Anyway, Norway's standard of living is pretty much down to the oil.
Nice rationalization but not accurate. Norway had a very high standard of living even before North Sea oil was discovered, Since North Sea oil Norway has for the most part resisted lavishly spending or distributing oil money. Also oil doesn't explain the high standards of living for other, non oil-producing European states that also have higher SOLs than the US.
It means that the socialist government in Norway is preparing to tax people who spend money, time and effort to create a new company and thereby jobs...So there are new stock rules going into effect next year, but theres a loop hole which some primary insiders are now using to avoid getting taxed to hell and back for being stupid enough to form a company...
And yet Norway has one of the highest standards of living in the world, higher than the US, has MUCH lower unemployment than the US, has a lower infant mortality rate than the US, AND provides universal health care for all citizens. Pretty lousy way to run a country if you ask me.
More like MS would buy Opera and shut it down, simply to reduce the competition for MS rather than as a replacement for IE. That was their main business plan for acquisitions throughout the 90's and I don;t really see them as having done an ethical about-face.
That was modded informative by somebody who doesn't know how superchargers and turbochargers work. While the turbocharger uses kinetic energy in exhaust gas to push something, don't forget what it's pushing: more gas and air into the engine.
It is a bit ironic that you were complaining tht people did not know how turbochargers work. Let me explain. Turbochargers only compress AIR. They do not compress an air/fuel mixture that is then pumped into the cylinders. The extra O2 in the cylinder head provided by the turbo simply allows more complete combustion of the fuel that is injected. That allows LESS fuel to be injected for the same power. Without turbocharging a lot of fuel goes unburned out the tailpipe while with turbocharging that wasted fuel is converted to power.
Think about it - if turbochargers required more fuel to run then you would have to depress the accelerator every time the turbo came on just to maintain the same speed. In fact just the opposite is true. In all conditions except full-throttle, less fuel has to be suppleid to cylinders to provide the same power. In the special case of full-throttle, the SAME amount of fuel is provided (the physical maximum that the fuel system can provide) but more power is developed from it.
Except with a regular line I have the option of keeping an cheap corded phone around for emergencies and it'll be powered from the central office.
Not necessarily. The central office only powers the phones for as long as their back-up batteries last. During the New York/NE regional blackout a couple of years ago POP phone service in NYC only lasted a couple of hours and then was gone. Cell phones may have worked longer, but I couldn't say because my battery ran down after using it as a flashlight to get up the pitch-black stairwell to my 10th floor apartment.
I'm afraid to install it. Is it worth it? It looks like it's loaded with the typical Yahoo! superflous-ware.
I installed it because I got a message saying there was another "Konfabulator update" to my current version. I let out a small groan when I saw it had morphed into Yahoo! Widgets but so far except for seeing the Yahoo! name too may times during the install, Yahoo! is leaving me alone. Install screens now look more Corporate and less homespun Konfabulator-like but so far all my widgets still work and look the same and I haven't gotten any pop-ups, branding, or Yahoo messages.
But why trust any other source over Wikipedia? You'd still have to spend the time checking alternate sources on something printed in a newspaper, yes? If not, why not?
Because articles in newspapers and magazines usually have a byline. If an article is by a writer with a long history of well-researched articles or who clearly has knowledge of the subject matter then there is a low chance that the article is bogus. Newspapers also do not assign shipping clerks to write science articles, while anyone can write about anything in wikipedia. The byline also means that there are career and reputation consequences if the writer tries to mislead or makes stupid mistakes. Articles in newspapers also have clearly defined rules about what may be represented as fact vs opinion.
With wikipedia there is no attribution, no way to check on the qualifications or depth of knowledge of the writer, no way to separate opinion from fact, and usually no way to even identify the writer. The perfect example is the recent wikipedia article written by a shipping company employee who falsely linked a respected professor to the assasination of both Kennedys.
I totally trust Wikipedia for what it is... a starting resource that almost always gives me a good introduction to a concept,
You said it more clearly than I did, and that is what I meant when I called wikipedia a broadaxe being used as a scalpel. My impression, and it is no more than that, is that many people use it as the definitive source and go no further.
Using wikipedia is like being handed a list of import regulations for every country on the planet but being told that 5% are wrong. At first you might think it was was a really useful tool, but I suspect that after realizing you still had to look up every country's rules anyway to make sure it wasn't one of the 5% you would soon decide it wasn't worth the effort. That's pretty much me and wkipedia.
I will grant you this: because the information on wikipedia at least has the CHANCE of being verified by others it is more likely to be trustworthy than most of the unattributed information floating around on the internet.
What people are saying is that for typical uses, it's already an invaluable tool.
Oh, I think that is a bit of overstatement. I don't think wikipedia is invaluable at all. I almost never use it and I get along fine without it. In fact, when doing google searches I avoid wikipedia articles because I simply don't trust anything written there. It is not worth my time to have to go to alternate sources to verify the information only to find that the wikipedia article was largely plagarized anyway. Granted, much of what's there is true, accurate and trustworthy, and you seem to have cited some examples, but the big problem is that there is no way to tell which information is accurate and which is not.
I agree, Wikipedia is a tool - it's a broadaxe that most people mistake to be a scalpel.
Blah, blah, blah is right. My how smart you are with all that jargon. How impressed am I? Not at all. Spouting a jargon-filled diatribe to an audience not familiar with it illuminates the state of your ego more than providing any useful information. If you even have a point, which you may very well not, you have simply made it incomprehensible.
There really should be another category added to the slashdot scoring: Self-important Twit. You rate a 5.
Actually the message box is rather large and declares the error very clearly. In addition it shows the details of what the action will do.
It does not matter how large or explicit the warning box was. If every large transaction got the same verificaton box re-stating the terms of the trade (and I suspect this is the case) the warning was useless because it will be ignored 999 times out of 1,000. Only if warning or confirmation boxes appear infrequently, when certain parameters are exceeded, will they be paid any attention. A warning box that constantly gives false negatives is poor design.
You don't have ambulance helicopters in U.S.? They're faster than your hot rod no matter what
Hmmmm...that isn;t really true. A recent article in the NYTimes (you'll have to look it up, I'm feeling lazy this morning) listed response times for ambulances vs helicopter evacuation for traffic accidents in NY State. Ambulances got patients to the hospital faster than helicopters more than half the time. This is because of flight restrictions, basing location of the helicopter, finding suitable landing spots, coordination problems with ground rescue personnel,weather, etc.
Having said that I agree that there is no excuse for driving at unsafe speeds to get someone to the hospital.
Look, traffic engineers know, and have known for a very long time, that the safest speed to set speed limits at is the 85% percentile speed...Accidents at the 58 experimental sites where speed limits were lowered increased by 5.4 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate is 44 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 11 percent to an increase of 26 percent....
He was being funny, you moron.
But anyway, what a bunch of fucking nonsense yourself.
---Funny part begins---
I happen to know that engineers have determined that the safest speed limit for a road is 93.67456% of the mean average speed corrected upward, of course, using the Student- t test, for the average population age of the region (determined by latest census data) of over 65.6 year-old drivers, divided by the average number of days the car windshields had last been cleaned. Age of windshield wipers and number of dogs in the back seat are also factors, but negligible for our purposes.
----Funny part ends, unfunny part begins----
People who always have exact number-solutions for what are basically qualitative issues break me up. Your post sounded oh so wonderful and technical, even when it absurdly quantified accidents numbers to the tenths of accidents in the 33rd percentile until you screwed it up by stating that the Confidence Level of the data was a pathetic 44%. Do you even understand what this means? Their data was so bad they couldn't even tell if driving at the suggested safe speed increased or decreased accidents! SHEESH! And THIS is a study you used to prove your know-it-allness? Confidence Levels in scientific articles always exceed 99.95% (and preferably 99.99%) to be even CONSIDERED to be valid.
Although there's an idea... If you speed, you don't get any music or radio. Because, obviously, you need all your attention on the road right then.
Not a bad idea, although the other responder was too dense and literal-minded to realize you were being whimsical. Really though - no radio or music as PUNISHMENT for speeding would work.
Unless there is a tax or government subsidy for recyclable diesel (diesel in which the CO2 was trapped by plants recently), biodiesel will never take off b/c few consumers will double or triple their fuel costs to use a sustainable energy source.
I can tell you don't buy biodiesel. The difference in pump prices aren't nearly that much. Non-subsidized biodiesel sells for about $3.50/gallon which is not double or triple the cost of petro-diesel. It is only about 20% to 30% more. Moreover, as economy of scale in biodiesel production will likely reduce biodiesel pump prices while the cost of petrodiesel will only be going up, the pump-price economics of biodiesel will soon reach the break-even point. For example, during the post-Katrina spike in oil prices, biodiesel was actually cheaper than petro-diesel. So your statement that "biodiesel will never take off unless subsidized" is a bit short-sighted.
Alright, genius, what do you think is going to happen to the carbon in the waste products used here if it isn't used to make fuel?
A damn lot (all?) of it is going to end up back in the environment anyway as it decomposes. That's why this is "carbon neutral."
Decomposing animal products only release their stored carbon into the ground, not into the atmosphere, so that isn't the reason biodiesel is termed carbon neutral. It is carbon neutral because the plants used to make it took their carbon from the air as CO2, and then when the biodiesel is burned it simply puts the same amount of carbon back into the atmosphere as CO and CO2. There is no net gain or loss of atmospheric carbon from plant-based biodiesel.
The carbon balance equation from animal-fat biodiesel is more complicated because the animals get their carbon from eating plants (sequestered, non-atmospheric carbon) and that sequestered carbon is put back into the atmosphere when the biodiesel is burned. So technically animal-fat based biodiesel is not carbon neutral. True, the carbon is only one cycle from having been atmospheric, but technically the carbon in the animal fat would have remained sequestered if it had not been turned into biodiesel.
Just out of curiosity, can't they follow the same business model that VCR and DVD manufactures follow? I.e., make a good product, and sell it for a profit.
Because the service IS their product. It would be like asking Willie Nelson why he doesn't follow Apple's business model and make iPODS.
I don't get people who seem to find advertising on television and in magazines to be morally reprehensible and an affront to their constitutional rights.
It is the same people who fnd it morally reprehensible and an affront to their constitutional rights to have to pay for someone else's work product, such as music or software.
Personally, I want one of these devices that works on senior citizens. There's a gang of grannies who hang out near my store, harassing young people and keeping the town in a constant state of fear.
As a disclaimer, I'm a Mechanical Engineer working in the area of biodiesel and energy recovery through dynamic breaking.
Besides all the technical errors in your post about biodiesel (including the totally incorrect idea that diesel injectors need to be specially coated to run biodiesel, and not knowing that the only significant by-product of making biodiesel is glycerin), something about the way you spell your "dynamic breaking" engineering project makes me think bullshit.
"Yesterday I couldn't spell engineer, today I are one".
Biodiesal *IS* solar power. Where do you think the energy present in the plant matter comes from?
Really? But doesn't that mean that petroleum diesel and gasoline are then also solar power? Where do you think the energy came to grow the prehistoric plants that were converted to petroleum?
You might as well just say that our cars are nuclear powered because after all the Sun is driven by nuclear reactions. Hmmm, wait one... we use big-bang powered cars, that's it!
I have to assume you're talking about the scene in Cryptonomicon where the Waterhouse family is dividing up an estate (was it Grandmother Waterhouse's?). The parking lot is a pretty obvious--stated, even--metaphor for the equitable division of loot.
I guess I didn't even get to THAT parking lot description, thank God. It *was* Cryptnomicon and the scene involved some Federal agents trying to confiscate a computer, some geeks with an EMP device, and some people standing around, one of whom was eating some fast food. As I recall the stupid McMuffin and the paper it was wrapped in was described in great detail, too! There were no metaphors. In my opinion Stephenson is just one lousy writer.
Look, I didn't throw the book away just because of one two-page parking lot description - it was just the last straw in a long series of excruciatingly detailed descriptions that had had no purpose other than getting more words in the book so it could have a higher selling price.
Working on the Quicksilver trilogy (Stephenson) right now, and enjoying them a lot so far.
I know I am going to get slammed for this because Stephenson seems to be a slashdot icon, but how can anyone like Stephenson's writing? I ended throwing away the only Stephenson book I ever bought after he took two entire pages to describe a parking lot - including how many and what kind of cars were in it, the height of the curbs and the thickness of the paint lines! In my opinion Stephenson just substitutes tons of filler and useless data for story-line and calls it a book.
but this is/., also known as the totality of the Libertarian party.
What/. are YOU reading? In my estimation most slashdotters are liberal, not ultra-conservative libertarians.
Ayn Rand isn't a geek novelist. It's faux philosophical fiction for people who want to feel good about being greedy.Not a value judgement, some people might like her. Doesn't stop her from being in the top five of my "If I could Go Back in Time and Kill Famous Dead People" list, though.
Ayn Rand's philosophy has been hijacked by Libertarians and has been subverted to their cause. As most people have never read her books their ideas about her philosphy come from the Libertarian crackpots out there. Ms Rand really championed the value of the individual, not greed. Her philosophy championed the blacksmith or the street sweeper for their honest labor just as the industrialist for his. Nothing to do with greed there! In fact, most of the Libertarians I hear remind me a lot more of Elsworth Toohey than Howard Rourke.
You are right though - Ayn Rand did not write geek books.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, Norway's standard of living is pretty much down to the oil.
Nice rationalization but not accurate. Norway had a very high standard of living even before North Sea oil was discovered, Since North Sea oil Norway has for the most part resisted lavishly spending or distributing oil money. Also oil doesn't explain the high standards of living for other, non oil-producing European states that also have higher SOLs than the US.
It means that the socialist government in Norway is preparing to tax people who spend money, time and effort to create a new company and thereby jobs...So there are new stock rules going into effect next year, but theres a loop hole which some primary insiders are now using to avoid getting taxed to hell and back for being stupid enough to form a company...
And yet Norway has one of the highest standards of living in the world, higher than the US, has MUCH lower unemployment than the US, has a lower infant mortality rate than the US, AND provides universal health care for all citizens. Pretty lousy way to run a country if you ask me.
More like MS would buy Opera and shut it down, simply to reduce the competition for MS rather than as a replacement for IE. That was their main business plan for acquisitions throughout the 90's and I don;t really see them as having done an ethical about-face.
That was modded informative by somebody who doesn't know how superchargers and turbochargers work. While the turbocharger uses kinetic energy in exhaust gas to push something, don't forget what it's pushing: more gas and air into the engine.
It is a bit ironic that you were complaining tht people did not know how turbochargers work. Let me explain. Turbochargers only compress AIR. They do not compress an air/fuel mixture that is then pumped into the cylinders. The extra O2 in the cylinder head provided by the turbo simply allows more complete combustion of the fuel that is injected. That allows LESS fuel to be injected for the same power. Without turbocharging a lot of fuel goes unburned out the tailpipe while with turbocharging that wasted fuel is converted to power.
Think about it - if turbochargers required more fuel to run then you would have to depress the accelerator every time the turbo came on just to maintain the same speed. In fact just the opposite is true. In all conditions except full-throttle, less fuel has to be suppleid to cylinders to provide the same power. In the special case of full-throttle, the SAME amount of fuel is provided (the physical maximum that the fuel system can provide) but more power is developed from it.
Except with a regular line I have the option of keeping an cheap corded phone around for emergencies and it'll be powered from the central office.
Not necessarily. The central office only powers the phones for as long as their back-up batteries last. During the New York/NE regional blackout a couple of years ago POP phone service in NYC only lasted a couple of hours and then was gone. Cell phones may have worked longer, but I couldn't say because my battery ran down after using it as a flashlight to get up the pitch-black stairwell to my 10th floor apartment.
I'm afraid to install it. Is it worth it? It looks like it's loaded with the typical Yahoo! superflous-ware.
I installed it because I got a message saying there was another "Konfabulator update" to my current version. I let out a small groan when I saw it had morphed into Yahoo! Widgets but so far except for seeing the Yahoo! name too may times during the install, Yahoo! is leaving me alone. Install screens now look more Corporate and less homespun Konfabulator-like but so far all my widgets still work and look the same and I haven't gotten any pop-ups, branding, or Yahoo messages.
But why trust any other source over Wikipedia? You'd still have to spend the time checking alternate sources on something printed in a newspaper, yes? If not, why not?
Because articles in newspapers and magazines usually have a byline. If an article is by a writer with a long history of well-researched articles or who clearly has knowledge of the subject matter then there is a low chance that the article is bogus. Newspapers also do not assign shipping clerks to write science articles, while anyone can write about anything in wikipedia. The byline also means that there are career and reputation consequences if the writer tries to mislead or makes stupid mistakes. Articles in newspapers also have clearly defined rules about what may be represented as fact vs opinion.
With wikipedia there is no attribution, no way to check on the qualifications or depth of knowledge of the writer, no way to separate opinion from fact, and usually no way to even identify the writer. The perfect example is the recent wikipedia article written by a shipping company employee who falsely linked a respected professor to the assasination of both Kennedys.
I totally trust Wikipedia for what it is... a starting resource that almost always gives me a good introduction to a concept,
You said it more clearly than I did, and that is what I meant when I called wikipedia a broadaxe being used as a scalpel. My impression, and it is no more than that, is that many people use it as the definitive source and go no further.
Using wikipedia is like being handed a list of import regulations for every country on the planet but being told that 5% are wrong. At first you might think it was was a really useful tool, but I suspect that after realizing you still had to look up every country's rules anyway to make sure it wasn't one of the 5% you would soon decide it wasn't worth the effort. That's pretty much me and wkipedia.
I will grant you this: because the information on wikipedia at least has the CHANCE of being verified by others it is more likely to be trustworthy than most of the unattributed information floating around on the internet.
What people are saying is that for typical uses, it's already an invaluable tool.
Oh, I think that is a bit of overstatement. I don't think wikipedia is invaluable at all. I almost never use it and I get along fine without it. In fact, when doing google searches I avoid wikipedia articles because I simply don't trust anything written there. It is not worth my time to have to go to alternate sources to verify the information only to find that the wikipedia article was largely plagarized anyway. Granted, much of what's there is true, accurate and trustworthy, and you seem to have cited some examples, but the big problem is that there is no way to tell which information is accurate and which is not.
I agree, Wikipedia is a tool - it's a broadaxe that most people mistake to be a scalpel.
Blah, blah, blah is right. My how smart you are with all that jargon. How impressed am I? Not at all. Spouting a jargon-filled diatribe to an audience not familiar with it illuminates the state of your ego more than providing any useful information. If you even have a point, which you may very well not, you have simply made it incomprehensible.
There really should be another category added to the slashdot scoring: Self-important Twit. You rate a 5.
Actually the message box is rather large and declares the error very clearly. In addition it shows the details of what the action will do.
It does not matter how large or explicit the warning box was. If every large transaction got the same verificaton box re-stating the terms of the trade (and I suspect this is the case) the warning was useless because it will be ignored 999 times out of 1,000. Only if warning or confirmation boxes appear infrequently, when certain parameters are exceeded, will they be paid any attention. A warning box that constantly gives false negatives is poor design.
You don't have ambulance helicopters in U.S.? They're faster than your hot rod no matter what
Hmmmm...that isn;t really true. A recent article in the NYTimes (you'll have to look it up, I'm feeling lazy this morning) listed response times for ambulances vs helicopter evacuation for traffic accidents in NY State. Ambulances got patients to the hospital faster than helicopters more than half the time. This is because of flight restrictions, basing location of the helicopter, finding suitable landing spots, coordination problems with ground rescue personnel,weather, etc.
Having said that I agree that there is no excuse for driving at unsafe speeds to get someone to the hospital.
What a bunch of fucking nonsense.
Look, traffic engineers know, and have known for a very long time, that the safest speed to set speed limits at is the 85% percentile speed...Accidents at the 58 experimental sites where speed limits were lowered increased by 5.4 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate is 44 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 11 percent to an increase of 26 percent....
He was being funny, you moron.
But anyway, what a bunch of fucking nonsense yourself.
---Funny part begins---
I happen to know that engineers have determined that the safest speed limit for a road is 93.67456% of the mean average speed corrected upward, of course, using the Student- t test, for the average population age of the region (determined by latest census data) of over 65.6 year-old drivers, divided by the average number of days the car windshields had last been cleaned. Age of windshield wipers and number of dogs in the back seat are also factors, but negligible for our purposes.
----Funny part ends, unfunny part begins----
People who always have exact number-solutions for what are basically qualitative issues break me up. Your post sounded oh so wonderful and technical, even when it absurdly quantified accidents numbers to the tenths of accidents in the 33rd percentile until you screwed it up by stating that the Confidence Level of the data was a pathetic 44%. Do you even understand what this means? Their data was so bad they couldn't even tell if driving at the suggested safe speed increased or decreased accidents! SHEESH! And THIS is a study you used to prove your know-it-allness? Confidence Levels in scientific articles always exceed 99.95% (and preferably 99.99%) to be even CONSIDERED to be valid.
But you're an expert, right?
Although there's an idea... If you speed, you don't get any music or radio. Because, obviously, you need all your attention on the road right then.
Not a bad idea, although the other responder was too dense and literal-minded to realize you were being whimsical. Really though - no radio or music as PUNISHMENT for speeding would work.
Unless there is a tax or government subsidy for recyclable diesel (diesel in which the CO2 was trapped by plants recently), biodiesel will never take off b/c few consumers will double or triple their fuel costs to use a sustainable energy source.
I can tell you don't buy biodiesel. The difference in pump prices aren't nearly that much. Non-subsidized biodiesel sells for about $3.50/gallon which is not double or triple the cost of petro-diesel. It is only about 20% to 30% more. Moreover, as economy of scale in biodiesel production will likely reduce biodiesel pump prices while the cost of petrodiesel will only be going up, the pump-price economics of biodiesel will soon reach the break-even point. For example, during the post-Katrina spike in oil prices, biodiesel was actually cheaper than petro-diesel. So your statement that "biodiesel will never take off unless subsidized" is a bit short-sighted.
Alright, genius, what do you think is going to happen to the carbon in the waste products used here if it isn't used to make fuel?
A damn lot (all?) of it is going to end up back in the environment anyway as it decomposes. That's why this is "carbon neutral."
Decomposing animal products only release their stored carbon into the ground, not into the atmosphere, so that isn't the reason biodiesel is termed carbon neutral. It is carbon neutral because the plants used to make it took their carbon from the air as CO2, and then when the biodiesel is burned it simply puts the same amount of carbon back into the atmosphere as CO and CO2. There is no net gain or loss of atmospheric carbon from plant-based biodiesel.
The carbon balance equation from animal-fat biodiesel is more complicated because the animals get their carbon from eating plants (sequestered, non-atmospheric carbon) and that sequestered carbon is put back into the atmosphere when the biodiesel is burned. So technically animal-fat based biodiesel is not carbon neutral. True, the carbon is only one cycle from having been atmospheric, but technically the carbon in the animal fat would have remained sequestered if it had not been turned into biodiesel.
Just out of curiosity, can't they follow the same business model that VCR and DVD manufactures follow? I.e., make a good product, and sell it for a profit.
Because the service IS their product. It would be like asking Willie Nelson why he doesn't follow Apple's business model and make iPODS.
I don't get people who seem to find advertising on television and in magazines to be morally reprehensible and an affront to their constitutional rights.
It is the same people who fnd it morally reprehensible and an affront to their constitutional rights to have to pay for someone else's work product, such as music or software.
Personally, I want one of these devices that works on senior citizens. There's a gang of grannies who hang out near my store, harassing young people and keeping the town in a constant state of fear.
Oh that's easy. It's called Rap Music.
As a disclaimer, I'm a Mechanical Engineer working in the area of biodiesel and energy recovery through dynamic breaking.
Besides all the technical errors in your post about biodiesel (including the totally incorrect idea that diesel injectors need to be specially coated to run biodiesel, and not knowing that the only significant by-product of making biodiesel is glycerin), something about the way you spell your "dynamic breaking" engineering project makes me think bullshit.
"Yesterday I couldn't spell engineer, today I are one".
Biodiesal *IS* solar power. Where do you think the energy present in the plant matter comes from?
Really? But doesn't that mean that petroleum diesel and gasoline are then also solar power? Where do you think the energy came to grow the prehistoric plants that were converted to petroleum?
You might as well just say that our cars are nuclear powered because after all the Sun is driven by nuclear reactions. Hmmm, wait one... we use big-bang powered cars, that's it!
HA! Very funny. One of the few +5 Funny mods that truly deserves its mod points.
I have to assume you're talking about the scene in Cryptonomicon where the Waterhouse family is dividing up an estate (was it Grandmother Waterhouse's?). The parking lot is a pretty obvious--stated, even--metaphor for the equitable division of loot.
I guess I didn't even get to THAT parking lot description, thank God. It *was* Cryptnomicon and the scene involved some Federal agents trying to confiscate a computer, some geeks with an EMP device, and some people standing around, one of whom was eating some fast food. As I recall the stupid McMuffin and the paper it was wrapped in was described in great detail, too! There were no metaphors. In my opinion Stephenson is just one lousy writer.
Look, I didn't throw the book away just because of one two-page parking lot description - it was just the last straw in a long series of excruciatingly detailed descriptions that had had no purpose other than getting more words in the book so it could have a higher selling price.
Working on the Quicksilver trilogy (Stephenson) right now, and enjoying them a lot so far.
I know I am going to get slammed for this because Stephenson seems to be a slashdot icon, but how can anyone like Stephenson's writing? I ended throwing away the only Stephenson book I ever bought after he took two entire pages to describe a parking lot - including how many and what kind of cars were in it, the height of the curbs and the thickness of the paint lines! In my opinion Stephenson just substitutes tons of filler and useless data for story-line and calls it a book.
but this is /., also known as the totality of the Libertarian party.
/. are YOU reading? In my estimation most slashdotters are liberal, not ultra-conservative libertarians.
What
Ayn Rand isn't a geek novelist. It's faux philosophical fiction for people who want to feel good about being greedy.Not a value judgement, some people might like her. Doesn't stop her from being in the top five of my "If I could Go Back in Time and Kill Famous Dead People" list, though.
Ayn Rand's philosophy has been hijacked by Libertarians and has been subverted to their cause. As most people have never read her books their ideas about her philosphy come from the Libertarian crackpots out there. Ms Rand really championed the value of the individual, not greed. Her philosophy championed the blacksmith or the street sweeper for their honest labor just as the industrialist for his. Nothing to do with greed there! In fact, most of the Libertarians I hear remind me a lot more of Elsworth Toohey than Howard Rourke.
You are right though - Ayn Rand did not write geek books.