Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
on
Science Faction
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
As someone who just put down Asimov's fantastic Caves of Steel to catch up on Slashdot, I have to say that I'm really suprised at an article that talks about the deep and lasting impact science fiction has made in the progress of real technology, and then goes on for two pages about movies. Admittedly, film has captured the public interest far more than literature in this genre, but how can the article fail to even mention sci-fi literature? With the exception of mentioning that several classic sci-fi films were based on Phillip K. Dick's work, the entire body of sci-fi short stories and books, which have had a phenomenal impact in science and everyday life, are completely ignored.
So three cheers for Heinlein, Asimov, Niven, Pournelle, Robinson, Bear, and the dozens of other great writers who have produced the body of works that I think of when I hear "sci-fi".
I don't know where you get your information. Coffee certainly is popular over here, and I'd say that the majority of adults drink it, but in living over here I haven't found the proportions to be any different than America. That is, for the stated "drink it black" coffee.
They do, however, have flavored and unflavored coffee-milk blends that are for sale in every convenience store and out of the majority of vending machines. I love 'em; I get enough caffeine to get up in the morning, and they don't give me killer heartburn:)
You imagine that he went off a jump that had the wheels off the ground long enough for the engine to spin the wheels up to twice their original speed? Man, to gegt that kind of air, he'd need to be going, what, 120?
What you're forgetting is that these guys aren't really making any money on their hardware. Microsoft pays $400 for parts on each $200 X-box, and as I understand they still aren't in the black on the deal. Their bet is on getting a big enough chunk of market share that they can make the money back long-run on game sales. I don't imagine that the PS2 and GC are being sold at a profit either, since they're both being sold very cheaply and they're both running impressive hardware.
Hail to the king, baby.
What's up with this at the tail end of an otherwise relatively well-written essay?
Europe lacks a First Amendment and the respect for limited government, private property and free enterprise that America still enjoys.
Item 1: Of course they don't have the First Amendment. They don't have the Declaration of Independance or the Proclamation of Emancipation, either; the First Amendment is part of the American constitution. This intentionally emotion-provoking phrase intends to say "they don't have freedom of speech", which may be true in limited ways (I understand, for example, that Nazi references are regulated in Germany), but I've never heard of extreme censorship in Europe. Am I wrong? Is Europe secretly a band of neo-nazi fascist authoritarians? My bad...
Item 2: No respect for private property. Really? This reads like a third-grader's "your momma's so fat" joke; it seems like it's just there to try to make Europe seem bad, without any justifying context. Again, am I wrong? Did Europe turn Commie when I wasn't looking? I hate it when they do that...
Item 3: Free enterprise is disrespected by Europe too? Okay, I don't actually know anything about Europe on this one. If we let Microsoft to continue to operate a monopoly, let the RIAA run the music industry as an oligarchy, and let the oil industry run the government (all of which practices are extremely discouraging to "free enterprise" in that competition is made more difficult), we don't get to bitch about Europe.
Item 4: "... that America still enjoys". With the implication that in pursuit of respect for Free Speech, Respect For Small Government, and Respect For Free Enterprise, America is the shining star that all other nations should look to for inspiration. Get real; the states aren't any better at any of this than their peers in democracy. College kids don't get their life-savings yanked for producing search engines in free-speech respecting nations. America rocks; it's my favorite country by far. But don't go trying to make it sound like it's got all the problems licked, and if the rest of the world would just look at what we're doing over here...
Stop trying to cram pro-American sentimentalities down our throat. There were two pages of informative and interesting writing before that line, why'd you have to ruin it by trying to make America the moral of the story?
As much as I hate to bury a comment all the way down here where it will do my karma no good at all...;) ---
I'm twenty and a CS major, and I remember first learning to write QBASIC on my dad's Tandy1000 when I was six or seven. Sure enough, my first programs, probably a year or two worth of them, were variations on 'hello world', screen-saver patterns, and badly written text adventures. The idea that thirteen years of writing computer programs that were not 'real-world mission critical' is a useless experience is a silly thing to say. Of course I never wrote mission critical code. The only time I ever did so was when I had a moron for a boss during an internship. The value of thirteen years of having an idea of how computer code is structured, however, is huge. It took me zero time to understand the first two years worth of programming information, and I was able to spend that time exploring the nuts and bolts behind programming, the things that I'd never had the chance to understand before. Rather than learning the basics like my fellow students, I've gotten to spend my time in college learning about actual programming.
So try to keep in mind that when someone my age claims a decade of coding, they are probably not stupid enough to think that makes them any kind of 'vet', but it certainly makes them a different kind of animal than the 'hey, these CS people are making good money, lets get one of those degrees' crowd.
Does the fact that we can say anything mean that we should say everything? I've noticed a certain "anything that can be said, should be said" mentality in a lot of my fellow Ameicans, and I wonder how valid it is. Thoughts?
My opinion at this moment, though it tends to waver, is that maybe it's a good thing terrorism-supporting movies aren't in vogue. Neither are movies cataloguing the mating habits of the turnip family. For speech to be useful, doesn't it need to have an audience?
Anyway... my rambling is done... my karma remains neutral...
Your case that it's prohibitively difficult to use a keyboard to type Japanese characters is simply not true. I'm American, but I'm living in Japan this year on exchange, and I've had to type up all of my class papers. The process is extremely simple.
Each letter in the Japanese phonetic alphabet can be broken down into either a single vowel in English, or into a consonant followed by a vowel. As you type the letters in, the hiragana (phonetic letters) show up on the screen. When you want to convert the block you've just written into kanji (ideographic characters), you hit the space bar. The computer chooses the most likely options, which are probably correct a little over half the time, and if they are wrong, you simply look at a little menu of all the possibilities (at most there will be 10-15, usually only three or four) and select the right kanji.
Admittedly this is a little slower than typing in straight English, at least for me, but even as a non-native, and not very good, speaker/writer of the language, I can pop out 30-40 wpm, about a third of my English typing speed.
All your other points, however, are correct; handwriting in Japanese and Chinese is an artform, but that's because there are thousands of unique characters in the languages, and learning how to write them at all requires the dedication of an artist. I don't think the fact that an ideographic, two-thousand character alphabet (Japanese) requiring long years of training in handwriting, and resulting in a culture that reveres good handwriting to a certain extent, is a reasonable basis of comparison to a phonetic language with 26 characters that require maybe a week to learn how to draw.
I myself couldn't write for beans until I started learning Japanese. Now I can write pretty decently because I've learned a lot of neat tricks, but I still don't use cursive, and after three years of college I've had exactly zero problems as a result.
My main problem with your argument here is your continuing insistance on calling people who steal and then give away for free other people's property 'competition'. That's patently rediculous.
The difference between selling ten thousand and a million copies is indeed significant. The thing is, we live in a capitalist society. That's the basic problem I have with this whole line of reasoning. As a society, we have decided that a person who provides a service or a good to society should be recompensated for their time with the ability to then gain the results of others' labors. We call the system by which we keep track of this 'money'. If someone creates a great game, it's only because they've spent years of their life learning how. It's right that they should be rewarded. Hating big corporations is just another religion; you do it because it feels right. Try and keep in mind, however, that the people behind those corporations deserve to be rewarded for their time, and they have the right to charge whatever they want for that time. If you don't like what they're charging, fine, don't give them your hard earned money, take it to a competitor. Instead of turning pirate and justifying it by saying that anyone who overcharges deserves to be robbed, download shareware, freeware, and open-source games to your heart's content.
So many people around here follow a philosophy that, taken to its logical ends, would have you breaking into Fred Meyer and simply stealing anything you considered to be over-priced. Get over yourselves and your sense of communal self-justification.
Hello, my name is _________ I'm conducting a poll for Industrial ScienCorp. Would you be willing to answer a series of questions?
Yes or no, did you know that by switching to AT&T today, you could save 12.3% on all calls to Michigan? Yes or no, did you know that by switching now, you could be entered into a national drawing for a lifetime supply of fried Twinkies?
...etc.
~SL
Meaningful posts keep being modded down... all desire to contribute fading... fading...
Sure, the cost to produce the second copy of Thief 2 is only a few cents. The first one cost them several hundred thousand dollars. Do you seriously believe that it costs a studio the same amount to create and distribute a game as it costs Joe Hacker to distribute it over the 'net? Get real.
~SL
Meaningful posts modded down... all incentive to contribute fading... fading...
I love it. I get modded down a point for suggesting that plaigarism on slashdot isn't a great idea, but being informed that my mother is being anally raped is all good. Keep up the good work, mod system:).
~SL
That news came out when I was in highschool, like four years ago. And it doesn't even really matter; by the classic scientific definition, all the asteroids are planets, and no one gets all panicky when they find that out.
'Oh gosh!' we'd all say, 'we've got to memorize the order of fifty million planets!'
Heh... My Very Educated Mother isn't going to cut it anymore, it's going to take a mnemonic the length of the Encyclopedia Britainica.
~SL
Yeah I'm crotchety... it's 8:00 in the friggin' morning and I'm up early to post to/....
You've got your basic laws of thermodynamics down pat, my friend, but you're forgetting one thing. Conservation of energy is true in any closed system, but the winds of the Earth are fueled by sunlight. That means the energy comes in as heat, then turns into kinetic energy, so it would actually be possible for the effect to change the speed of the earth's rotation.
Now, why milliseconds a year are important? I couldn't tell you; if this effect got bad enough to have a noticeable impact on any of us, the planet would be uninhabitable. It would take a lot of wind to speed up a planet.
Let's pay attention to the important news here, people. Like, will Sony ship a reasonable number of PS3s?
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who just put down Asimov's fantastic Caves of Steel to catch up on Slashdot, I have to say that I'm really suprised at an article that talks about the deep and lasting impact science fiction has made in the progress of real technology, and then goes on for two pages about movies. Admittedly, film has captured the public interest far more than literature in this genre, but how can the article fail to even mention sci-fi literature? With the exception of mentioning that several classic sci-fi films were based on Phillip K. Dick's work, the entire body of sci-fi short stories and books, which have had a phenomenal impact in science and everyday life, are completely ignored.
So three cheers for Heinlein, Asimov, Niven, Pournelle, Robinson, Bear, and the dozens of other great writers who have produced the body of works that I think of when I hear "sci-fi".
Cheers
I don't know where you get your information. Coffee certainly is popular over here, and I'd say that the majority of adults drink it, but in living over here I haven't found the proportions to be any different than America. That is, for the stated "drink it black" coffee.
:)
They do, however, have flavored and unflavored coffee-milk blends that are for sale in every convenience store and out of the majority of vending machines. I love 'em; I get enough caffeine to get up in the morning, and they don't give me killer heartburn
You imagine that he went off a jump that had the wheels off the ground long enough for the engine to spin the wheels up to twice their original speed? Man, to gegt that kind of air, he'd need to be going, what, 120?
What you're forgetting is that these guys aren't really making any money on their hardware. Microsoft pays $400 for parts on each $200 X-box, and as I understand they still aren't in the black on the deal. Their bet is on getting a big enough chunk of market share that they can make the money back long-run on game sales. I don't imagine that the PS2 and GC are being sold at a profit either, since they're both being sold very cheaply and they're both running impressive hardware. Hail to the king, baby.
What's up with this at the tail end of an otherwise relatively well-written essay?
Europe lacks a First Amendment and the respect for limited government, private property and free enterprise that America still enjoys.
Item 1: Of course they don't have the First Amendment. They don't have the Declaration of Independance or the Proclamation of Emancipation, either; the First Amendment is part of the American constitution. This intentionally emotion-provoking phrase intends to say "they don't have freedom of speech", which may be true in limited ways (I understand, for example, that Nazi references are regulated in Germany), but I've never heard of extreme censorship in Europe. Am I wrong? Is Europe secretly a band of neo-nazi fascist authoritarians? My bad...
Item 2: No respect for private property. Really? This reads like a third-grader's "your momma's so fat" joke; it seems like it's just there to try to make Europe seem bad, without any justifying context. Again, am I wrong? Did Europe turn Commie when I wasn't looking? I hate it when they do that...
Item 3: Free enterprise is disrespected by Europe too? Okay, I don't actually know anything about Europe on this one. If we let Microsoft to continue to operate a monopoly, let the RIAA run the music industry as an oligarchy, and let the oil industry run the government (all of which practices are extremely discouraging to "free enterprise" in that competition is made more difficult), we don't get to bitch about Europe.
Item 4: "... that America still enjoys". With the implication that in pursuit of respect for Free Speech, Respect For Small Government, and Respect For Free Enterprise, America is the shining star that all other nations should look to for inspiration. Get real; the states aren't any better at any of this than their peers in democracy. College kids don't get their life-savings yanked for producing search engines in free-speech respecting nations. America rocks; it's my favorite country by far. But don't go trying to make it sound like it's got all the problems licked, and if the rest of the world would just look at what we're doing over here...
Stop trying to cram pro-American sentimentalities down our throat. There were two pages of informative and interesting writing before that line, why'd you have to ruin it by trying to make America the moral of the story?
Sheesh...
As much as I hate to bury a comment all the way down here where it will do my karma no good at all... ;)
---
I'm twenty and a CS major, and I remember first learning to write QBASIC on my dad's Tandy1000 when I was six or seven. Sure enough, my first programs, probably a year or two worth of them, were variations on 'hello world', screen-saver patterns, and badly written text adventures. The idea that thirteen years of writing computer programs that were not 'real-world mission critical' is a useless experience is a silly thing to say. Of course I never wrote mission critical code. The only time I ever did so was when I had a moron for a boss during an internship. The value of thirteen years of having an idea of how computer code is structured, however, is huge. It took me zero time to understand the first two years worth of programming information, and I was able to spend that time exploring the nuts and bolts behind programming, the things that I'd never had the chance to understand before. Rather than learning the basics like my fellow students, I've gotten to spend my time in college learning about actual programming.
So try to keep in mind that when someone my age claims a decade of coding, they are probably not stupid enough to think that makes them any kind of 'vet', but it certainly makes them a different kind of animal than the 'hey, these CS people are making good money, lets get one of those degrees' crowd.
Benjamin
And here's another question for you:
Does the fact that we can say anything mean that we should say everything? I've noticed a certain "anything that can be said, should be said" mentality in a lot of my fellow Ameicans, and I wonder how valid it is. Thoughts?
My opinion at this moment, though it tends to waver, is that maybe it's a good thing terrorism-supporting movies aren't in vogue. Neither are movies cataloguing the mating habits of the turnip family. For speech to be useful, doesn't it need to have an audience?
Anyway... my rambling is done... my karma remains neutral...
Your case that it's prohibitively difficult to use a keyboard to type Japanese characters is simply not true. I'm American, but I'm living in Japan this year on exchange, and I've had to type up all of my class papers. The process is extremely simple.
Each letter in the Japanese phonetic alphabet can be broken down into either a single vowel in English, or into a consonant followed by a vowel. As you type the letters in, the hiragana (phonetic letters) show up on the screen. When you want to convert the block you've just written into kanji (ideographic characters), you hit the space bar. The computer chooses the most likely options, which are probably correct a little over half the time, and if they are wrong, you simply look at a little menu of all the possibilities (at most there will be 10-15, usually only three or four) and select the right kanji.
Admittedly this is a little slower than typing in straight English, at least for me, but even as a non-native, and not very good, speaker/writer of the language, I can pop out 30-40 wpm, about a third of my English typing speed.
All your other points, however, are correct; handwriting in Japanese and Chinese is an artform, but that's because there are thousands of unique characters in the languages, and learning how to write them at all requires the dedication of an artist. I don't think the fact that an ideographic, two-thousand character alphabet (Japanese) requiring long years of training in handwriting, and resulting in a culture that reveres good handwriting to a certain extent, is a reasonable basis of comparison to a phonetic language with 26 characters that require maybe a week to learn how to draw.
I myself couldn't write for beans until I started learning Japanese. Now I can write pretty decently because I've learned a lot of neat tricks, but I still don't use cursive, and after three years of college I've had exactly zero problems as a result.
There must be a line, though. Or else I'm creating www.SubliminalSlashdot.org, the contents of which will read:
It is a fact that the following was posted to Slashdot today: {copy and paste Slashdot's contents}.
(c)2003 Subliminal Love.
~SL
That's not a bad idea... let's all clap our hands at the same time and see what happens. Ready?
~SL
My main problem with your argument here is your continuing insistance on calling people who steal and then give away for free other people's property 'competition'. That's patently rediculous.
~SL
(This will completely exempt ISPs from current Washington spam laws, which Microsoft just happens to be.)
~SL
Microsoft just happens to be an anti-spam law? Damn... they're cornering the market on everything.
~SL
Yeah, because I need an ulterior motive to not put my anti-theft device at the end of a friggin' thread. Come on.
~SL
They can purify sewage now? Man, my Tang is going to taste so much better....
~SL
The difference between selling ten thousand and a million copies is indeed significant. The thing is, we live in a capitalist society. That's the basic problem I have with this whole line of reasoning. As a society, we have decided that a person who provides a service or a good to society should be recompensated for their time with the ability to then gain the results of others' labors. We call the system by which we keep track of this 'money'. If someone creates a great game, it's only because they've spent years of their life learning how. It's right that they should be rewarded. Hating big corporations is just another religion; you do it because it feels right. Try and keep in mind, however, that the people behind those corporations deserve to be rewarded for their time, and they have the right to charge whatever they want for that time. If you don't like what they're charging, fine, don't give them your hard earned money, take it to a competitor. Instead of turning pirate and justifying it by saying that anyone who overcharges deserves to be robbed, download shareware, freeware, and open-source games to your heart's content.
So many people around here follow a philosophy that, taken to its logical ends, would have you breaking into Fred Meyer and simply stealing anything you considered to be over-priced. Get over yourselves and your sense of communal self-justification.
~SL
Hello, my name is _________
I'm conducting a poll for Industrial ScienCorp. Would you be willing to answer a series of questions?
Yes or no, did you know that by switching to AT&T today, you could save 12.3% on all calls to Michigan?
Yes or no, did you know that by switching now, you could be entered into a national drawing for a lifetime supply of fried Twinkies?
...etc.
~SL
Meaningful posts keep being modded down... all desire to contribute fading... fading...
Sure, the cost to produce the second copy of Thief 2 is only a few cents. The first one cost them several hundred thousand dollars. Do you seriously believe that it costs a studio the same amount to create and distribute a game as it costs Joe Hacker to distribute it over the 'net? Get real.
~SL
Meaningful posts modded down... all incentive to contribute fading... fading...
~SL
I love it. I get modded down a point for suggesting that plaigarism on slashdot isn't a great idea, but being informed that my mother is being anally raped is all good. Keep up the good work, mod system :).
~SL
Let's leave the copyright infringement to the bad guys, shall we? At least get permission before you plaigarize the entire article on /.
~SL
How many of you read that article and went and changed your share password from eight asterisks in a row? How many of you thought that was so clever?
~SL
My meaningful posts keep getting modded down... all incentive to contribute fading.... fading....
That news came out when I was in highschool, like four years ago. And it doesn't even really matter; by the classic scientific definition, all the asteroids are planets, and no one gets all panicky when they find that out.
/. ...
'Oh gosh!' we'd all say, 'we've got to memorize the order of fifty million planets!'
Heh... My Very Educated Mother isn't going to cut it anymore, it's going to take a mnemonic the length of the Encyclopedia Britainica.
~SL
Yeah I'm crotchety... it's 8:00 in the friggin' morning and I'm up early to post to
You've got your basic laws of thermodynamics down pat, my friend, but you're forgetting one thing. Conservation of energy is true in any closed system, but the winds of the Earth are fueled by sunlight. That means the energy comes in as heat, then turns into kinetic energy, so it would actually be possible for the effect to change the speed of the earth's rotation.
Now, why milliseconds a year are important? I couldn't tell you; if this effect got bad enough to have a noticeable impact on any of us, the planet would be uninhabitable. It would take a lot of wind to speed up a planet.
Let's pay attention to the important news here, people. Like, will Sony ship a reasonable number of PS3s?
~SL
For crying out loud moderators. Read the whole post before you quiet my voice!
Seriously, I've been wondering that for years... truly are all questions answered on /.