I hear they did it because people were pronouncing it "skiffy".
What is particularly annoying is its relation to the fannish distinction from a few decades back. Science fiction was abbreviated "SF" and pronounced "ess-eff". "SciFi" was pronounced "skiffy". SF was things like _the Foundation Trilogy_. SciFi was things like _Son of the Giant Toad that Ate Chicago_. "SciFi" could also be used as an adjective: "That movie/TV show is EXTREMELY skiffy".
And by that definition most of what the SciFi / SyFy channel runs/ran is "SciFi".
(Oh, well. At least they coined a new one rather than appropriating SF and misbranding themselves. "SyFy" is what THEY define it to be by what they run.)
The flaw in that story is that unless they were aware of what the right/better choice was they would continue to relive the same crisis by making the same choice and go into a loop.
"Humans have just enough psi to make different decisions."
Not necessarily the RIGHT decision. But a DIFFERENT one than "last time". They get just enough of a premonition of doom when they consider the previous choices to avoid them. This breaks the loop and eventually they get it right - or at least good enough to avoid hitting the button again. (Or the enemy successfully sneak-attacks before they can push the button - an incentive to avoid holding off.)
Or so their theory goes. The story ends as the people who must "push the button" are at the peak of their uncertainty, just before activating the device or refusing to do so.
The point is to put the reader into their shoes. The decision they make and the "actual" physics are immaterial.
(You haven't kept going back in time and improving the plot, have you?)
Not so far. B-) But I did just pull another bit from my memory...
Maybe it does work - but from the viewpoint of the current timeline it's just the end of the universe. Maybe it does work but the universe doesn't branch - so it REALLY IS the end of the ENTIRE universe.
From the outside perspective, the scientist was never able to achieve time travel, and the proliferation of nasty accidents around time travel experimentors would seem like some sort of "Physicist's Curse".
There was something that LOOKED like that in chemistry: The isolation of Fluorine. It turned out to be pretty straightforward. But the stuff was SO toxic that a number of chemists died in "mysterious laboratory accidents" before one succeeded AND kept it sufficiently contained to live to tell about it. Then they figured out what had happened to the rest.
Nitroglycerin had a related happening, first time: It blew the lab and the chemist to small pieces. But he'd kept good notes and they survived. With the info others were able to replicate the synthesis and knew to take care (and work from a distance!) until they figured out the need for temperature control and shock-avoidance to avoid setting off the product in mid-reaction.
I had a high school english teacher who gave me a C+... because I failed to mention the nuclear war... that occurred only in the 1960 movie version, not the book.
In retrospect, this should have been self-evident to the teacher, since the story was written in 1895, before Bohr suggested there was even such a thing as an atomic nucleus in 1913.
I'm not surprised. It was an English teacher. Unfortunately, liberal arts graduates in many fields (excluding some like History and Anthropology) tend to be ignorant of such details - especially of technical issues and also of science fiction as an art form - and/or fail to make such connections. Comes with the territory. Those for whom math, sequence, technology, and making connections are significant gravitate to other fields.
And that's probably a good thing. While it's an ongoing pain for the young due to the problems the Arts types cause for their students, I really prefer that those whose skills at math and tracking details are weak AREN'T designing the bridges, buildings, factories, vehicles, chemical plants, nuclear reactors, and other stuff that kills people if they fail.
What if certain "extraordinary" people are merely beneficiaries of dumb luck? What if Warren Buffett has no actual investiment skill, but appears so because we never put him in the context of the many thousands of similar individuals who eventually "landed on tails", so to speak?
I understand that there's a theory in investing that a significant fraction of investment advisers are precisely that. B-)
There's also a confidence game that works that way:
1) The con artist starts by extracting a large number of names and addresses from the phone book.
2) He send them each a random stock pick or horse race winner.
3) After the race/target date he discard all the names he sent a bum pick and repeats with the remainder and a new set of picks.
4) After a few iterations he has a handfull of people who are convinced he's psychic or has inside info, some of whom already traded/bet on his calls and are richer than they were before he started. (The number if iterations is significant but I don't recall it. It's got to be long enough to hook the suckers and short enough that the news of the losers doesn't propagate. USPS and the racket squads are aware of this system.) Then he sends a letter asking for a big fee for the next pick. This brings in a pile of money.
5) He sends each of 'em who pays up another random pick. If they're all flops he's still got the pile of money. If one or two hits he now has one or two suckers who are even more convinced and have a bunch of money to fleece with one more iteration.
A pair of entangled particles has the property that, if someone takes a measurement on each of them, forcing each into one of a pair of eigenstates, knowing which state one of them collapsed into tells you which state the other one collapsed into - even if the separation between the two measurements is spacelike rather than timelike (i.e. even if a signal from one of them "telling" the other which state to pick would have to propagate faster than light.)
But you can't force your particle to pick one of the two options for its own collapse, and thus force the other to pick a state of your choosing and send a bit of information faster than light. The PARTICLE gets to make the pick. You can't distinguish whether the particles communicate FTL, the pick was already made when they initially became entangled and carried by some "hidden variable" until the measurement (though there's reason to believe it's not a hidden variable), they were just predestined to act that way, or whatever. (Physics says WHAT it does but, at least so far, not HOW.)
The most you can do is measure a DIFFERENT thing about the particle when you force the collapse (such as the polarization along a different axis if you're measuring polarization), in which case you lose all knowledge about how the other particle's measurement came out.
So if there is an FTL communications link there, it's useful for the particles but apparently not for us.
This is probably good. If we had a reliable FTL signal link we could pretty trivially (using special relativity and things moving moderately fast) turn it into a future-to-past communication link and blow the hell out of causality. So far the only maybe-future-to-past comm channel that comes out of current paradigms (AFAIK) involves galactic-scale masses and energies.
... (some time between fall '63 and spring '65) I wrote a short story with a similar premise:
The government's physicists had identified a way to create such a "bounce" situation by a nuclear mumbo-jumbo that starts with putting together a dense enough energy packet. This backs the universe up a bit and it takes another alternative timeline. Humans have just enough psi to make different decisions. The more energy you use to start the process, the farther back the "time bounce" to the fork. Or at least that's the theory.
The government has taken advantage of this by creating a secret project: They are collecting and storing a LOT of energy using a solar power satellite. (The downlink is a laser and the ground-based collector and energy storage tech, like the details of the bounce device, are unspecified.) Accumulation of energy is ongoing, so they continue to have enough to bounce back at least to the time when the project was initiated. (Going farther risks taking a fork on which the device is not made.)
This is used by the diplomats as a way to correct mistakes: If things got too bad diplomatically they could go back and try something different. (Unlike a doomsday device you WANT to keep this one secret - and for there to be only one.)
Since the project went online, though there have been many conflicts and near-misses on situations with the potential to degenerate into something that would make WW II or a comet impact look tame, things have always worked out for the government in question. Sometimes by smart diplomacy, sometimes by smart battle strategy in small conflicts heading off large ones, sometimes by seemingly amazing coincidences and blind luck. Starting as one country on Earth (where the device is still sited) the government has (mostly peaceably) unified/absorbed/explored/grown into a multi-solar-system empire.
The kicker is that, from the viewpoint of the operators (from which it is was written) EVERY use is the FIRST use. It ALWAYS appears that things have miraculously gone so well that they haven't needed it - until JUST NOW. Maybe the thing really doesn't work - in which case it will destroy the planet and life on most of the spiral arm. Maybe it does work - but from the viewpoint of the current timeline it's just the end of the universe. Maybe the diplomats and generals, knowing this is a possibility, have gone to heroic efforts and pulled out heroic saves - until JUST NOW. But now it's finally hit the fan and the viewpoint characters have been ordered to set it off...
One of the others in that class was the guy who was the model for Aahz in Asprin's books. Ran into him a decade or two later. He brought up the story and said it had haunted him ever since. B-)
Has anybody looked into what "harvesting" all this wind is gonna do to the environment?
Yep.
It's about like letting a forest grow. Slows the wind down a little bit near the surface. Eases erosion nearby. Does diddly-squat to the weather. (A little more nucleation and turbulence - far less than building a city on the site.)
With solar I have much less concern since that sunlight is just gonna hit the ground anyway,...
And maybe half of it bounce back into the sky at the original frequency (depending on the color of the ground) and pass right back through the greenhouse gasses into space.
Put a solar collector there and essentially all of it is absorbed, to be re-emitted as infrared that the greenhouse gasses won't pass. Oops!
It's the difference bettween a greenhouse full of sand and a greenhouse full of black stuff. (And as somebody who had a freshly assembled mini-greenhouse full of black thermoplastic plant trays not yet filled with dirt and plants MELT THE TRAYS the first sunny day after it was assembled, I'm a tad sensitive to the issue.)
One of the proposed solutions for "global warming" was albedo management - painting enough of the planet white to reduce the greenhouse effect and regulate the temperature that way. This is painting a bunch of the planet black. Industrial-scale solar collection systems will become "heat islands" just like cities did, with their tar and asphalt streets and roofs and their waste heat from energy use.
For photovoltaic arrays there's also the pollution issues of their construction - mostly in places other than the US which don't bother with costly things like capturing the toxics from the waste stream.
While the science geek in me says cool!, the other side says, After 40 years, is this the BEST we can do?
After the Apollo program we pi**ed all the money away on Vietnam, a string of other wars, and "The Great Society" welfare programs. These were all run on the national credit card until the interest on the account is now sucking down more than the income tax provides.
The value was sucked out of the economy and disposed of by government until, despite what advancements WERE made since with what resources were left, we still can't afford the size of program we could in the 1960s.
- We didn't miss the aim point.
- None of the instruments malfunctioned.
- We didn't lose the data on the way back.
- We'll tell you what it means once we're done analyzing and checking it.
In still other words "The project passed THE major milestone and is on track with nothing broken."
You correct it. You take your lumps with this employer. And you drop the guy who hacked your resume.
It's OK so shorten your resume. It's not OK to falsify anything on it.
You should have dropped 'em the first time. Now that you know this guy fakes resumes you should never touch him again.
You may be having trouble now because there's two versions of your resume getting to some HR departments and you're flagged as a fake. If you keep getting no-replies you may need to include a cover letter explaining that a(n unnamed) headhunter had previously "enhanced" your resume and circulated this false version, that this one is true and correct, and you no longer do business with him.
SF and mainstream fiction have distinct central messages.
Mainstream fiction is art for the ruled classes. It says "It may be bad but anything you do to try to fix it will will make it worse. Listen to the authorities and those with the right certifications - no matter how badly they're performing they're the only ones who know how to handle this stuff. Be a nice sheep. Do what your leaders tell you. Shearing you in the spring makes the hot summer more comfortable and they'll keep you healthy until you're ready for the table." Literature teachers generally deride any literature that doesn't carry this message as "escapist" (as if there's something horribly wrong with reading a mood-uplifting story rather than being depressed ALL the time and such stories are thus automatically low quality).
SF's is the art of engineers - the people who MUST strive for excellence and improvement to make the infrastructure run. Its central message is "Applying thought and effort to improve things works and can bring enormous benefits. Letting things slide makes them worse. YOU are responsible for your life and the quality of life of those around you." Even SF dystopias are generally of the form: "If you let THIS break it can get SO bad that it's no longer possible to fix it."
But there are a few authors and a few stories that use the SF form but carry mainstream fiction's central message. And my experience in the past has been that those teachers who attempt to "bring Science Fiction into the classroom" gravitate to these authors and stories with their familiar components, hold them up as some of the best work in the field, and thus miss the entire POINT of SF.
Converting you Informix Data to SQL Server. Converting you C++ code to java. Converting your Flash to HTML...
Actually, I was thinking more of things like converting your.doc files to ODF (without breaking something), converting your Outlook calendar to any other calendaring tool (and interacting with other workers who didn't), ad infinitum.
Or attaching another vendor's peripheral to your mainframe computer.
Vendor lock-in as a business model has been a way of life in computing since before computers were "personal". This aspect of "the cloud" businesses is nothing new.
Why on earth would a company allow customers to automatically populate another company's website with your data?
And while we're at it:
Why would a company that's so paranoid about their proprietary information that they won't use a wireless microphone in a meeting:
- Hire an external company to convert the "nerd lunch" lectures, which walk employees through the IP crown jewels, to convert the videotapes of the lectures to online format for the internal website (rather than buying an appliance or configuring a linux box to do it in-house),
- Hire an outside service to do online videoconferencing,
- Hire a division of ONE OF THEIR COMPETITORS to run their internal IT infrastructure.
- Force the linux users of the acquisition they just paid a couple billion for onto Vista (for security),
- Force all employees to take a mandatory intellectual-property security-training web-based presentation that only runs under Internet Explorer (if you want to get credited for passing it) and asks you to input your password so it can check it for quality,
just for starters.
But then I think back to the office politics of OTHER large companies I've worked for and it all makes sense. Unfortunately.
... a gallon of gasoline could potentially lift a human into orbit, less spaceship.
Actually it's quite a bit more than a gallon. (LEO is very high and very fast. Other orbits are moreso.) But the basic idea is sound.
Rockets are HORRIBLE energy-spenders. (Their big advantage is that they do work and are self-contained.) That's why there's all that work on various "space elevators", where you can use electric motors (or the equivalent), at efficiencies in the 75 to 98% range from electricity to kinetic energy, to move stuff from the ground to LEO, geosynch, or otherwise get it persistently off the ground and out of the atmosphere.
This sort of revision tracking can be added on later.
Initially it MUST be added on, by porting the current laws and the legislative history to a revision tracking system. Later legislation can be entered and connected as the bills are submitted, amended, voted on, passed or rejected, sent to conference, signed or vetoed, etc.
There is ALREADY a government office that is MANDATED by congress to do EXACTLY THIS - making legislation in progress electronically accessible and searchable: It's the Library of Congress, with its Thomas project. They started it as a solution to a publication problem. But it's been improving and evolving toward a revision tracking system.
IMHO what is really being asked for here is a system more explicitly organized AS a revision-tracking system (with a public read-only interface), with the useful code-clarifying tools that have been developed for software ported over to the legal code. And to make this available to the legislators while mandating that they (i.e. the staff) use it for the new stuff in their day-to-day operation.
And it seems to me that the logical audience for such a suggestion is not the Slashdot community (though perhaps discussing it here is useful for getting the proposal together and mobilizing a mob to lobby for it B-) ). Instead the right audience is:
- first the Thomas group in the Library of Congress, asking them to incorporate more computer-code revision-control insights to improve their (already very nice) system's functionality (with an eye to also making it useful to congressional staffers),
- then congresscritters' staff (to get them to use it to help THEIR work),
- then the congressional printing office (to get the congressional record more integrated with it),
- then finally the congresscritters themselves (to get them to make it the official way to do their INTERNAL publications).
= = = =
A possible downside to applying revision tracking to legislation is McClary's Third Law: "Code complexity expands to saturate the available code management tools." - derived from Mark Miller's observaton during the Xanadu project that "The complexity of a database is limited by the number of colors of magic marker available for making the whiteboard diagrams."
It already IS a formal language: American English Leagalese.
This language started out as essentially the language as spoken at the time the early laws were written, then various words had their meanings defined, clarified, and frozen by court decisions. Further laws, contracts, and legal arguments and decisions used these words whose meanings were clarified in preference to other words that had not been so clarified. Meanwhile, in the absense of public education in the law for people who weren't making a carreer in the legal system, the spoken language drifted away.
There's an enormous amount of existing code. Look at how much Slashdot talks about COBOL, which is around 50 years old. In common law countries (eg Britain, the USA and Australia), the law has code nearly a millennium old, written in a variety of languages.
Fortunately we're talking about a much smaller problem.
We're not talking about putting THE LAW into a revision control system. We're talking about putting THE STATUTES and PENDING LEGISLATION into a revision control sysetm. This excludes common law, administrative law, judicial interpretation and precedent, judicial striking of law for constitutional issues, judicial district differences in precedent, enforcement priorities, and a host of other things.
The constitution, the statutes, and their proposed revisions are exceedingly well structured for a computer-code-style revision tracking system.
Later such a system might be augmented to track things like judicial precedent, law review articles, history of enforcement, and the like in much the same way that current sysems can (or should B-) ) track documentation and its connection to code.
But the immediate target is eliminating the "too complex to understand so I didn't bother to read it" excuse that the legislators are using to pull con games on their opposition and the public.
The bill as written allowed people to simply walk into a hospital and demand healthcare, whether they were american, illegal residents, or foreign tourists just dropping-in for a visit.
How is that different than the situation we have today?
Currently:
- Hospitals are only required to perform the care necessary to stabilize immediately life-threatening problems. (That's why there's no co-pay collection at the emergency room but there IS at the urgent-care walkin and the other clinics. And why many illegals use the E-room for everything from a broken arm to a kid with a cold.)
- Hospitals pick up the tab for the bills they can't collect. This means most of it ends up (drastically) raising the rates of the people who DO pay. And it also means, when the cost gets TOO high, that some hospitals must chose between closing the E-room and closing the hospital. (This is why some private hospitals are closing E-rooms or whole hospital complexes in dense urban areas, selling out to non-profits and government-run healthcare system, etc.)
Obamacare, if essentially ANY of the claims about it are true, would mean the on-demand try-to-collect-later health care would be across the board, not just emergency service.
This is expected to raise the cost of private insurance until it can't compete with the "public option". Then the private insurance plans fold and everybody but the hyper-rich ends up on the government plan.
You'll notice the choice of metals: calcium, magnesium, and zinc are all things your body needs in non-trace quantities, and is capable of regulating the level of.
Good observation.
And I'm sure they'll refine the zinc enough to get all the cadmium out of it. (All but a trace too small to matter, of course. Say: levels far below the levels that would pass the intestinal barrier from a comparable amount of an oral zinc supplement.)
Slashdot Mirror
No, the morons on channel 680 mean that.
Dittos on that.
I hear they did it because people were pronouncing it "skiffy".
What is particularly annoying is its relation to the fannish distinction from a few decades back. Science fiction was abbreviated "SF" and pronounced "ess-eff". "SciFi" was pronounced "skiffy". SF was things like _the Foundation Trilogy_. SciFi was things like _Son of the Giant Toad that Ate Chicago_. "SciFi" could also be used as an adjective: "That movie/TV show is EXTREMELY skiffy".
And by that definition most of what the SciFi / SyFy channel runs/ran is "SciFi".
(Oh, well. At least they coined a new one rather than appropriating SF and misbranding themselves. "SyFy" is what THEY define it to be by what they run.)
The flaw in that story is that unless they were aware of what the right/better choice was they would continue to relive the same crisis by making the same choice and go into a loop.
"Humans have just enough psi to make different decisions."
Not necessarily the RIGHT decision. But a DIFFERENT one than "last time". They get just enough of a premonition of doom when they consider the previous choices to avoid them. This breaks the loop and eventually they get it right - or at least good enough to avoid hitting the button again. (Or the enemy successfully sneak-attacks before they can push the button - an incentive to avoid holding off.)
Or so their theory goes. The story ends as the people who must "push the button" are at the peak of their uncertainty, just before activating the device or refusing to do so.
The point is to put the reader into their shoes. The decision they make and the "actual" physics are immaterial.
(You haven't kept going back in time and improving the plot, have you?)
Not so far. B-) But I did just pull another bit from my memory...
Maybe it does work - but from the viewpoint of the current timeline it's just the end of the universe. Maybe it does work but the universe doesn't branch - so it REALLY IS the end of the ENTIRE universe.
Doesn't this really just mean that FTL is only possible if there's a preferred frame of reference?
Yep. But such a special frame also pulls the rug out from under both special and general relativity.
Given how well relativity has matched extreme physical phenomena so far it seems unlikely that a special frame with FTL will show up.
Good stuff!
From the outside perspective, the scientist was never able to achieve time travel, and the proliferation of nasty accidents around time travel experimentors would seem like some sort of "Physicist's Curse".
There was something that LOOKED like that in chemistry: The isolation of Fluorine. It turned out to be pretty straightforward. But the stuff was SO toxic that a number of chemists died in "mysterious laboratory accidents" before one succeeded AND kept it sufficiently contained to live to tell about it. Then they figured out what had happened to the rest.
Nitroglycerin had a related happening, first time: It blew the lab and the chemist to small pieces. But he'd kept good notes and they survived. With the info others were able to replicate the synthesis and knew to take care (and work from a distance!) until they figured out the need for temperature control and shock-avoidance to avoid setting off the product in mid-reaction.
I had a high school english teacher who gave me a C+ ... because I failed to mention the nuclear war... that occurred only in the 1960 movie version, not the book.
In retrospect, this should have been self-evident to the teacher, since the story was written in 1895, before Bohr suggested there was even such a thing as an atomic nucleus in 1913.
I'm not surprised. It was an English teacher. Unfortunately, liberal arts graduates in many fields (excluding some like History and Anthropology) tend to be ignorant of such details - especially of technical issues and also of science fiction as an art form - and/or fail to make such connections. Comes with the territory. Those for whom math, sequence, technology, and making connections are significant gravitate to other fields.
And that's probably a good thing. While it's an ongoing pain for the young due to the problems the Arts types cause for their students, I really prefer that those whose skills at math and tracking details are weak AREN'T designing the bridges, buildings, factories, vehicles, chemical plants, nuclear reactors, and other stuff that kills people if they fail.
What if certain "extraordinary" people are merely beneficiaries of dumb luck? What if Warren Buffett has no actual investiment skill, but appears so because we never put him in the context of the many thousands of similar individuals who eventually "landed on tails", so to speak?
I understand that there's a theory in investing that a significant fraction of investment advisers are precisely that. B-)
There's also a confidence game that works that way:
1) The con artist starts by extracting a large number of names and addresses from the phone book.
2) He send them each a random stock pick or horse race winner.
3) After the race/target date he discard all the names he sent a bum pick and repeats with the remainder and a new set of picks.
4) After a few iterations he has a handfull of people who are convinced he's psychic or has inside info, some of whom already traded/bet on his calls and are richer than they were before he started. (The number if iterations is significant but I don't recall it. It's got to be long enough to hook the suckers and short enough that the news of the losers doesn't propagate. USPS and the racket squads are aware of this system.) Then he sends a letter asking for a big fee for the next pick. This brings in a pile of money.
5) He sends each of 'em who pays up another random pick. If they're all flops he's still got the pile of money. If one or two hits he now has one or two suckers who are even more convinced and have a bunch of money to fleece with one more iteration.
If I ever find the manuscript I might. Or submit it to a 'zine.
However I am not confident that it survived a few decades of moves.
A pair of entangled particles has the property that, if someone takes a measurement on each of them, forcing each into one of a pair of eigenstates, knowing which state one of them collapsed into tells you which state the other one collapsed into - even if the separation between the two measurements is spacelike rather than timelike (i.e. even if a signal from one of them "telling" the other which state to pick would have to propagate faster than light.)
But you can't force your particle to pick one of the two options for its own collapse, and thus force the other to pick a state of your choosing and send a bit of information faster than light. The PARTICLE gets to make the pick. You can't distinguish whether the particles communicate FTL, the pick was already made when they initially became entangled and carried by some "hidden variable" until the measurement (though there's reason to believe it's not a hidden variable), they were just predestined to act that way, or whatever. (Physics says WHAT it does but, at least so far, not HOW.)
The most you can do is measure a DIFFERENT thing about the particle when you force the collapse (such as the polarization along a different axis if you're measuring polarization), in which case you lose all knowledge about how the other particle's measurement came out.
So if there is an FTL communications link there, it's useful for the particles but apparently not for us.
This is probably good. If we had a reliable FTL signal link we could pretty trivially (using special relativity and things moving moderately fast) turn it into a future-to-past communication link and blow the hell out of causality. So far the only maybe-future-to-past comm channel that comes out of current paradigms (AFAIK) involves galactic-scale masses and energies.
Does that explanation help?
... (some time between fall '63 and spring '65) I wrote a short story with a similar premise:
The government's physicists had identified a way to create such a "bounce" situation by a nuclear mumbo-jumbo that starts with putting together a dense enough energy packet. This backs the universe up a bit and it takes another alternative timeline. Humans have just enough psi to make different decisions. The more energy you use to start the process, the farther back the "time bounce" to the fork. Or at least that's the theory.
The government has taken advantage of this by creating a secret project: They are collecting and storing a LOT of energy using a solar power satellite. (The downlink is a laser and the ground-based collector and energy storage tech, like the details of the bounce device, are unspecified.) Accumulation of energy is ongoing, so they continue to have enough to bounce back at least to the time when the project was initiated. (Going farther risks taking a fork on which the device is not made.)
This is used by the diplomats as a way to correct mistakes: If things got too bad diplomatically they could go back and try something different. (Unlike a doomsday device you WANT to keep this one secret - and for there to be only one.)
Since the project went online, though there have been many conflicts and near-misses on situations with the potential to degenerate into something that would make WW II or a comet impact look tame, things have always worked out for the government in question. Sometimes by smart diplomacy, sometimes by smart battle strategy in small conflicts heading off large ones, sometimes by seemingly amazing coincidences and blind luck. Starting as one country on Earth (where the device is still sited) the government has (mostly peaceably) unified/absorbed/explored/grown into a multi-solar-system empire.
The kicker is that, from the viewpoint of the operators (from which it is was written) EVERY use is the FIRST use. It ALWAYS appears that things have miraculously gone so well that they haven't needed it - until JUST NOW. Maybe the thing really doesn't work - in which case it will destroy the planet and life on most of the spiral arm. Maybe it does work - but from the viewpoint of the current timeline it's just the end of the universe. Maybe the diplomats and generals, knowing this is a possibility, have gone to heroic efforts and pulled out heroic saves - until JUST NOW. But now it's finally hit the fan and the viewpoint characters have been ordered to set it off ...
One of the others in that class was the guy who was the model for Aahz in Asprin's books. Ran into him a decade or two later. He brought up the story and said it had haunted him ever since. B-)
Has anybody looked into what "harvesting" all this wind is gonna do to the environment?
Yep.
It's about like letting a forest grow. Slows the wind down a little bit near the surface. Eases erosion nearby. Does diddly-squat to the weather. (A little more nucleation and turbulence - far less than building a city on the site.)
With solar I have much less concern since that sunlight is just gonna hit the ground anyway, ...
And maybe half of it bounce back into the sky at the original frequency (depending on the color of the ground) and pass right back through the greenhouse gasses into space.
Put a solar collector there and essentially all of it is absorbed, to be re-emitted as infrared that the greenhouse gasses won't pass. Oops!
It's the difference bettween a greenhouse full of sand and a greenhouse full of black stuff. (And as somebody who had a freshly assembled mini-greenhouse full of black thermoplastic plant trays not yet filled with dirt and plants MELT THE TRAYS the first sunny day after it was assembled, I'm a tad sensitive to the issue.)
One of the proposed solutions for "global warming" was albedo management - painting enough of the planet white to reduce the greenhouse effect and regulate the temperature that way. This is painting a bunch of the planet black. Industrial-scale solar collection systems will become "heat islands" just like cities did, with their tar and asphalt streets and roofs and their waste heat from energy use.
For photovoltaic arrays there's also the pollution issues of their construction - mostly in places other than the US which don't bother with costly things like capturing the toxics from the waste stream.
And open pit mine would be a pretty rotten place for a wind farm OR a solar field.
Might make a good site for an orbital solar power downlink rectenna, though.
While the science geek in me says cool!, the other side says, After 40 years, is this the BEST we can do?
After the Apollo program we pi**ed all the money away on Vietnam, a string of other wars, and "The Great Society" welfare programs. These were all run on the national credit card until the interest on the account is now sucking down more than the income tax provides.
The value was sucked out of the economy and disposed of by government until, despite what advancements WERE made since with what resources were left, we still can't afford the size of program we could in the 1960s.
Moon shots are expensive and we're broke.
- We didn't miss the aim point.
- None of the instruments malfunctioned.
- We didn't lose the data on the way back.
- We'll tell you what it means once we're done analyzing and checking it.
In still other words "The project passed THE major milestone and is on track with nothing broken."
You correct it. You take your lumps with this employer. And you drop the guy who hacked your resume.
It's OK so shorten your resume. It's not OK to falsify anything on it.
You should have dropped 'em the first time. Now that you know this guy fakes resumes you should never touch him again.
You may be having trouble now because there's two versions of your resume getting to some HR departments and you're flagged as a fake. If you keep getting no-replies you may need to include a cover letter explaining that a(n unnamed) headhunter had previously "enhanced" your resume and circulated this false version, that this one is true and correct, and you no longer do business with him.
Wow, and to think that we thought things were bad in the US.
I seem to recall this was TRIED in the US and failed miserably.
... _The Machine Stops_ or anything by Bradbury.
SF and mainstream fiction have distinct central messages.
Mainstream fiction is art for the ruled classes. It says "It may be bad but anything you do to try to fix it will will make it worse. Listen to the authorities and those with the right certifications - no matter how badly they're performing they're the only ones who know how to handle this stuff. Be a nice sheep. Do what your leaders tell you. Shearing you in the spring makes the hot summer more comfortable and they'll keep you healthy until you're ready for the table." Literature teachers generally deride any literature that doesn't carry this message as "escapist" (as if there's something horribly wrong with reading a mood-uplifting story rather than being depressed ALL the time and such stories are thus automatically low quality).
SF's is the art of engineers - the people who MUST strive for excellence and improvement to make the infrastructure run. Its central message is "Applying thought and effort to improve things works and can bring enormous benefits. Letting things slide makes them worse. YOU are responsible for your life and the quality of life of those around you." Even SF dystopias are generally of the form: "If you let THIS break it can get SO bad that it's no longer possible to fix it."
But there are a few authors and a few stories that use the SF form but carry mainstream fiction's central message. And my experience in the past has been that those teachers who attempt to "bring Science Fiction into the classroom" gravitate to these authors and stories with their familiar components, hold them up as some of the best work in the field, and thus miss the entire POINT of SF.
Converting you Informix Data to SQL Server. Converting you C++ code to java. Converting your Flash to HTML...
Actually, I was thinking more of things like converting your .doc files to ODF (without breaking something), converting your Outlook calendar to any other calendaring tool (and interacting with other workers who didn't), ad infinitum.
Or attaching another vendor's peripheral to your mainframe computer.
Vendor lock-in as a business model has been a way of life in computing since before computers were "personal". This aspect of "the cloud" businesses is nothing new.
Why on earth would a company allow customers to automatically populate another company's website with your data?
And while we're at it:
Why would a company that's so paranoid about their proprietary information that they won't use a wireless microphone in a meeting:
- Hire an external company to convert the "nerd lunch" lectures, which walk employees through the IP crown jewels, to convert the videotapes of the lectures to online format for the internal website (rather than buying an appliance or configuring a linux box to do it in-house),
- Hire an outside service to do online videoconferencing,
- Hire a division of ONE OF THEIR COMPETITORS to run their internal IT infrastructure.
- Force the linux users of the acquisition they just paid a couple billion for onto Vista (for security),
- Force all employees to take a mandatory intellectual-property security-training web-based presentation that only runs under Internet Explorer (if you want to get credited for passing it) and asks you to input your password so it can check it for quality,
just for starters.
But then I think back to the office politics of OTHER large companies I've worked for and it all makes sense. Unfortunately.
... a gallon of gasoline could potentially lift a human into orbit, less spaceship.
Actually it's quite a bit more than a gallon. (LEO is very high and very fast. Other orbits are moreso.) But the basic idea is sound.
Rockets are HORRIBLE energy-spenders. (Their big advantage is that they do work and are self-contained.) That's why there's all that work on various "space elevators", where you can use electric motors (or the equivalent), at efficiencies in the 75 to 98% range from electricity to kinetic energy, to move stuff from the ground to LEO, geosynch, or otherwise get it persistently off the ground and out of the atmosphere.
This sort of revision tracking can be added on later.
Initially it MUST be added on, by porting the current laws and the legislative history to a revision tracking system. Later legislation can be entered and connected as the bills are submitted, amended, voted on, passed or rejected, sent to conference, signed or vetoed, etc.
There is ALREADY a government office that is MANDATED by congress to do EXACTLY THIS - making legislation in progress electronically accessible and searchable: It's the Library of Congress, with its Thomas project. They started it as a solution to a publication problem. But it's been improving and evolving toward a revision tracking system.
IMHO what is really being asked for here is a system more explicitly organized AS a revision-tracking system (with a public read-only interface), with the useful code-clarifying tools that have been developed for software ported over to the legal code. And to make this available to the legislators while mandating that they (i.e. the staff) use it for the new stuff in their day-to-day operation.
And it seems to me that the logical audience for such a suggestion is not the Slashdot community (though perhaps discussing it here is useful for getting the proposal together and mobilizing a mob to lobby for it B-) ). Instead the right audience is:
- first the Thomas group in the Library of Congress, asking them to incorporate more computer-code revision-control insights to improve their (already very nice) system's functionality (with an eye to also making it useful to congressional staffers),
- then congresscritters' staff (to get them to use it to help THEIR work),
- then the congressional printing office (to get the congressional record more integrated with it),
- then finally the congresscritters themselves (to get them to make it the official way to do their INTERNAL publications).
= = = =
A possible downside to applying revision tracking to legislation is McClary's Third Law: "Code complexity expands to saturate the available code management tools." - derived from Mark Miller's observaton during the Xanadu project that "The complexity of a database is limited by the number of colors of magic marker available for making the whiteboard diagrams."
Think your laws are complicated NOW? Just wait.
Why not make the source itself a formal language?
It already IS a formal language: American English Leagalese.
This language started out as essentially the language as spoken at the time the early laws were written, then various words had their meanings defined, clarified, and frozen by court decisions. Further laws, contracts, and legal arguments and decisions used these words whose meanings were clarified in preference to other words that had not been so clarified. Meanwhile, in the absense of public education in the law for people who weren't making a carreer in the legal system, the spoken language drifted away.
There's an enormous amount of existing code. Look at how much Slashdot talks about COBOL, which is around 50 years old. In common law countries (eg Britain, the USA and Australia), the law has code nearly a millennium old, written in a variety of languages.
Fortunately we're talking about a much smaller problem.
We're not talking about putting THE LAW into a revision control system. We're talking about putting THE STATUTES and PENDING LEGISLATION into a revision control sysetm. This excludes common law, administrative law, judicial interpretation and precedent, judicial striking of law for constitutional issues, judicial district differences in precedent, enforcement priorities, and a host of other things.
The constitution, the statutes, and their proposed revisions are exceedingly well structured for a computer-code-style revision tracking system.
Later such a system might be augmented to track things like judicial precedent, law review articles, history of enforcement, and the like in much the same way that current sysems can (or should B-) ) track documentation and its connection to code.
But the immediate target is eliminating the "too complex to understand so I didn't bother to read it" excuse that the legislators are using to pull con games on their opposition and the public.
The bill as written allowed people to simply walk into a hospital and demand healthcare, whether they were american, illegal residents, or foreign tourists just dropping-in for a visit.
How is that different than the situation we have today?
Currently:
- Hospitals are only required to perform the care necessary to stabilize immediately life-threatening problems. (That's why there's no co-pay collection at the emergency room but there IS at the urgent-care walkin and the other clinics. And why many illegals use the E-room for everything from a broken arm to a kid with a cold.)
- Hospitals pick up the tab for the bills they can't collect. This means most of it ends up (drastically) raising the rates of the people who DO pay. And it also means, when the cost gets TOO high, that some hospitals must chose between closing the E-room and closing the hospital. (This is why some private hospitals are closing E-rooms or whole hospital complexes in dense urban areas, selling out to non-profits and government-run healthcare system, etc.)
Obamacare, if essentially ANY of the claims about it are true, would mean the on-demand try-to-collect-later health care would be across the board, not just emergency service.
This is expected to raise the cost of private insurance until it can't compete with the "public option". Then the private insurance plans fold and everybody but the hyper-rich ends up on the government plan.
You'll notice the choice of metals: calcium, magnesium, and zinc are all things your body needs in non-trace quantities, and is capable of regulating the level of.
Good observation.
And I'm sure they'll refine the zinc enough to get all the cadmium out of it. (All but a trace too small to matter, of course. Say: levels far below the levels that would pass the intestinal barrier from a comparable amount of an oral zinc supplement.)