Not always true. If your credit card company uses the average daily balance system of calculating interest rates, you benefit from paying it down as low as possible as often as possible.
Average daily balance is calculated by taking the daily totals of what you owe on each day of a billing period, adding them all together, and dividing by the number of days in the billing period. Not every card uses this method, so it's best to check your own account terms to see which strategy is going to rack up the least interest.
This assumes that no changes are made drawing over drawing.
Very true...but on top of that:
Supposing that the system were, in fact, perfectly random, and involved such enormous odds as it is meant to, does the amount of data collected in the years since the game's creation constitute a large enough sample to show real trends? If the "trends" aren't real trends, but just pattern-finding in a proportionally small data set, one ought to expect an eventual regression to the mean here. In other words, if nothing does change, one would predict that (over a long period of time) the number frequency would even out--low-frequency balls turning up more often, and high-frequency balls turning up less often--even though one couldn't predict when a particular ball would have a hot streak or a dry spell.
Putting it into perspective, you may have to run even a binary probability test for a long, long sample to see the peaks and valleys smooth out.(It takes a lot of coin flips coming up "heads" to figure out whether you're Rosencranz or Guildenstern.)
I had LOGO in high school (with Harvard Graphics and some type-in-what's-on-the-worksheet programming). It wasn't stellar, but it did prepare me for vector graphics, later in life.
Radio Shack Level II Basic, on the other hand, was my computer play-pen. Dad bought it for himself, then promptly started typing in (or buying?) educational programs. I learned state capitals, national capitals, how to touch-type, how to build cute little spaceships out of CHR$'es, how to type in programs out of a book, and how to win from Blackjack amounts of money that required exponential notation to display. I loved it...and it was formative. I keep wanting ActionScript to let me 080 GOTO LINE 010.
Perhaps jellomizer is thinking of the fiduciary duty owed by Apple's directors' and company officers to stockholders of the company...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors. The SEC, which is a federal institution (created by Congress in the Securities Exchange Act of 1934) regulates publicly traded companies. IANAL, but to the best of my understanding, Apple's directors and company officers might have to be making money for themselves at the expense of the stockholders for the SEC to step in and make a federal, criminal case of it. Incompetence or blindness, rather than venality, might open the directors up to civil suits by stockholders seeking compensation for their losses. I'm not at all sure that anyone would have a case against the directors for a strategy designed to maximize long-term profits over short-term ones. Short-sighted measures taken to meet or beat earnings expectations one year may well leave a company without the means to maintain long-term growth and value.
Well, the first thing that strikes me is that the panel head (RIchard Covey) himself (were he younger and still in the flight program) wouldn't hesitate to fly on the revamped shuttle. So NASA fails the appointed checklist of improvements, but doesn't fail a former astronaut's 'gut instinct' test.
(While we're on the subject, let me recommend to anyone who is, has been, or ever will be interested in the subject of NASA's decision-making--under crisis conditions, or in conditions leading to crises--the work of Edward Tufte. http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ His analyses of the data graphics used in the launch decision of the Challenger, the investigation of the Challenger disaster (Feynman's experiment), and the Columbia in-flight decisions are a must-read take-no-prisoners statistical firefight. Also, well-written and heartbreaking.)
Now I'm asking, given NASA's bright-dark history in these matters, Covey's professed take, and the lacunae in the checklist...Would you be willing to fill a seat on the next Shuttle mission?
(Or would I, supposing the sudden need arose for a hack novelist/graphic designer/wicked dancer in space, of course...)
On the contrary side, would you be willing to send up a $$$$$ shuttle, $500 million in launch costs, and 7 astronauts (each representing maybe $3 million in sunk training costs, and more importantly, people, skilled, experts in their fields, brave, etc--not to mention the international incident factors if one of the crew is non-US)--with a higher-than-requested, but amorphously lower-than-previous risk of ever returning?
(Here I reveal my ace-in-the-hole for getting onto a mission someday, despite being the hack novelist, graphic designer, etc--no sunk training costs; I'm worthless, so if I don't come back, the taxpayer is getting an awesome deal.)
The point is all the more interesting in light of the quite deep sci-fi content of the original stories I've read:
Alien was loosely based on one of the four short stories comprising the novel "The Voyage of the Space Beagle" by A. E. van Vogt. The main point of the novel wasn't a crew's rather helpless fight for survival against a nearly invulnerable enemy; it was the struggle for acceptance by specialists by an "holistic scientist," and it falls somewhere between the gritty-utopian and future-optimism schools of pulp-era classics. (I say "utopian" here because of the social-science aspect in the hero's profession; cf. the "encyclopedic synthesist" in Heinlein. I might add that I have always wanted to be an ES when I grew up.) The movie drops the scientists and top-of-the-line flight crew of the Beagle, and replaces them with the technically skilled, mining-competent, but not-quite-Ph.D.-toting crew of the Nostromo. Holistic science never gets a look-in.
Aliens, while keeping the acid-blooded creature from Vogt, is a frank (and honest) borrowing of Starship Troopers tech and esprit de corps. I'll skip the analysis, since I expect more Slashdotters have read the book than have bathed today, and simply note that, again, only a tiny aspect of the novel makes it to the screen. These "space marines" are troopers, but they're no citizen soldiers. (Funny, the troopers here don't bother me nearly as much as the troopers in the actual movie "Starship Troopers." Eh.)
I don't know of my own reading whether The Terminator is based on a specific prior work or not; I've seen other posts here today which attribute it to Philip K. Dick, and that seems about right.
It strikes me that the utopian aspects of the first two sources are completely stripped from the movies, while dystopian aspects (PKD influences?) are added. Does the philosophic core of hard sci-fi -always- burn up (to be replaced, if at all, with dime-store Zen) on entry to Los Angeles? *
Existing word, wrong usage. Ought to be a bingo game in and of itself. Malaprop-keno.
While we're on the subject, a quick search of Monster jobs in my area brought me to a position offering "salary commiserate with experience." I kid you not.
However, people who are forced to use windows based PC's at work would probably have one at home too.
I'm not sure that that follows. I mean, it may be statistically true, purely because more offices use Windows and more PCs are out there in the home market, but I don't think that the if/then implication is necessarily valid.
begin anecdotal data, fwiw
When I worked on Macs, I kept a Wintel PC at home for games, email, and writing. When that job ended and I was forced to design on PCs at a new office, that's when I decided to buy my own Mac.
My brother majored in Comp. Sci., all PC, went into the military, and now does tech for totally Windows networks. He never had much use for Macs until he had to slog Windows all day and night. He switched about six months after seeing my first iBook, precisely because he was troubleshooting XP. He says he wanted something that just worked, though it's possible that if he did Mac networks he would have a Windows machine at home--that he likes the difference, not the differences, if you follow me...
The thing that I most miss, though, was the shape-recognition. You can draw a freehand box or a circle and it will "square it up" (or circle it up). Although the drawing functions weren't very sophisticated I considered this to be the start of something great, and I'm really disappointed to see that it hasn't caught on. In fact I have even thought about buying myself a tablet and seeing if I could code something myself - maybe an Inkscape extension?
Strangely enough, I use this feature every day. Macromedia Flash's drawing tools can do this. There's an "ink" setting, where the "pencil" draws whatever you do, warts and all, a "smooth" setting, where it simplifies the curves and creates fewer vector points, and "straighten," which examines your scrawl for resemblance to a line, triangle, oblong, or circle, and makes a nice neat one of the scrawl's size and proportions. Now that Adobe and Macromedia are (very probably) merging, maybe they can incorporate this into Illustrator.
I live in Atlanta. I work on one side of town, I room on the other. I go 25 miles each way. Average speed of 25mph. That's 2 hours a day I spend in the car.
If I could get into my car, type in a destination, and read, have breakfast, catch the last 10 winks, or write the great American novel while the car did the work, I would jump at it like a shot.
I realize that what I want out of an autonomous car is available, mostly, as public transportation. Unfortunately, public transportation in Atlanta is a joke. To do the 25 miles from my house to the office takes 2 hours, on 2 different systems, with three transfers. That's 4 hours a day in transit, provided nothing breaks down and the buses aren't late. I tried it, and I had just enough time left over in the day to sleep. Not eat, just sleep.
I saw a test car and strip of highway (somewhere in California, IIRC) that worked together as an autopilot. Drivers could enter the freeway, tell the computer what exit they wanted to get off at, and let the car drive itself. Little pips in the tarmac told the car where the lanes were, the on-board did the steering, and the central controller managed congestion by telling the cars what speed was best for the volume of traffic, when to change lanes, and when to wake (pardon me, alert) the driver that the exit was near.
Anyone out there remember this? Is it still under development?
Anyone care to speculate how soon I can get a robot chaffeur or auto-highway?
And does anyone remember...Sally? Asimov fans will know what I mean.
Agree with you regarding the extension of FCC power. However...
Congress and the other branches create agencies to enforce, monitor, develop, explore, protect, etc. -not- "to extend government power without making it answerable to the other branches;" the FBI, FCC, EPA, NASA, USMC, etc. are created by the elected/judicially-nominated-through-democratic processes representatives of the people either to assist them directly in their duty to their constituents (OMB) or to carry out those duties as agents of said representatives.
Put another way, I'd rather have my congressman drafting bills, negotiating compromises, establishing policy, and checking/balancing the other branches than scanning 700 broadcast channels for cusswords.
I've been trying to figure out where this agency might be better put, and I'm drawing a blank. I don't think this kind of thing can be organized under the judiciary, and I can't see any improvement if the FCC were to be moved into any of the executive cabinet-level departments.
As it is, these kinds of regulatory agencies are answerable to Congress, but have their commissioners (5, in the FCC's case) appointed by the President and confirmed in the Senate.
Supposing you were in charge, where would you place regulatory authority for wire/opticable-less communication and EM emmisions?
Good point regarding the allegories...the technique is classic, and Star Trek (has been at times) one of the finest examples in popular fiction.
Take issue A. Not everyone really wants to deal with issue A in a serious context all the time. And if issue A is something so divisive or ugly that people don't even want to consider it, you may be in danger of offending people in any discussion or scenario in a realistic setting. So take issue A and set it on another planet, (or in another country--Shakespeare was always lifting recent English politics into Rome/Italy/Denmark) where you can explore the bejeazus out of it without naming names or identifying your readers or viewers as villains.
I'd have to say that science fiction used to be a prime place for this, particularly on highly-censored media like television. Frankly, though, television doesn't need to worry as much about offending anymore...can anybody find me a social issue that isn't dealt with in documentary or mainstream fiction these days? (Within a script-cycle on Law and Order, for one.)
Also, with that breed of social sci-fi/fantasy has always been at risk--see Utopia, Erewhon, Planet of the Apes (the book, folks)--of becoming a preachy polemic on the author's ideals. Roddenberry and the original writers rode the edge well, for the most part, for their time, and they really made "ripping good yarns" out of some of the episodes. (Anyone wants to argue "all" is kindly asked to watch "Spock's Brain before posting).
But I think that long-term interest--both the kind that makes the whole dorm show up for each new episode AND the kind that makes every succeeding generation turn to their kids and say, "Hey, you're old enough, read/watch this," have been lacking for a -long- time in too many of the shows.
Anyway, returning to my main point...there are other shows out there visiting an allegory a week, and there have been for a while. Original Trek had to compete with Lost in Space--no contest. STNG owned the dial at our place (Dr.Who came on late Saturdays only). Since then, though, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise have had to endure comparisons with B5, Stargate, Farscape, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and Atlantis...none of which are or were saddled with as much backstory...and all of which were free (see parent sidenote) to look at the grimy side of the future and present in ways that Trek was not.
How odd. What on earth is he thinking "the one" refers to in this? "The dark secret" or "homosexual society?" Because the source of the phrase in this context is Oscar Wilde, meaning "the -love- that dare not speak its name." And when he wrote it, he meant love--it's from a love poem, for crying out loud.
Wonder if Card included the citation at the end of his article...
I agree. In XP (my employer runs Windows only), I use the gray theme with a clean desktop image. In OS X Panther (my laptop),I use the silver/silver theme. I'm a designer, I work with a lot of color, and I need neutral edges and backdrops. Ever try to color correct orange tones against a candy-bright blue?
The human eye needs resting space. White is too bright from a CRT or LCD monitor, so give us a good-looking, uncluttered gray option and type that sets well against it.
I've been thinking a lot about interface design in Flash and html, and I seem to see the OS-level interfaces picking up stylistic elements of popular websites (Adobe and Macromedia jump to mind). Is it just me, or has the thin-line, dove-to-charcoal gray trend gained momentum recently?
Short answer: Yes, digital can be as good as film.
Long answer: No, digital can never be as good as film.
The real question is, "Can digital images ever capture as much information as format X using film Y?" Digital has -already- surpassed the level of information that can be captured on cheaper brands of film, particularly high-ISO (high light sensitivity), in 35mm or smaller formats. Pro-level SLR cameras (of the kind built for 35mm lens mounts) are producing images comparable to decent 35mm film. I can point you to some sites (phot.net is a good place to start) where some photographers hold forth that the pro-level 35mm-mount SLRs have now equalled 35mm film as a whole. However, in the medium format (2.25 inches square, or rectangles of about the same area) film still gets the nod most of the time, and in large format (shooting 4x5 inches to 8x10 inches, or even larger) I haven't seen anyone claim digital has the lead.
I have a Wacom 9x12 tablet. I use it on Mac and Wintel, and I love it for illustration, drawing, photoshopping, etc. I'd be in favor of a tablet screen (such as Wacom already makes, or like this tablet PC) anyway. A tablet takes up desk real estate, and my 'ergonomic' setup still makes my neck hurt. I have to have my eyes on the screen in front of me, my mouse (right) hand on the tablet, and my keying hand on the board. I'm a small person; this is a strain. I'd love to have my eyes where I'm working and get rid of the pain between right jaw and shoulder.
The APD are using these things. They look more intimidating on them than does a bicycle cop (though still not as impressive as the mounted police, which we no longer have here) or a cop on foot. It raises them over the heads of most pedestrians, which is probably useful.
It also allows them to carry large amounts of gear more comfortably than on their belts, into smaller spaces than with a car. You could probably get a bicycle into most of those spaces, with a full kit in your panniers and wide tires for rough surfaces, but -really- tight corners, less than the turning radius of the bike, would be trouble. Our downtown isn't huge, nor particularly rundown, but we have (junior) skyscrapers within a few blocks of condemned, weedy areas with cracked-up pavement. One cop's beat could include both types of terrain.
As for the chase--a good cyclist could outpace a segway and escape, but he or she could equally well outpace a cop on foot. I imagine the police coordinate these things by radio.
Weather: Atlanta doesn't have to cope with snow more than two or three times a year; even my 'touring' bike tires can cope with our usual cover. We get whopping great ice storms, sometimes, which put half-an-inch of black ice on the road and scare even northern drivers into getting off the streets. I don't think the segway could cope with that. I'm not sure what could. It looked to me as though one could be happier in the rain on this gadget than on a bike--less spray-up from the road when you travel, body more vertical when standing still. That's just a guess, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Not always true. If your credit card company uses the average daily balance system of calculating interest rates, you benefit from paying it down as low as possible as often as possible.
Average daily balance is calculated by taking the daily totals of what you owe on each day of a billing period, adding them all together, and dividing by the number of days in the billing period. Not every card uses this method, so it's best to check your own account terms to see which strategy is going to rack up the least interest.
Very true...but on top of that:
Supposing that the system were, in fact, perfectly random, and involved such enormous odds as it is meant to, does the amount of data collected in the years since the game's creation constitute a large enough sample to show real trends? If the "trends" aren't real trends, but just pattern-finding in a proportionally small data set, one ought to expect an eventual regression to the mean here. In other words, if nothing does change, one would predict that (over a long period of time) the number frequency would even out--low-frequency balls turning up more often, and high-frequency balls turning up less often--even though one couldn't predict when a particular ball would have a hot streak or a dry spell.
Putting it into perspective, you may have to run even a binary probability test for a long, long sample to see the peaks and valleys smooth out.(It takes a lot of coin flips coming up "heads" to figure out whether you're Rosencranz or Guildenstern.)
I had LOGO in high school (with Harvard Graphics and some type-in-what's-on-the-worksheet programming). It wasn't stellar, but it did prepare me for vector graphics, later in life. Radio Shack Level II Basic, on the other hand, was my computer play-pen. Dad bought it for himself, then promptly started typing in (or buying?) educational programs. I learned state capitals, national capitals, how to touch-type, how to build cute little spaceships out of CHR$'es, how to type in programs out of a book, and how to win from Blackjack amounts of money that required exponential notation to display. I loved it...and it was formative. I keep wanting ActionScript to let me 080 GOTO LINE 010.
Perhaps jellomizer is thinking of the fiduciary duty owed by Apple's directors' and company officers to stockholders of the company...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors. The SEC, which is a federal institution (created by Congress in the Securities Exchange Act of 1934) regulates publicly traded companies. IANAL, but to the best of my understanding, Apple's directors and company officers might have to be making money for themselves at the expense of the stockholders for the SEC to step in and make a federal, criminal case of it. Incompetence or blindness, rather than venality, might open the directors up to civil suits by stockholders seeking compensation for their losses. I'm not at all sure that anyone would have a case against the directors for a strategy designed to maximize long-term profits over short-term ones. Short-sighted measures taken to meet or beat earnings expectations one year may well leave a company without the means to maintain long-term growth and value.
Again, my lawyerness = 0. Caveat lector.
Well, the first thing that strikes me is that the panel head (RIchard Covey) himself (were he younger and still in the flight program) wouldn't hesitate to fly on the revamped shuttle. So NASA fails the appointed checklist of improvements, but doesn't fail a former astronaut's 'gut instinct' test.
(While we're on the subject, let me recommend to anyone who is, has been, or ever will be interested in the subject of NASA's decision-making--under crisis conditions, or in conditions leading to crises--the work of Edward Tufte. http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ His analyses of the data graphics used in the launch decision of the Challenger, the investigation of the Challenger disaster (Feynman's experiment), and the Columbia in-flight decisions are a must-read take-no-prisoners statistical firefight. Also, well-written and heartbreaking.)
Now I'm asking, given NASA's bright-dark history in these matters, Covey's professed take, and the lacunae in the checklist...Would you be willing to fill a seat on the next Shuttle mission?
(Or would I, supposing the sudden need arose for a hack novelist/graphic designer/wicked dancer in space, of course...)
On the contrary side, would you be willing to send up a $$$$$ shuttle, $500 million in launch costs, and 7 astronauts (each representing maybe $3 million in sunk training costs, and more importantly, people, skilled, experts in their fields, brave, etc--not to mention the international incident factors if one of the crew is non-US)--with a higher-than-requested, but amorphously lower-than-previous risk of ever returning?
(Here I reveal my ace-in-the-hole for getting onto a mission someday, despite being the hack novelist, graphic designer, etc--no sunk training costs; I'm worthless, so if I don't come back, the taxpayer is getting an awesome deal.)
You have a point.
The point is all the more interesting in light of the quite deep sci-fi content of the original stories I've read:
Alien was loosely based on one of the four short stories comprising the novel "The Voyage of the Space Beagle" by A. E. van Vogt. The main point of the novel wasn't a crew's rather helpless fight for survival against a nearly invulnerable enemy; it was the struggle for acceptance by specialists by an "holistic scientist," and it falls somewhere between the gritty-utopian and future-optimism schools of pulp-era classics. (I say "utopian" here because of the social-science aspect in the hero's profession; cf. the "encyclopedic synthesist" in Heinlein. I might add that I have always wanted to be an ES when I grew up.) The movie drops the scientists and top-of-the-line flight crew of the Beagle, and replaces them with the technically skilled, mining-competent, but not-quite-Ph.D.-toting crew of the Nostromo. Holistic science never gets a look-in.
Aliens, while keeping the acid-blooded creature from Vogt, is a frank (and honest) borrowing of Starship Troopers tech and esprit de corps. I'll skip the analysis, since I expect more Slashdotters have read the book than have bathed today, and simply note that, again, only a tiny aspect of the novel makes it to the screen. These "space marines" are troopers, but they're no citizen soldiers. (Funny, the troopers here don't bother me nearly as much as the troopers in the actual movie "Starship Troopers." Eh.)
I don't know of my own reading whether The Terminator is based on a specific prior work or not; I've seen other posts here today which attribute it to Philip K. Dick, and that seems about right.
It strikes me that the utopian aspects of the first two sources are completely stripped from the movies, while dystopian aspects (PKD influences?) are added. Does the philosophic core of hard sci-fi -always- burn up (to be replaced, if at all, with dime-store Zen) on entry to Los Angeles? *
Existing word, wrong usage. Ought to be a bingo game in and of itself. Malaprop-keno.
While we're on the subject, a quick search of Monster jobs in my area brought me to a position offering "salary commiserate with experience." I kid you not.
I'm not sure that that follows. I mean, it may be statistically true, purely because more offices use Windows and more PCs are out there in the home market, but I don't think that the if/then implication is necessarily valid.
begin anecdotal data, fwiw
When I worked on Macs, I kept a Wintel PC at home for games, email, and writing. When that job ended and I was forced to design on PCs at a new office, that's when I decided to buy my own Mac.
My brother majored in Comp. Sci., all PC, went into the military, and now does tech for totally Windows networks. He never had much use for Macs until he had to slog Windows all day and night. He switched about six months after seeing my first iBook, precisely because he was troubleshooting XP. He says he wanted something that just worked, though it's possible that if he did Mac networks he would have a Windows machine at home--that he likes the difference, not the differences, if you follow me...
Strangely enough, I use this feature every day. Macromedia Flash's drawing tools can do this. There's an "ink" setting, where the "pencil" draws whatever you do, warts and all, a "smooth" setting, where it simplifies the curves and creates fewer vector points, and "straighten," which examines your scrawl for resemblance to a line, triangle, oblong, or circle, and makes a nice neat one of the scrawl's size and proportions. Now that Adobe and Macromedia are (very probably) merging, maybe they can incorporate this into Illustrator.
God, yes.
I live in Atlanta. I work on one side of town, I room on the other. I go 25 miles each way. Average speed of 25mph. That's 2 hours a day I spend in the car.
If I could get into my car, type in a destination, and read, have breakfast, catch the last 10 winks, or write the great American novel while the car did the work, I would jump at it like a shot.
I realize that what I want out of an autonomous car is available, mostly, as public transportation. Unfortunately, public transportation in Atlanta is a joke. To do the 25 miles from my house to the office takes 2 hours, on 2 different systems, with three transfers. That's 4 hours a day in transit, provided nothing breaks down and the buses aren't late. I tried it, and I had just enough time left over in the day to sleep. Not eat, just sleep.
I saw a test car and strip of highway (somewhere in California, IIRC) that worked together as an autopilot. Drivers could enter the freeway, tell the computer what exit they wanted to get off at, and let the car drive itself. Little pips in the tarmac told the car where the lanes were, the on-board did the steering, and the central controller managed congestion by telling the cars what speed was best for the volume of traffic, when to change lanes, and when to wake (pardon me, alert) the driver that the exit was near.
Anyone out there remember this? Is it still under development?
Anyone care to speculate how soon I can get a robot chaffeur or auto-highway?
And does anyone remember...Sally? Asimov fans will know what I mean.
Thanks for the correction, everyone...I found full details here:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/question375.htm
Skipping over the comic book character for a moment--
Isn't "magneto" the British-English term for what Americans call a "carburetor?"
Comic book villain, or old car part...great marketing, either way.
Well said.
Agree with you regarding the extension of FCC power. However...
Congress and the other branches create agencies to enforce, monitor, develop, explore, protect, etc. -not- "to extend government power without making it answerable to the other branches;" the FBI, FCC, EPA, NASA, USMC, etc. are created by the elected/judicially-nominated-through-democratic processes representatives of the people either to assist them directly in their duty to their constituents (OMB) or to carry out those duties as agents of said representatives.
Put another way, I'd rather have my congressman drafting bills, negotiating compromises, establishing policy, and checking/balancing the other branches than scanning 700 broadcast channels for cusswords.
I've been trying to figure out where this agency might be better put, and I'm drawing a blank. I don't think this kind of thing can be organized under the judiciary, and I can't see any improvement if the FCC were to be moved into any of the executive cabinet-level departments.
As it is, these kinds of regulatory agencies are answerable to Congress, but have their commissioners (5, in the FCC's case) appointed by the President and confirmed in the Senate.
Supposing you were in charge, where would you place regulatory authority for wire/opticable-less communication and EM emmisions?
Good point regarding the allegories...the technique is classic, and Star Trek (has been at times) one of the finest examples in popular fiction.
Take issue A. Not everyone really wants to deal with issue A in a serious context all the time. And if issue A is something so divisive or ugly that people don't even want to consider it, you may be in danger of offending people in any discussion or scenario in a realistic setting. So take issue A and set it on another planet, (or in another country--Shakespeare was always lifting recent English politics into Rome/Italy/Denmark) where you can explore the bejeazus out of it without naming names or identifying your readers or viewers as villains.
I'd have to say that science fiction used to be a prime place for this, particularly on highly-censored media like television. Frankly, though, television doesn't need to worry as much about offending anymore...can anybody find me a social issue that isn't dealt with in documentary or mainstream fiction these days? (Within a script-cycle on Law and Order, for one.)
Also, with that breed of social sci-fi/fantasy has always been at risk--see Utopia, Erewhon, Planet of the Apes (the book, folks)--of becoming a preachy polemic on the author's ideals. Roddenberry and the original writers rode the edge well, for the most part, for their time, and they really made "ripping good yarns" out of some of the episodes. (Anyone wants to argue "all" is kindly asked to watch "Spock's Brain before posting).
But I think that long-term interest--both the kind that makes the whole dorm show up for each new episode AND the kind that makes every succeeding generation turn to their kids and say, "Hey, you're old enough, read/watch this," have been lacking for a -long- time in too many of the shows.
Anyway, returning to my main point...there are other shows out there visiting an allegory a week, and there have been for a while. Original Trek had to compete with Lost in Space--no contest. STNG owned the dial at our place (Dr.Who came on late Saturdays only). Since then, though, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise have had to endure comparisons with B5, Stargate, Farscape, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and Atlantis...none of which are or were saddled with as much backstory...and all of which were free (see parent sidenote) to look at the grimy side of the future and present in ways that Trek was not.
How odd. What on earth is he thinking "the one" refers to in this? "The dark secret" or "homosexual society?" Because the source of the phrase in this context is Oscar Wilde, meaning "the -love- that dare not speak its name." And when he wrote it, he meant love--it's from a love poem, for crying out loud.
Wonder if Card included the citation at the end of his article...
I agree. In XP (my employer runs Windows only), I use the gray theme with a clean desktop image. In OS X Panther (my laptop),I use the silver/silver theme. I'm a designer, I work with a lot of color, and I need neutral edges and backdrops. Ever try to color correct orange tones against a candy-bright blue?
The human eye needs resting space. White is too bright from a CRT or LCD monitor, so give us a good-looking, uncluttered gray option and type that sets well against it.
I've been thinking a lot about interface design in Flash and html, and I seem to see the OS-level interfaces picking up stylistic elements of popular websites (Adobe and Macromedia jump to mind). Is it just me, or has the thin-line, dove-to-charcoal gray trend gained momentum recently?
Short answer: Yes, digital can be as good as film.
Long answer: No, digital can never be as good as film.
The real question is, "Can digital images ever capture as much information as format X using film Y?" Digital has -already- surpassed the level of information that can be captured on cheaper brands of film, particularly high-ISO (high light sensitivity), in 35mm or smaller formats. Pro-level SLR cameras (of the kind built for 35mm lens mounts) are producing images comparable to decent 35mm film. I can point you to some sites (phot.net is a good place to start) where some photographers hold forth that the pro-level 35mm-mount SLRs have now equalled 35mm film as a whole. However, in the medium format (2.25 inches square, or rectangles of about the same area) film still gets the nod most of the time, and in large format (shooting 4x5 inches to 8x10 inches, or even larger) I haven't seen anyone claim digital has the lead.
The cat is out of the bag? And if you are so anxious to open your copy and install it, your curiousity will have killed it? Sheesh.
I have a Wacom 9x12 tablet. I use it on Mac and Wintel, and I love it for illustration, drawing, photoshopping, etc. I'd be in favor of a tablet screen (such as Wacom already makes, or like this tablet PC) anyway. A tablet takes up desk real estate, and my 'ergonomic' setup still makes my neck hurt. I have to have my eyes on the screen in front of me, my mouse (right) hand on the tablet, and my keying hand on the board. I'm a small person; this is a strain. I'd love to have my eyes where I'm working and get rid of the pain between right jaw and shoulder.
The APD are using these things. They look more intimidating on them than does a bicycle cop (though still not as impressive as the mounted police, which we no longer have here) or a cop on foot. It raises them over the heads of most pedestrians, which is probably useful. It also allows them to carry large amounts of gear more comfortably than on their belts, into smaller spaces than with a car. You could probably get a bicycle into most of those spaces, with a full kit in your panniers and wide tires for rough surfaces, but -really- tight corners, less than the turning radius of the bike, would be trouble. Our downtown isn't huge, nor particularly rundown, but we have (junior) skyscrapers within a few blocks of condemned, weedy areas with cracked-up pavement. One cop's beat could include both types of terrain. As for the chase--a good cyclist could outpace a segway and escape, but he or she could equally well outpace a cop on foot. I imagine the police coordinate these things by radio. Weather: Atlanta doesn't have to cope with snow more than two or three times a year; even my 'touring' bike tires can cope with our usual cover. We get whopping great ice storms, sometimes, which put half-an-inch of black ice on the road and scare even northern drivers into getting off the streets. I don't think the segway could cope with that. I'm not sure what could. It looked to me as though one could be happier in the rain on this gadget than on a bike--less spray-up from the road when you travel, body more vertical when standing still. That's just a guess, though.