One of the stories in there talked about nuclear reactors in space, that were in geosyncronous orbit, transmitting power down to the planet's surface. (via microwave or some such) (Of course, the whole thing went down due to the fact that someone accidently hit it with the service craft.)
Given the plot, I don't know if you can say that Heinlein considered it a good idea...
But anyway, the really interesting predictions are in an article in the Expanded Universe collection, written in the fifties, then updated in the sixties and 1980, that attempts to predict what the year 2000 will be like. (With interesting commentary on the real predictive value of SF.) Fascinating stuff. My favorite part was the way he predicts the fall of communism in 1950 and then retracts the prediction in 1965!
Watson and Crick discovered the chemical that allowed genes to work. They did not discover that idea of the gene. That was implied in Darwinian evolution and proved by Mendel, both in the 19th century.
It wasn't described as a full virtual reality. Mike's image was described as basically just a talking head, with some background stuff, but no real interactivity or any of the other stuff that makes VR.
Anyway, interesting trivia about this. The character of Mike was built after Heinlein read a Scientific American special issue on computer technology and its future. Much of the computing described there (including some howlers, if you pay close attention) come straight of of the articles in that magazine.
It also shows how hard it is to really predict the future. Mike is a huge mainframe just like they had in the sixties. Heinlein, like every other science fiction writer than I know of (and nearly every other engineer, computer scientist, etc.) failed to predict the truly profound change in computer technology. The personal computer.
(Though Fritz Leiber did write a story predicting something like a palm pilot, but that's another story.)
Sam Delaney used a virtual reality type device (controlled by computers) in The Towers of Toron way back in the early sixties. And P.K. Dick wrote many things involving VR type worlds, though not involving computers, even earlier. The short story that was mutalited into Total Recall (We Can Remember It For You Wholesale) was written in the early fifties.
He got it from Dyson and then after the first book, discovered that it was inherently unstable, and so had to write a whole bunch of stuff describing how it was kept in orbing in The Ringworld Engineers.
All you have to do is read the science fiction of the past, and make the very logical assumption that science fiction writers of today are no smarter than science fiction then.
From much of the conversation, I gather many people don't read science fiction older than circa 1980. Grab a few science fiction magazines of the fifties and read those. Even stories by the the grand masters, Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov. What you'll find is a whole heap of stuff that seems utterly ridiculous, obviously silly and never would have happened, with maybe one or two things that are close to somewhat right. Everyone talks about Clarke's prediction of the satellite, forgetting that he wrote a whole hell of a lot, and that's about the sum total of accurate predictions. This is no offense to those guys. They wrote great stuff still worth reading. But it wasn't particularly predictive, nor was it meant to be.
Chili. It was initially called a success, though I don't know how it is doing now since the chilean economy stopped growing so much a couple years back.
As you imply, this is not a new thing. This sort of thing has gone on for centuries. (Hell, likely millenia.) It is caused by the unfortunate tendency of the human animal to let optimism override good sense when it comes to profit.
Anyone wanting to invest in tech should read the above book. (Hell, perhaps I should have when I invested in Corel. Perhaps I would have sold instead of watching all of my profit vanish. But that's another story...)
What is really interesting about all this is that there are other areas of the market that seem undervalued, because all of the money is chasing tech stocks.
Two questions: 1) I own a bunch of your CDs. I've ripped them all and store them on my computer so that I can listen to them at work. I do not make them available to others through Napster.
Your record company calls this illegal behavior. Do you think it should be?
2) Have you considered the possibility that you might be able to make more money (and avoid the huge cut that record companies take out of the price of a CD) by selling mp3 files directly to the public?
It is harder for a person to self-justify copyright infringement for a mp3 files at $0.50 a song than for $20 a CD, yet you'd make more money in the former case.
You really need to read up on the cases the ACLU actually takes. Suing for the rights of neo-nazis to march, for people to be allowed to burn a flag, for people to be allowed to print "Hustler", and for church groups to meet on school property off hours (if other non-school groups are) all contradict your thesis.
Bad analogy. A better one would be someone who bought his book, ripped the binding off, scanned the whole thing, used an OCR to get the text, printed 300,000 copies of it and offered to mail it free to anyone who wanted it.
I'm sorry Jon, but you are wrong. It is exactly those kids, and not Napster, that are committing the crime here. It is those kids who are ruining it for those of us that want sensible laws regarding mp3s.
While in high school (Who over the age of 16 would think of this?) some friends and I seriously discussed an idea for a game called "Operation Insemination", which took things from the POV of a sperm.
Once it gets above a certain point, it somehow ceases to be much of a concern. I've always thought that the lack of a karma cap was a flaw in the whole moderation system. Either that, or karma should expire.
It is hard to say what makes one more of a "Karma Whore", posting with +1 or not. Posting without the +1, you've got an opportunity for that one extra point, though I have a strong suspicion that a post initially given a 2 is more likely to be noticed and moderated up. (I can't prove it, but after posting with the +1 sometimes, without at others, this seems to be the case.)
(I moderate you down myself, but I just used all my points undoing a little of the damage some troll with moderator points did to slashdot-terminal.)
Ever stop to think that maybe Linux zealots make up the larger part of their userbase?
Excuse me, but make that Linux users not zealots. I like to think (hope) that most people here are not zealots. Unfortunately, zealots tend to talk louder than the rest of us, so their numbers seem overrepresented. (Not to mention trolls playing the zealot.)
Personally, I think zealotry in an OS is pretty damn sad. There is a lot more to life than what set of bits you put in your computer.
To the guy who originated this thread, I'd like to say: don't let the idiots put you off. If you are in this industry, you owe it to yourself to try Linux, not because it is "better", or even because it is going to "win", but because stretching yourself technologically is the key to long term success. Using just one system is stagnation. (And that goes for all you guys who've never used anything but Linux as well. Learn windows even if you never intend to do much with it. Seeing another approach, even a poor approach, is a learning experience.)
How many people do you know that collect welfare or UN "assistance" without making an effort to even sustain their own existance.
Just having labor is not enough. Unless you have resources to turn into something useful, labor is useless. What you see on the streets of Calcutta are not a bunch of lazy underacheivers, but a bunch of people without any resources.
If I put you out on a barren rock in the middle of the north atlantic, you could work your hands to the bone, day and night, and you'd still starve. Put you on the streets of Calcutta with no education and no possessions, and you'd not do much better.
That's one reason the US a smaller percentage of dirt poor than India does. Not because Indians are lazier than Americans. Because India has fewer resources to go around than the United States.
But what term should be used for illegally copying copyrighted material?
For example, if I copy your column up there and post it on my website, what do you call what I did?
That is a serious question.
But my opinion:
People like to obsess over what things are called. "Hacker" vs. "Cracker". "Stealing" vs. ?. I think that these arguments fundamentally misses the way languages change. The definition of a word is a sort of language-space consensus. Trying to fight that consensus is like holding back the tide. If people call the illegal copy "Piracy", that will be the definition. Whether that word has bad, good, or indifferent connotations depends entirely on how people feel about the act it defines.
Hell, I personally paid $600 for a car CD player around ten years ago. I paid that much to get a six CD changer and thus have almost six hours of uninterrupted music.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh.....isn't 3.5% less than 7%? Isn't 1998 a couple years back?
<P>
Given the plot, I don't know if you can say that Heinlein considered it a good idea...
But anyway, the really interesting predictions are in an article in the Expanded Universe collection, written in the fifties, then updated in the sixties and 1980, that attempts to predict what the year 2000 will be like. (With interesting commentary on the real predictive value of SF.) Fascinating stuff. My favorite part was the way he predicts the fall of communism in 1950 and then retracts the prediction in 1965!
Anyway, interesting trivia about this. The character of Mike was built after Heinlein read a Scientific American special issue on computer technology and its future. Much of the computing described there (including some howlers, if you pay close attention) come straight of of the articles in that magazine.
It also shows how hard it is to really predict the future. Mike is a huge mainframe just like they had in the sixties. Heinlein, like every other science fiction writer than I know of (and nearly every other engineer, computer scientist, etc.) failed to predict the truly profound change in computer technology. The personal computer.
(Though Fritz Leiber did write a story predicting something like a palm pilot, but that's another story.)
From much of the conversation, I gather many people don't read science fiction older than circa 1980. Grab a few science fiction magazines of the fifties and read those. Even stories by the the grand masters, Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov. What you'll find is a whole heap of stuff that seems utterly ridiculous, obviously silly and never would have happened, with maybe one or two things that are close to somewhat right. Everyone talks about Clarke's prediction of the satellite, forgetting that he wrote a whole hell of a lot, and that's about the sum total of accurate predictions. This is no offense to those guys. They wrote great stuff still worth reading. But it wasn't particularly predictive, nor was it meant to be.
They just like to pretend they are as they pump money into the latest bubble.
As you imply, this is not a new thing. This sort of thing has gone on for centuries. (Hell, likely millenia.) It is caused by the unfortunate tendency of the human animal to let optimism override good sense when it comes to profit.
Anyone wanting to invest in tech should read the above book. (Hell, perhaps I should have when I invested in Corel. Perhaps I would have sold instead of watching all of my profit vanish. But that's another story...)
What is really interesting about all this is that there are other areas of the market that seem undervalued, because all of the money is chasing tech stocks.
Your record company calls this illegal behavior. Do you think it should be?
2) Have you considered the possibility that you might be able to make more money (and avoid the huge cut that record companies take out of the price of a CD) by selling mp3 files directly to the public?
It is harder for a person to self-justify copyright infringement for a mp3 files at $0.50 a song than for $20 a CD, yet you'd make more money in the former case.
It is hard to say what makes one more of a "Karma Whore", posting with +1 or not. Posting without the +1, you've got an opportunity for that one extra point, though I have a strong suspicion that a post initially given a 2 is more likely to be noticed and moderated up. (I can't prove it, but after posting with the +1 sometimes, without at others, this seems to be the case.)
(I moderate you down myself, but I just used all my points undoing a little of the damage some troll with moderator points did to slashdot-terminal.)
Excuse me, but make that Linux users not zealots. I like to think (hope) that most people here are not zealots. Unfortunately, zealots tend to talk louder than the rest of us, so their numbers seem overrepresented. (Not to mention trolls playing the zealot.)
Personally, I think zealotry in an OS is pretty damn sad. There is a lot more to life than what set of bits you put in your computer.
To the guy who originated this thread, I'd like to say: don't let the idiots put you off. If you are in this industry, you owe it to yourself to try Linux, not because it is "better", or even because it is going to "win", but because stretching yourself technologically is the key to long term success. Using just one system is stagnation. (And that goes for all you guys who've never used anything but Linux as well. Learn windows even if you never intend to do much with it. Seeing another approach, even a poor approach, is a learning experience.)
Just having labor is not enough. Unless you have resources to turn into something useful, labor is useless. What you see on the streets of Calcutta are not a bunch of lazy underacheivers, but a bunch of people without any resources.
If I put you out on a barren rock in the middle of the north atlantic, you could work your hands to the bone, day and night, and you'd still starve. Put you on the streets of Calcutta with no education and no possessions, and you'd not do much better.
That's one reason the US a smaller percentage of dirt poor than India does. Not because Indians are lazier than Americans. Because India has fewer resources to go around than the United States.
For example, if I copy your column up there and post it on my website, what do you call what I did?
That is a serious question.
But my opinion:
People like to obsess over what things are called. "Hacker" vs. "Cracker". "Stealing" vs. ?. I think that these arguments fundamentally misses the way languages change. The definition of a word is a sort of language-space consensus. Trying to fight that consensus is like holding back the tide. If people call the illegal copy "Piracy", that will be the definition. Whether that word has bad, good, or indifferent connotations depends entirely on how people feel about the act it defines.
Or even more likely, a combination of the three. The more people interact, the more their tongues merge.
An OS isn't a religion. It is a tool. Blizzard says you have to user a poorer tool to use their game. So that's what I'll do.
People should stop worshiping hammers.
As you can guess, I'll be first in line for this.