The organisers claimed 300,000, the police claimed 200,000, and the media said 250,000. Organisers usually exaggerate number while police usually play them down.
I don't think anyone was 'stuck in the mob' (revealing choice of word, BTW). The protest asembled in Hyde Park (in Sydney, Australia), and police diverted traffic and blocked off roads that were affected by the march. In Sydney you can actually book portions of the city for a protest providing you give advanced notice and have sufficient interest.
There were some good aerial shots of the march showing its size pretty well in the Sydney Morning Herald and on smh.com.au, but I think these are now in a paid archive.
The second article on this page mentions the numbers in a summary (sorry about the huge URL).
Remember that most Ausralian citizens oppose the war, so naturally there are larger turnouts here than in pro-war countries.
"War protestors as a percentage of world population are "so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who" protests."
At the last anti-war protest I went to, a quarter of a million people were present, from a city of 4 million. That's 12.5%. Your percentage may be accurate for the USA (I doubt it though), but other countries have diversity of opinion.
"However, the group the author wants to own "second superpower" is composed of war protestors, whose roughly three million malcontents account for about 0.05% of the world's 6 billionish people. Clearly, by the author's own statistics, bloggers (4%) far outnumber protestors by a factor of 80 to 1, so Google's claim to democracy wins hands-down."
4% of internet users != 4% of the world's population. Duh.
I was at an arcade in Santa Cruz where the had the drumming games
A friend of mine is a drummer, and was carrying his gear into a pub to play when he noticed one of those Bemani drumming games. He had a go at it but it didn't feel quite right to him until he brought his cymbals into the arcade and set them up. Comical.
The so-called coalition of the willing consists of three types of nations: those run by right-wing administrations (Italy, Spain, Denmark), those bought off with US money or influence (eastern Europe), plus the UK and Australia, who have yet to defy the US.
As an Australian, I think my country should be counted amongst the bought off vassals. I suspect England is much the same.
I have heard that Arthur C. Clarke named him as his favourite author.
I saw an SF documentary which suggested that Clarke and Niven were enemies. According to the doco Clarke is a pacifist and was disgusted with Niven over his participation in the Star Wars SDI project. That was a while ago, so it might all be water under the bridge now. Or Clarke made the comment some time in the seventies...
Well, that's definitely part of his appeal, but I think his writing's a bit different to conventional space opera. He's definitely writing about moral shades of grey as opposed to the basic Doc Smith 'good vs evil' scenario. Also, as you say, it's anarcho/socialist space opera as rather than the regular imperial/libertarian variety.
Banks has an excellent article about the political structure of the Culture online here.
He's not really a new wave writer, though, I'll give you that.
I guess my question is this: do I rely on my not-as-vast scientific knowledge that I maintain by reading the science journals and rely on the strength of my writing to carry me through to publication? Or do I focus away from writing science fiction?
Kim Stanley Robinson comes from an English background rather than a science background (he wrote his thesis on P.K. Dick), but seems to write convincing SF simply by doing a lot of research (several years for the Mars trilogy). I've spotted a lot of things he used in my own pop science reading about Mars, so I don't think he delved overly far into the technical during his research. I'm sure this approach would work as well for you.
A subset question of this is: is it easy to get pigeonholed in a particular genre? I am putting the finishing touches on a pair of SF short stories that I am going to be sending out, but I'm writing "literary"/mainstream fiction novels that I'd like to see in print. Am I going to face discrimination working in two blatantly different genres if I try and publish in both under the same name?
There are a lot of SF/lit fic writers who have published in both genres and done well. Some of the more obvious ones include:
Iain (M) Banks
Doris Lessing
H.G. Wells
Brian Aldiss
J.G. Ballard
Carel Kapek
I think -- looking at the list above -- chances for success writing both styles under the same name are increased if you're writing intellectual / new wave SF rather than space opera stuff. That way your literary cred is not reduced by writing genre guff.
I wrote some code for a company developing a web based CMS with version control (competing directly with Interwoven) from 1999 - 2001. Sadly the company died in the dot com crash and last I heard the code was being sold off -- I wonder if Interwoven bought it up before filing this patent? I know they were aware of our product, because we were at the same trade shows together.
Actually, back then (yes, I know I'm old) I knew several women who were D&Ders, and at least two male players who met their future spouses playing the game. I'm not sure when role-playing games became a guy thing, but they didn't start out that way.
I used to play with a bunch of disgruntled middle aged postal workers. Unable to find love in their D & D club they resorted to mail order brides... true.
As an electronic music nerd I need floppies to do OS upgrades on my samplers. A lot of second hand gear I pick up needs a boot disk, and as the original floppies are usually missing or damaged I have to find a boot disk image on the web.
(You can get Akai sampler OS upgrades here if you're interested).
Occasionally PCs need a boot disk too, so I hear...
Don't be afraid to refactor code every so often, because, schedule or no schedule, new requirements move the 'ideal' design away from what you drew up last month. That's (to my mind) the second largest contributor. Even good coders crumble to cost and schedule, and band-aid code that just plain needs to be rethought. In some environments, that's a fact of life. In others you will have to fight for it, but you can get code rewritten.
In my experience, programming for an employer is the process of secretly introducing quality. This usually consists of debugging and refactoring on the sly while your pointy-haired boss thinks you're adding 'features'.
Is it just me, or this the way it's done most places?
Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan -- which has been sort of adopted by NASA -- lets you do most of these things without first having a space station. The basic idea is to send a robot propellant factory/return vehicle to Mars ahead of the astronauts.
A solid understanding of the effect of long-duration (3+ years) exposure to space in closed habitation.
Zubrin argues that the psychological effects of close proximity for the length of the trip can be easily studied on Antarctica, or at sea. The plan calls for tethering the Earth-to-Mars spacecraft to a spent booster and spinning it for (faux) gravity, which should take care of zero-g health problems. The only outstanding issues then are radiation (for which he suggests basic shielding plus a shelter for solar flares) and medical emergencies (for which he suggests cross-training and luck).
Development of self-sustaining ecologies for said closed habitation.
Since the crew travel in a different craft each way, the Mars Direct plan simply replaces the mass fuel for a round trip with the equivalent mass of life support. He does the math in a 'The Case for Mars'.
Psychological and health studies to maintain crew safety and performance during said mission.
Can be done on the ground -- see above.
Development of technologies to allow us to construct large structures on-orbit (since no Mars-bound vessel will be small enough to fit on the end of an Energia booster).
Mars Direct is designed for Saturn Vs, but Zubrin has a variation using Energia in his book.
Your points five and six (about logistics and management) I'm not too sure about. Mars Direct is a lot closer to a Apollo mission than an ISS mission, but it's still novel territory that will require/spawn new techniques.
In his book Zubrin talks about objections to Mars missions because of the perception that a moon base (or in this case an ISS) is a pre-requisite. He fears that the space program will use up its tenuous goodwill with congress (and hence its funding) by screwing around in orbit when we could be getting started on Mars right now...
the Sony is sitting in a box as an expensive paper weight since it started having headaches just trying to play new DVDs, straight out of the box new (no scratches, no nothing)
Hmmm. My PS2 does the same thing (sort of) with Warner Bros DVDs. After about the third viewing they begin to skip uncontrollably, despite having no visible surface dirt or scratches.
The most annoying part is the way it displays an 'unable to read disc' error rather than forging on in a burst of digital distortion until it hits the next readable bit.
Slashdot Mirror
I've just spent three days trying to resolve problems with the Citrix client corrupting Win2k user profiles.
If you can keep Citrix off even one innocent box, it's worth losing your cushy contract over.
The organisers claimed 300,000, the police claimed 200,000, and the media said 250,000. Organisers usually exaggerate number while police usually play them down.
I don't think anyone was 'stuck in the mob' (revealing choice of word, BTW). The protest asembled in Hyde Park (in Sydney, Australia), and police diverted traffic and blocked off roads that were affected by the march. In Sydney you can actually book portions of the city for a protest providing you give advanced notice and have sufficient interest.
There were some good aerial shots of the march showing its size pretty well in the Sydney Morning Herald and on smh.com.au, but I think these are now in a paid archive.
The second article on this page mentions the numbers in a summary (sorry about the huge URL).
Remember that most Ausralian citizens oppose the war, so naturally there are larger turnouts here than in pro-war countries.
It's a troll, but I'll bite...
"War protestors as a percentage of world population are "so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who" protests."
At the last anti-war protest I went to, a quarter of a million people were present, from a city of 4 million. That's 12.5%. Your percentage may be accurate for the USA (I doubt it though), but other countries have diversity of opinion.
"However, the group the author wants to own "second superpower" is composed of war protestors, whose roughly three million malcontents account for about 0.05% of the world's 6 billionish people. Clearly, by the author's own statistics, bloggers (4%) far outnumber protestors by a factor of 80 to 1, so Google's claim to democracy wins hands-down."
4% of internet users != 4% of the world's population. Duh.
I was at an arcade in Santa Cruz where the had the drumming games
A friend of mine is a drummer, and was carrying his gear into a pub to play when he noticed one of those Bemani drumming games. He had a go at it but it didn't feel quite right to him until he brought his cymbals into the arcade and set them up. Comical.
The so-called coalition of the willing consists of three types of nations: those run by right-wing administrations (Italy, Spain, Denmark), those bought off with US money or influence (eastern Europe), plus the UK and Australia, who have yet to defy the US.
As an Australian, I think my country should be counted amongst the bought off vassals. I suspect England is much the same.
Disabling web access for programmers at work might have the interesting side effect of increasing the productivity of unpaid OSS projects.
Sure they're not reading slashdot in the 9 to 5, but now your programmers might be debugging the GIMP on company time : )
I have heard that Arthur C. Clarke named him as his favourite author.
I saw an SF documentary which suggested that Clarke and Niven were enemies. According to the doco Clarke is a pacifist and was disgusted with Niven over his participation in the Star Wars SDI project. That was a while ago, so it might all be water under the bridge now. Or Clarke made the comment some time in the seventies...
Well, that's definitely part of his appeal, but I think his writing's a bit different to conventional space opera. He's definitely writing about moral shades of grey as opposed to the basic Doc Smith 'good vs evil' scenario. Also, as you say, it's anarcho/socialist space opera as rather than the regular imperial/libertarian variety.
Banks has an excellent article about the political structure of the Culture online here.
He's not really a new wave writer, though, I'll give you that.
IANLN, but...
I guess my question is this: do I rely on my not-as-vast scientific knowledge that I maintain by reading the science journals and rely on the strength of my writing to carry me through to publication? Or do I focus away from writing science fiction?
Kim Stanley Robinson comes from an English background rather than a science background (he wrote his thesis on P.K. Dick), but seems to write convincing SF simply by doing a lot of research (several years for the Mars trilogy). I've spotted a lot of things he used in my own pop science reading about Mars, so I don't think he delved overly far into the technical during his research. I'm sure this approach would work as well for you.
A subset question of this is: is it easy to get pigeonholed in a particular genre? I am putting the finishing touches on a pair of SF short stories that I am going to be sending out, but I'm writing "literary"/mainstream fiction novels that I'd like to see in print. Am I going to face discrimination working in two blatantly different genres if I try and publish in both under the same name?
There are a lot of SF/lit fic writers who have published in both genres and done well. Some of the more obvious ones include:
I think -- looking at the list above -- chances for success writing both styles under the same name are increased if you're writing intellectual / new wave SF rather than space opera stuff. That way your literary cred is not reduced by writing genre guff.
I wrote some code for a company developing a web based CMS with version control (competing directly with Interwoven) from 1999 - 2001. Sadly the company died in the dot com crash and last I heard the code was being sold off -- I wonder if Interwoven bought it up before filing this patent? I know they were aware of our product, because we were at the same trade shows together.
Actually, back then (yes, I know I'm old) I knew several women who were D&Ders, and at least two male players who met their future spouses playing the game. I'm not sure when role-playing games became a guy thing, but they didn't start out that way.
I used to play with a bunch of disgruntled middle aged postal workers. Unable to find love in their D & D club they resorted to mail order brides... true.
plastic money isn't especially sturdy
Here in Australia we've been using plastic notes for a while, and they are quite sturdy and survive adventures in the washing machine rather well.
As an electronic music nerd I need floppies to do OS upgrades on my samplers. A lot of second hand gear I pick up needs a boot disk, and as the original floppies are usually missing or damaged I have to find a boot disk image on the web. (You can get Akai sampler OS upgrades here if you're interested). Occasionally PCs need a boot disk too, so I hear...
Domain Name: AMATEURPORNHOUSE.COM
Administrative Contact:
Phucksum, Jeff
I bet he has a moustache on his driver's licence photo.
Someone actually tested the bloody thing rather than randomly speculating. Mod up please.
cheers
Phil
Don't be afraid to refactor code every so often, because, schedule or no schedule, new requirements move the 'ideal' design away from what you drew up last month. That's (to my mind) the second largest contributor. Even good coders crumble to cost and schedule, and band-aid code that just plain needs to be rethought. In some environments, that's a fact of life. In others you will have to fight for it, but you can get code rewritten.
In my experience, programming for an employer is the process of secretly introducing quality. This usually consists of debugging and refactoring on the sly while your pointy-haired boss thinks you're adding 'features'.
Is it just me, or this the way it's done most places?
If the space program is fake, presumably the doubters can produce the Challenger crew.
(Oooooh... that was in poor taste.)
Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan -- which has been sort of adopted by NASA -- lets you do most of these things without first having a space station. The basic idea is to send a robot propellant factory/return vehicle to Mars ahead of the astronauts.
A solid understanding of the effect of long-duration (3+ years) exposure to space in closed habitation.
Zubrin argues that the psychological effects of close proximity for the length of the trip can be easily studied on Antarctica, or at sea. The plan calls for tethering the Earth-to-Mars spacecraft to a spent booster and spinning it for (faux) gravity, which should take care of zero-g health problems. The only outstanding issues then are radiation (for which he suggests basic shielding plus a shelter for solar flares) and medical emergencies (for which he suggests cross-training and luck).
Development of self-sustaining ecologies for said closed habitation.
Since the crew travel in a different craft each way, the Mars Direct plan simply replaces the mass fuel for a round trip with the equivalent mass of life support. He does the math in a 'The Case for Mars'.
Psychological and health studies to maintain crew safety and performance during said mission.
Can be done on the ground -- see above.
Development of technologies to allow us to construct large structures on-orbit (since no Mars-bound vessel will be small enough to fit on the end of an Energia booster).
Mars Direct is designed for Saturn Vs, but Zubrin has a variation using Energia in his book.
Your points five and six (about logistics and management) I'm not too sure about. Mars Direct is a lot closer to a Apollo mission than an ISS mission, but it's still novel territory that will require/spawn new techniques.
In his book Zubrin talks about objections to Mars missions because of the perception that a moon base (or in this case an ISS) is a pre-requisite. He fears that the space program will use up its tenuous goodwill with congress (and hence its funding) by screwing around in orbit when we could be getting started on Mars right now...
the Sony is sitting in a box as an expensive paper weight since it started having headaches just trying to play new DVDs, straight out of the box new (no scratches, no nothing)
Hmmm. My PS2 does the same thing (sort of) with Warner Bros DVDs. After about the third viewing they begin to skip uncontrollably, despite having no visible surface dirt or scratches.
The most annoying part is the way it displays an 'unable to read disc' error rather than forging on in a burst of digital distortion until it hits the next readable bit.