computer program had been designed that asked a series of questions and provided a most likely diagnosis.
You might want to look at the table on page 10: "Symptoms, Explanations, and Serious Illnesses." The "virtual doctor" has been around like forever - page through almost any back issue of Byte or Creative Computing - if you want to try a sampling FreeMD is a good a place as any to begin. Personally I prefer my HMO's help line nurses, who are on-call 24 hours a day, toll-free.
I'm sure the study concludes that it's a great idea to search the Internet to see if you have a terrible disease using Windows Live Search.
What the study actually found, of course, is that you are far better off using a search engine that links only to known-good sources for public health information.
The AMA. The American Cancer Society. The Center for Disease Control.
The geek shouldn't shrug off studies like these because they expose a serious problem with a general search engine like Google - and a search service that has perhaps become too much a marketing machine.
The problem might not be the use of the internet for information, so much as how people are going about getting and using that information.
The Microsoft research paper addresses this directly by comparing and contrasting how users responded to searches through MSN and MSN Health and Fitness, which searches a limited number of trusted sources for public health information. As you would expect, sites which are carefully vetted and never needlessly provocative or alarmist calm most fears.
I'm sorry, but telling the video game industry they're doing a good job of "keeping inappropriate" content out of the hands of children is both a slap in the face to the parents that should be watching what their kids are buying, and a slap in the face to the kids who buy these games hoping for something interesting, only to find talking frogs, barbie, and games where everybody gets along and wins -- when they're 14! Why can they go see a few hundred zombies get set on fire, shot at, or otherwise die in the theatre (as long as they're all non-smoking zombies), but can't get the same thing in a video game?
.
The video game is not a movie.
That is why the game based movie sucks rocks.
It is also why the action game based movie has an adolescent male demographic, which for the theater owner also sucks rocks.
The geek knows this - but balks at admitting that a movie is not a video game. That it is a different experience with a different set of rules.
The movie runs 90 minutes to two hours and you sit at a significant physical and psychological distance from the action.
You are not hunched over a keypad role-playing Hannibal Lector for the better part of two weeks --- or two months.
I tried showing her some "real" video games, only to have mom come down on me like a ton of bricks...
There was earlier story today about a geek who wanted to give his two year old son a laptop. Computer For a Child?
"Generation Snowflake" reads - but reads books which share her own interests and values, and it these books which are being successfully adapted into films. `Twilight' is the new breed of chick flick
There are more on the way, including James Patterson's Maximum Ride.
It's set in a world where the majority of people are packing guns, lasers, and rocket launchers.
I can't help wondering why you should be trusting a pre-war weapon in a Mad Max world. Why the thing hasn't rusted into uselessness or blown up in your face.
there used to be a thing called "community TV" a neighborhood would buy a lot, set up a big tower with antennas and wire all the homes with "cable tv" and everyone paid $25.00 a year to it's upkeep and upgrading.
And if you were lucky, you might get decent reception of three regional VHF stations.
The "community antenna" was just that - an antenna.
Out in the boondocks.
HBO doesn't have satellite distribution before 1975, no 24-hour service until 1981, no original programming until 1983. HBO
"She now faces up to 3 years in jail and $300,000 in fines -- a troubling precedent for anyone who has ever registered with a website under a pseudonym."
Use of a pseudonym is not a "Get Out Of Jail Free" Card.
It is not a grant of immunity from any civil action. You remain legally responsible for the consequences of your actions - no less than in the world outside.
Sure, almost anyone can play a round of knock-about pond hockey as a kid.
. But fundamentally, organized league play is a physically demanding - potentially very dangerous sport - at every level. Typically kids begin training no later than nine or ten and it's a big investment in time and money.
You can be a Wii Bowler and call yourself physically active. But that isn't going to be good enough to keep you competitive on the rink with a talented seventh grader.
2. this is corporate takeover of our culture. its our culture. not their ip. we need to hammer this point home. .
Godzilla is a corporate creation.
The corporate product has defined and shaped pop culture for generations.
When your great-great-grand parents played cowboys and indians as kids where do you think they found their inspiration?
It's unlikely they ever closer to the real West than the cap pistols and cowboy hats of the five and dime, the Saturday Matinee and the arena stage shows of Buffalo Bill Cody and the King Ranch.
The Wild West was a commercialized fantasy before Custer was cold in his grave. All the traditional elements of the western story are in place decades before "The Virginian" or "The Great Train Robbery."
The geek who peppers every post with a reference to "Star Trek" or "Star Wars" is an IP driven corporate artifact.
Law & Fiction and The Writer's Medical and Forensics Lab, are two very interesting and unusual sites, and, if you are into this stuff, both well worth your time.
The privilege takes strange twists and turns in real life:
The police recorded a telephone conversation between defendant and his wife in which he admitted to having oral sex with the wife's daughter. This recording was admitted into evidence. The defendant claimed that the communication was protected by the marital privilege.
The Court rejected the defendant's argument and affirmed his conviction stating:
"no such privilege exists where the communication arises out of the abuse of a spouse's child upon the theory that the wrong to the child is equally a wrong to the . . . spouse and that the performance of the injury is equally as destructive of the marriage"
Why would the government pay her to not grow food on her farm?
.
1 Over-production.
Prices collapse. Markets collapse.
2 Over-production.
The land is exhausted. That requires different plantings to repair some of the damage - extra tilling, a lot of fertilizer.
Rebuilding can take decades - consider the dust bowls of the thirties.
3 Green space. Conservation.
The land may be marginal for commercial agriculture. That doesn't mean it has no value as wild habitat or as a buffer zone against suburban development. Politically in the states, "subsidies to the family farm" is an easier sell than a government-owned "land trust."
"Marginal for agriculture" usually implies a shortage of water, distance from major markets, and a host of other problems that will show up later - in what you pay for gas, electric, water, sewage service, and so on.
One of the core protections in the US legal system is that you cannot be made to testify against a close relative. That niche just got filled nicely by DNA cross matching. .
You are thinking of the old notion that you can't be forced to testify against your spouse. "The two become one."
But "to testify" means "to be cross-examined."
It is about what you can be forced to say on the stand, not about what was discovered in a forensic examination of your hair, blood, fingerprints and so on.
The privilege against self-incrimination is fundamentally a defense against the use of psychological manipulation, extortion, bribery and torture to extract a confession.
This is done purely because of the geek-factor of building it. If you cant live with that, please apply for geek credentials, just so you can hand them in out the way out.
all the same, there is much to be said for the hardware hack that is both imaginative and useful.
I never have bought a product found through an advert.
I have my doubts. Add-block won't erase the sponsored responses to a Google search. The in-game add. The advertiser doesn't need the impulse "click n' buy," he only needs to build a subliminal awareness of his brand name and product.
Since the days of the 15 cent burger and fries McD's has been looking at new ways to deliver a more consistent product, reduce waste, simplify and speed production. "You can't be Mommy." Small savings here and there can reap very big rewards.
Slashdot Mirror
The cult in Nightfall has more than clue about what is about to happen. The scientists can only grope for an answer and they are running out of time. It isn't religion which destroys their civilization, it is the darkness which reveals the elemental truth about their world.
It would be hard to think of a movie more crammed with special effects than 2001. It would also be hard to imagine a movie looking more like a drug induced hallucination at the end. So much for understanding. 2001 is chillingly cold and remote, an intellectual exercise for the geek. Rather like the Foundation Trilogy in that respect.
The Mule is the only roadblock in their path - and the Mule is sick and sterile. You don't have to defeat him, you only have to survive him.
The only players who matter in this game are invisible, sitting by their chess boards on Trantor.
To me, that is deeply unsatisfying.
The Skylark of Space was serialized in 1928. Buck Rogers also makes his first appearance in Amazing Stories in 1928, and on the comic pages in 1929. Alex Raymund's Flash Gordon arrives in 1934. Buck Rogers had a fifteen year run on radio, beginning in 1932. When Worlds Collide is published in 1933. The genre has an immediate, cinematic, appeal and has defined Sci-Fi in pop culture for eighty years.
.
Oil solved many problems.
It could fuel a lamp, stove, furnace, a stationary engine, a motorcycle, an air ship or an ocean liner.
The internal combustion engine means no more boiler explosions. It means you can shed all the complexities and dangers of coal and steam.
Petroleum products could be easily transported by ship, barge, pipeline, tank car, truck or aircraft to anywhere they were needed - in small amounts, by the barrel or the can. There is no "post-processing" required.
The Model T Ford could transport a family of four twenty-five miles on a gallon of gas.
That is a day trip by horse and buggy - without the expense of caring for the horse. Without - someone - having to remove 50 pounds of manure a day.
The Ford cruise safely and comfortably at 45 mph on a hard surfaced road - almost non-existent outside the cities, of course. But quite competitive with the suburban streetcar line or commuter railroad.
The Sippingport reactor went critical on December 2, 1957.
50 years on, 'Atoms for Peace' is remembered We know a lot about the commercial development of nuclear power.
Meaning the user more interested in the out-of-the-box experience than in ideological purity. The user who just might make the "Year of Linux" on the desktop a reality.
.
Congratulations.
You have just re-invented the crap flood.
The lobbyist's mass mail-in campaign is as old as the postage stamp. It is the longest running gag in MAD magazine: The form letter in which you insert your favorite cliches and bits of jargon. It is the review geeks post in full mob force to Amazon.com before a game has been released.
Defective by design.
Most of them have.
The "replica" long rifle - as a presentation piece or a gentleman's sporting gun with over-elaborate inlaid decoration in brass or silver - appears as early as 1825. Something more authentic can be had today for $600-$700. Pennsylvania Rifles
You might want to look at the table on page 10: "Symptoms, Explanations, and Serious Illnesses." The "virtual doctor" has been around like forever - page through almost any back issue of Byte or Creative Computing - if you want to try a sampling FreeMD is a good a place as any to begin. Personally I prefer my HMO's help line nurses, who are on-call 24 hours a day, toll-free.
What the study actually found, of course, is that you are far better off using a search engine that links only to known-good sources for public health information.
The AMA. The American Cancer Society. The Center for Disease Control.
The geek shouldn't shrug off studies like these because they expose a serious problem with a general search engine like Google - and a search service that has perhaps become too much a marketing machine.
The Microsoft research paper addresses this directly by comparing and contrasting how users responded to searches through MSN and MSN Health and Fitness, which searches a limited number of trusted sources for public health information. As you would expect, sites which are carefully vetted and never needlessly provocative or alarmist calm most fears.
.
The video game is not a movie.
That is why the game based movie sucks rocks.
It is also why the action game based movie has an adolescent male demographic, which for the theater owner also sucks rocks.
The geek knows this - but balks at admitting that a movie is not a video game. That it is a different experience with a different set of rules.
The movie runs 90 minutes to two hours and you sit at a significant physical and psychological distance from the action.
You are not hunched over a keypad role-playing Hannibal Lector for the better part of two weeks --- or two months.
I tried showing her some "real" video games, only to have mom come down on me like a ton of bricks...
There was earlier story today about a geek who wanted to give his two year old son a laptop. Computer For a Child?
"Generation Snowflake" reads - but reads books which share her own interests and values, and it these books which are being successfully adapted into films. `Twilight' is the new breed of chick flick
There are more on the way, including James Patterson's Maximum Ride.
I can't help wondering why you should be trusting a pre-war weapon in a Mad Max world. Why the thing hasn't rusted into uselessness or blown up in your face.
And if you were lucky, you might get decent reception of three regional VHF stations.
The "community antenna" was just that - an antenna.
Out in the boondocks.
HBO doesn't have satellite distribution before 1975, no 24-hour service until 1981, no original programming until 1983. HBO
Use of a pseudonym is not a "Get Out Of Jail Free" Card.
It is not a grant of immunity from any civil action. You remain legally responsible for the consequences of your actions - no less than in the world outside.
.
But fundamentally, organized league play is a physically demanding - potentially very dangerous sport - at every level. Typically kids begin training no later than nine or ten and it's a big investment in time and money.
You can be a Wii Bowler and call yourself physically active. But that isn't going to be good enough to keep you competitive on the rink with a talented seventh grader.
.
Godzilla is a corporate creation.
The corporate product has defined and shaped pop culture for generations.
When your great-great-grand parents played cowboys and indians as kids where do you think they found their inspiration?
It's unlikely they ever closer to the real West than the cap pistols and cowboy hats of the five and dime, the Saturday Matinee and the arena stage shows of Buffalo Bill Cody and the King Ranch.
The Wild West was a commercialized fantasy before Custer was cold in his grave. All the traditional elements of the western story are in place decades before "The Virginian" or "The Great Train Robbery."
The geek who peppers every post with a reference to "Star Trek" or "Star Wars" is an IP driven corporate artifact.
Nothing more.
Law & Fiction and The Writer's Medical and Forensics Lab, are two very interesting and unusual sites, and, if you are into this stuff, both well worth your time.
The privilege takes strange twists and turns in real life:
The police recorded a telephone conversation between defendant and his wife in which he admitted to having oral sex with the wife's daughter. This recording was admitted into evidence. The defendant claimed that the communication was protected by the marital privilege.
The Court rejected the defendant's argument and affirmed his conviction stating: "no such privilege exists where the communication arises out of the abuse of a spouse's child upon the theory that the wrong to the child is equally a wrong to the . . . spouse and that the performance of the injury is equally as destructive of the marriage"
Thus, the Court found that the marital privilege, whose purpose is to protect the marriage, cannot be used to conceal acts which are themselves destructive to the marriage. Marital Privilege Does Not Protect Conversation Between Defendant And Wife That Defendant Had Oral Sex With Wife's Child
If you take this argument to its logical conclusion, I am not sure what, if anything, is left of the privilege.
.
1 Over-production.
Prices collapse. Markets collapse.
2 Over-production.
The land is exhausted. That requires different plantings to repair some of the damage - extra tilling, a lot of fertilizer.
Rebuilding can take decades - consider the dust bowls of the thirties.
3 Green space. Conservation.
The land may be marginal for commercial agriculture. That doesn't mean it has no value as wild habitat or as a buffer zone against suburban development. Politically in the states, "subsidies to the family farm" is an easier sell than a government-owned "land trust."
"Marginal for agriculture" usually implies a shortage of water, distance from major markets, and a host of other problems that will show up later - in what you pay for gas, electric, water, sewage service, and so on.
.
You are thinking of the old notion that you can't be forced to testify against your spouse. "The two become one."
But "to testify" means "to be cross-examined."
It is about what you can be forced to say on the stand, not about what was discovered in a forensic examination of your hair, blood, fingerprints and so on.
The privilege against self-incrimination is fundamentally a defense against the use of psychological manipulation, extortion, bribery and torture to extract a confession.
.
The same things that stopped you from planting the same sort of evidence before DNA testing:
You have to collect the samples.
You have to distribute the samples.
In ways that are safe and plausible. Getting it right means spending more time at the crime scene. This is generally considered undesirable.
Unless you are a nincompoop the frame has to fit someone you know very, very well - and who almost certainly knows you.
It had better not be the poor schnook who was struck by the crosstown bus at 5:30 on the day when your murder was committed at 9 o'clock.
all the same, there is much to be said for the hardware hack that is both imaginative and useful.
I have my doubts. Add-block won't erase the sponsored responses to a Google search. The in-game add. The advertiser doesn't need the impulse "click n' buy," he only needs to build a subliminal awareness of his brand name and product.
Since the days of the 15 cent burger and fries McD's has been looking at new ways to deliver a more consistent product, reduce waste, simplify and speed production. "You can't be Mommy." Small savings here and there can reap very big rewards.