So some way to encourage disclosure could be beneficial. That way does NOT have to be exclusivity, monopoly. Certainly, no one should have the "right" to tell others that they can't use some idea at all. But not only do we hand out monopolies, we let monopoly holders refuse to deal, denying everyone else. They don't have to license at any price at all. One thing this does is allow obsolete and inefficient industries to continue. They acquire the patents to better methods and bury them, so that everyone has to continue using the old way.
Maybe we should set some standard pricing. We could set up a patent tax, and use the money to encourage more innovation. When someone uses a patented idea, they pay a modest, standard fee. This leads to other problems. What if you can't find the owner? Fees would be paid to one of the organizations set up for purposes of handling collection and distribution, not to patent holders. The patent holders can surface later and demand their share, which would be much less than 100% and would come from these "Patent Collections and Holdings" organizations, not from the users. What if you didn't know some trivial idea was patented? Could pay some kind of general product development tax to cover that contingency. In all cases, keep the very, very, very expensive courts and the lawyers out of this business. It is absolutely idiotic the way we use court cases to try to figure out how much an idea is worth when no one can really know, and the threat of a court case and all the extremely burdensome expenses of it to extort and blackmail those engaged in productive endeavor. We don't do this just once, we do it over and over, because we've bought so thoroughly into this notion that each idea is unique and precious, and therefore should be handled in about the most expensive way possible, case by case. Patent lawyers are laughing at us all the way to the bank. Patents are definitely not easily available.
You are referring to this: "They talk for a while, they start making out on the bed." That's NOT what happened. They did not start, he started. She did not want to start. She told him that she did not want to start. No account I have heard gives us any reason to think otherwise. Not even his account.
But let's, as you say, talk about this hypothetical situation. It is ridiculously unlikely that a woman would want to have sex with a stranger she only just met, so already the hypothetical situation is shaky. I realize prostitutes may do just that, but it cannot be said to be freely willing and only because they want to, they do it for money or because a pimp coerces them. But let's run with it anyway: They started, and then she changed her mind. She clearly told him to stop. Clearly. But he did not stop. He's in the wrong. Both have every right to break off anytime, and the other party is obliged to stop. Both must have a clear way to signal "stop", there can't be any of this bull about no really meaning yes but in a different way.
In some cultures, it is expect that a woman will say that ("no") even if she wants it to continue.
"Continue"? There is no "continue" here, there is only start. How is she supposed to signal that she does not want it to start? Not invite any men up to her room for just talk, nothing more, and definitely no make-out sessions? Only men can meet for a bit of shop talk in hotel rooms without it leading to a "misunderstanding"? Or is she not supposed to have any say at all, and these cultures you refer to are these extremely patriarchal cultures that treat women like slaves? In many cultures, it's customary for the man and the woman to get to know each other first, even, you know, wait until marriage before having sex.
The "no" could have been taken as "no, don't do stick your hands down my pants" and, because they continued to kiss...
Bullcrap again. How is she supposed to say "no" so it will not be misunderstood to mean "do something else" instead of "don't do anything"?
They didn't continue to kiss, it was he started groping her. She didn't so much as want to start anything, let alone continue. When she fought back, he didn't stop to inquire, but tried to force her. Yeah, on the basis of all of an hour or 2 acquaintance, he just magically knows what she really means, knows all about her wants and expectations? No way!
Who the heck tries to rape someone, fails, and then thinks "Well I may as well leave with her passport, iPad, a cellphone, and whatever?"
The "who could be that stupid" thought, especially when the person in question is smart enough to be a researcher, is why my first thought on hearing about Nina Reiser was that Hans Reiser couldn't have murdered her because that would be such an unbelievably stupid way for a successful and even somewhat famous person to handle difficulties with another. No one smart and determined enough to create a good, viable file system used in the Linux kernel could possibly fail to think of all sorts of other courses of action, such as divorce, or could possibly choose a way so likely to end just the way it did, with him behind bars, his reputation hopelessly ruined, and his file system, his life work rotting away. As we all now know, he did indeed choose poorly. Yes, people, even very intelligent people, really will do very stupid things.
So, he starts getting handsy, she starts refuting him. He then does or says that she dislikes (moves his hands down her pants, says something offensive in her ear), and then, pay attention, she physically assaults him.
Do you even understand what you are saying? She said "no". That means, no touching. It sure as hell is attempted rape when he continues the "handsy" business. Stop kidding yourself on this point. We all understand very well what he was trying to do. If you touch someone, volutarily touch someone, after they told you not to, they are fully justified in considering it an assault at the least, and using whatever force is necessary to stop you. That's not assault, that's self defense. And I think the law agrees on this point. Touching is the line that you do not cross. Also, it occurred in her room. He was never confined to her room, he was free to leave any time. For so long as he remained in the room in spite of being told to leave, I'd say she was fully within her rights to fight back in any way she could.
Long ago, Xiph had a video code project they called Tarkin. When On2 gave out VP8, they abandoned Tarkin to focus on their own implementation of VP8 with a few tweaks, which they called Theora.
Star Wars is hardly original. Lucas evidently liked to double up vowels to give clones a slightly different name, ie. Luke Skywalker's clone is Luuke Skywalker. Daala might come from Dala, which according to a quick search is a board game from Sudan.
You could have sold your copy to a used bookstore. Could have ripped a copy you checked out from the library. Could have traded or given it to a friend.
DRM proponents have suggestions for those problems. The used bookstore and library could be forced to collect names and track every purchase or loan. Not too hard with most credit cards, but what if customers use cash or an anonymous kind of card? Customers could give false information. But of course their preferred solution is to outlaw the used bookstore entirely, and kill the public library with budget cuts. As to trading with friends, their solution seems to be to tie copies to devices so you can't. But you could still trade devices. To deal with that, they'd like to tie the device to the person, setting it up so it will only work after something like a retina scan matching the original purchaser. Would have to check quite frequently. This is of course marketed as enhancing the customer's security, because, assuming it can't be jail broken, thieves would not be able to use the device either.
It's all fantasy. People will not accept such patently absurd artificial limitations. Even if all that was accepted, it still wouldn't work because it takes only one crack to break out. Someone could use the 'analog hole", and simply type what they read right back into a general purpose computer, if necessary making alterations to throw off any watermarks and any Windows Vista style scanning for copyrighted material.
You're right. I meant, a probe to another star of course. Be awesome to get a close look at the Alpha Centauri system. That's what is way beyond us at present. Should launch the probe at something like 10% of the speed of light, which we simply can't do. Even if we could, would have to wait about 70 years. Making a probe capable of functioning for 70 years is doable, but a stretch. Greater longevity, such as the 100s or 1000s of years needed for a slower probe, is not only technology we haven't purposely attempted, it's a big gamble that our descendents will be in a position to receive and use the data when the probe finally does arrive. If civilization should fall during the centuries that the probe is underway, no one may be listening when it finally has something to show us. And that's still far faster than our current capabilities. To reach the nearest star at the speed of Voyager 1 would take about 80,000 years.
People don't think about how incredibly young we still are. Civilization has existed for less than 10,000 years. What will society be like in another 10,000 years? I think we will evolve to work better in groups than we now do. We will be more subtle in working with nature. Many of us are very controlling in our attitudes towards nature and each other. Cattle must be fenced in, employees must be pushed and driven, soldiers must obey orders and not do any thinking, information must be owned. We do this in the face of many examples and studies showing that we would profit more if we empowered more and controlled less. In our workplaces, we beat the spirit out of people, then complain about lack of initiative. It doesn't make for a stable enough society to have good hopes of seeing a 10,000 year long project to completion.
I think the community is more open than that. Like with many other touchy issues, it's a minority that's making all the noise and making it seem like Slashdot is more bigoted than it is.
I haven't had to face such issues, so I haven't thought about it much. For instance, could I date a woman knowing that she was born male? Could you? For men who want to have children and not by adoption, that won't do. Some day technology may allow sex changes that are so complete a person can have offspring after a sex change operation. It may also one day be possible to change peoples' minds to fit their bodies, rather than change their bodies to fit their minds, a sort of "cure" for homosexuality. Even if those days come, it may be wiser not to employ it. On the other hand, maybe in high school everyone should spend time as the other gender to really learn what it's like-- not solely what sex is like, but the day to day issues faced by the other gender.
We assume that we are best off if everyone is firmly wired for one gender. Could there be evolutionary advantages to there being a small percentage of the population having an ambiguous sexual identity? If homosexuality is so unnatural and disadvantageous, why hasn't it evolved out of the population entirely? If we should discover how to rewire our brains so that we are happy with our sexual lot and feel a "normal" attraction to the opposite sex, could it be harmful to employ it? Suppose we discovered a "cure" for black skin. We know that skin color darkens to protect people living in sunnier parts of the world. Obviously, it would be a bad idea to employ this technique to "cure" equatorial peoples of having black skin. Europeans really made a mess of Africa in other ways. A big mistake was herding people into big cities. Big cities work great in Europe, but the tropics have tons more horrible diseases that spread like wild among a concentration of people such as a city. Africans traditionally lived in many small villages for just that reason, to contain disease. Then the Europeans show up and arrogantly assume the lack of big cities shows a lack of civilization and perhaps intelligence, and try to "fix" this. When pandemics broke out, many just took it as a further sign that the Africans didn't know how to live right. It was also politically expedient to think that way. It let them carry on with conquest, slavery, and exploitation without their consciences bothering them as much.
When we don't know or are wrong about what constitutes normal, trying to enforce normality can be very harmful. Seems most sexual screw ups (2 penises, hermaphrodites, etc) really are mistakes of nature, same as cleft palates, and all kinds of birth defects, but we should not assume that. There's still a great deal we do not know about ourselves.
James Webb telescope, plus telescopes at L4 and L5
orbiters for Uranus and Neptune
rovers on every big rock hospitable enough for them to last a few months. Maybe Ganymede, Callisto, Europa, and Mercury for starters.
Also, let's cancel the ISS. Not sure about Biosphere 2 style research. We will want to do that eventually, but right now I don't think we really know enough to know where to look. We also know about a lot of problems for which we don't have answers, such as cosmic rays. But if we could concoct a way to turn Mars regolith into soil, perhaps by introducing mixes of appropriate bacteria, then grow plants in that environment, that would be a step towards eventual colonization.
I'd love to see an interstellar probe launched, but that is far beyond our current technology. We just can't do it.
I recall you as one of the people who insists that copying is stealing. You vehemently denounce piracy, saying that artists deserve to be paid, and people who just make a copy without paying are cheating the artists. Pirates are not paying for the labor, the hard work artists put into the creation of their works, and are therefore allegedly making it impossible to earn a living from art.
But interns? If artists deserve compensation for labor, and not just once, but each time their work is used, surely interns deserve some pay for their labor, just once?
How do you justify what seems to me to be a huge double standard?
Figure out what convinced you that the head of IT is the problem.
runs at roughly twice the budget of what the CFO has deemed appropriate
Why is the CFO competent about this, but the IT chief isn't? We all know how expectations can easily inflate beyond all reason. I've seen competent people in trouble for failing to accomplish the impossible. A group with unrealistic expectations can burn through a lot of employees, before someone starts thinking that maybe the problem isn't that they can't find any good people, maybe it's them.
Given the extreme uncertainty in time and resources required for non-trivial software projects, on time (in the information we were given, there was no mention of projects being late) at only twice the estimated costs might be considered fair or even good results. What I've heard is that of all software projects, only 10% are finished on time and within budget. Only 10%! A further 30% are finished, but are late or over budget, or both. About 30% are only partly successful, achieving only some of the goals before being cancelled. The final 30% are total failures, abandoned when it becomes obvious that the plans were at best too ambitious, or at worst completely crazy, being not only utterly unrealistic, but also of no use even if they had been achieved. This last happens when you have managers who prefer hand waving and magical thinking to actual hard work and hard truths. All in all, that's a stunning rate of failure. It seems we ought to be able to do better than that, and I think we will get better. But until we improve, this manager's performance ought to be measured against that standard, not against some opposite expectation that 90% of software projects should succeed.
And perhaps the rest of the company could use more appreciation of the problems that IT faces. Then instead of being perpetually disappointed in IT, they might have a little more respect. I've seen IT used as the whipping boy, and the handy, go-to excuse for why others couldn't meet their targets. It's IT's fault! They didn't keep our computers running! (Nevermind that we spent hours surfing porn sites with IE 6, infected all our computers, and bogged down our network with gigabytes of video downloads.) If the company has the mentality that IT is a "cost center", and, given what the CFO said, they probably do, IT is at a serious disadvantage.
Land that was under ice sheets during the last Ice Age is still rising. The Gulf of Bothnia may vanish in a few thousand years-- the floor may lift above sea level. For land that was next to an ice sheet but not under it, the opposite is happening. It bulged up when all the ice pressed down the adjacent land, and now that the ice is gone, it is sinking. Much of the Eastern Seaboard, including NYC, is experiencing this. That's how apparent sea level rise is higher at NYC than elsewhere. The sinking of the land in combination with the rising sea levels makes global warming worse for NYC than most other coastal cities.
Other local effects can influence coasts. New Orleans is another coastal city that's in trouble. It's on a river delta, which must be constantly replenished with fresh deposits. Deltas are always eroding and packing down, but most grow because there's enough silt to more than offset those effects. Thanks to our efforts at flood control, not as much silt is reaching the Mississippi delta. But our interference has an upside for New Orleans. The main flow of the Mississippi would have probably shifted to the Atchafalaya by now, leaving New Orleans stuck on a sinking backwater, if we hadn't interfered.
In science, there is no believing. Science is not about belief and faith. Science is not a religion. Science is facts, evidence, and logical deductions. The Big Bang is a theory that fits the facts we have. Is it right or wrong? Likely it is more subtle than that, and is correct as far as it goes, but is not anywhere close to a complete explanation. It certainly has difficult problems. There is no faith involved in that.
As to the idea that our observations may not be reliable, that what we see, hear, and measure may not reflect reality, and pretending otherwise is just acting on faith, this is an old problem in philosophy. How do we know anything we sense is real? We don't know. Is it faith to act as if what we sense is real? No! We accept that what we sense is reality, not out of faith, but because it doesn't make sense to follow any other line of reasoning. Imperfect though our understanding of reality is, and perhaps must be, we can still work with it, and we have. We would never have been able to make integrated circuits, radios, and all the other marvels of modern techonolgy if we didn't have some understanding of apparent reality.
What if we go with a hypothesis that we aren't sensing reality, that there is a deeper reality that we can't sense? Assuming it exists, what could the nature of this deeper reality be? If it is a supernatural reality, then that ends the scientific inquiry right there. Science is only about the natural, not the supernatural. Soon as the supernatural is invoked, it's all chaos. Anything at all might be true of a supernatural reality.
If you claim there is a deeper reality and it is natural, but that it cannot be observed, that makes things difficult, but hardly insurmountable. How can we know it even exists, if there is no way to observe it? Without any way to sense it, perform experiments on it, or extrapolate its effects to things we can observe, we can only speculate wildly. First, anyone making such a claim ought to have some sort of rationale for it. We do speculate, with ideas like that our universe is only a part of a multiverse, or that our reality is actually not 4 dimensions, but 10 or 26, with the extra dimensions being so small that we can't perceive them. This is not reaching for faith, this is simply speculation. Even if we can't sort this out now, we may be able to in the future.
We all know how messed up much corporate planning, decision making, and management is. They have the stupidest mental shortcuts for evaluating people and projects, and the queerest ideas about what attributes a model employee possesses. How they think and even wish people should behave is wildly unrealistic. So many employees are just playing the game, trying to appear to have the "proper" attitudes, while keeping their real opinions and thoughts to themselves. Management picks loudmouths and hardasses for management positions, mistaking noise and bullying for drive and vision. Instead of thoughtfully evaluating plans on the merits, choosing among them and measuring progress as best they can so they have some idea whether it's feasible and how long it will take, they set impossible deadlines, frantically ply the whips, and when that doesn't work blame the slave labor for letting the company down. They also can't resist working on hidden agendas driven by shockingly unprofessional and even childish motives. An upper manager might well lay off an entire department on trumped up questions about their value to the company, all because an attractive member of it refused a sexual advance. Wag the Dog would have been more likely if it had been about a corporate leader rather than a national leader.
You'd think such messed up organizations would collapse under their own incompetence every time. They do fail rather often, but surprisingly less often than one might think. I can only think a bad business survives in spite of their incompetence, because their competitors are just as incompetent. Or they don't have competitors.
Seems to me the problem is the the downright feudal nature of these organizations. Inheritance has been thoroughly discredited as a way to pick national leaders. But we still pick many corporate leaders that way, and accept it. It's as if ownership is held in the high regard that the monarchy and nobility once enjoyed. The rich are the new nobility. When the person at the top is unimaginitive and plodding, yet egotistical, arrogant and contemptuous towards the "lower classes", and also jealous and resentful of respect towards scientists, engineers, and other meritorious people, the company is not going to be well run. Ford Motor Company has had this problem. Used to refer to Henry Ford as "King Henry". What restrains them from acting too tyrannical and arbitrary is that employees are free to leave. Unless the economy stinks, or they manage to set up a company town, and collude with their competitors not to hire each other's former employees. Maybe do a bit of union busting as well. Top management strives entirely too much to achieve such dubious control. Sickening to see company resources expended for such purposes, but there it is.
So far, 3D printing seems like a solution in search of a problem. To date, what's the most useful item made by 3D printing? Clips for firearms? But all that really does is demonstrate the ineffectiveness of laws against weapons. Maybe customized medical implants are the most useful items? Even if they can design it themselves, no one is able to put an item like that to use by themselves, need lots of medical help. No reason to employ a vending machine in that process.
How about prototypes? Maybe, but while good for the start, a 3D printer could not be a serious contributor to the end of a design process that started with a scaled down prototype. It's not so good for full sized models of even modestly sized items, as most machines are limited to about 25 cm^3 (1 cubic foot). Can't fit a building or a car or just a car door in that area. Even the interior handle of a car door could be too large, if it includes a grip and arm rest in the design. Separate pieces that are held together by mechanical means may be fine for prototypes, but maybe not the final product, because when it gets old and loosens up a bit, it will cause all kinds of annoying rattles and squeaks in a environment subject to vibration, such as a car. If the prototype appears to be a good design, the production of the full sized product would be done with other methods.
Even in cases where the 3D printer could make the final product, there is still the issue of quantity. 3D printing is just too slow for runs of thousands of copies of an item.
All you can really do easily with a low cost 3D printer is small artistic sculptures and custom toys such as model cars and figurines for role playing games, and that's limited. A person can store thousands of flat items like photo prints, but can't so easily store thousands of 3D items, takes too much space.
I expect the single life is my lot. Even apart from my own blunders, or just the stigma of being too "white and nerdy", I'd have thought I'd have a bit more success. But I have gotten nowhere. Talk and talk on dating sites, maybe for weeks, seeming like we have much in common, and then suddenly she stops responding. What did I say wrong? What happened? I don't know. Communication? What communication?
Could be some were just using men. Maybe she was married, and misrepresented herself as single, or any number of other lies. I have no idea how common that is. But I think most people are mostly sincere and mostly honest. A few times, I did get a reason of sorts. One was a divorced woman who told me that her husband left her without a word of explanation, and she had no idea why. Hmm. A few weeks later, she told me she "wasn't ready", which sounded screwy to me. Another was a Life Coach, which, upon reading a bit about what that was, sounded like potentially a downright evil career. After a few weeks, told me she didn't want to chat with me any more, unless I wanted to be a customer and pay her money for advice on what I should do with my life! Had me wondering if the entire purpose of the conversation was just an attempt to drum up some business. Felt as if I'd been given directions to a party, only to discover upon arriving that there was nothing there, and worse, that I'd crossed a minefield to get to the place and that my correspondent knew all about that part.
Perhaps it's not me especially, it's the environment. Seems in recent times, the economy has been bad most years, and this stresses and depresses people. I fancy people aren't much interested in the pursuit of happiness, and are definitely less interested in having children, when life sucks. Also, we have the obesity epidemic. It's harder to get excited over someone who can't climb a stairway because they're too fat. And when that fat person is you, and you can hardly stand to look at yourself in the mirror, how can you feel confident enough to date? I wonder how many morbidly obese women have given up all hope and don't even bother trying? A review I saw of OKCupid complained that the women there weren't serious, and I'm thinking there may be something to that. I wonder how spoiled we all are. Are people's expectations so sky high that no one can meet them? I read a bit about some sisters of one of the King Louises of France. They didn't want to marry any man who was not worthy of them, and declined many offers. Seemed they were holding out for a king of a major nation. They ended up never marrying. Many daughters of nobility were pushed into nunneries, which were the dumping grounds for excess children. A noble might produce many daughters before he finally had enough sons to have good odds of one living long enough to succeed him. Also, some of the women in nunneries were the victims of rape by a nobleman, which in those days was considered the fault of the woman. But these sisters of King Louis weren't driven into the religious life, they just couldn't settle for any man. I wonder if we've all become a bit more like that.
You don't think that's enough money? Why is it that Work For Hire is okay for software developers, but is totally unfair for scientists and authors, and employers of software developers? What would you suggest for a fair method of calculating compensation? That is, other than the current method of "I dunno, let's hand them a monopoly and even spend public money on enforcement, so they can be as generous or as stingy and demanding as they want to be."
Which part? This: "I see nothing wrong with DRM for subscription based content." Well, I see everything wrong with that. DRM is categorically unacceptable.
You think it's okay to have DRM on, say, cable TV? And it's okay to implement this or a similar service on your computer, right down to the DRM? I disagree. Strongly. Either I must give up control of my computer to powers that have demonstrated time and again that they are not to be trusted with such control, or I must set up a sandbox, a totally separate system specially for viewing DRM content. I will take a third option. I just won't view it.
Now, if DRM gets shoved onto our systems in the form of browsers that conform to an HTML standard that has DRM grafted on, then to be secure we would have to hack the browsers to remove that part, or just not have browsers on any of our computers that have sensitive data. Wouldn't do to have the DRM capable software make a mistake and accidentally erase financial records. Do you recall the year Turbo Tax screwed with the boot sector of their customer's hard drives, endangering all the data on them? And do you suppose that fundamental attitude has changed? These people still really think that it's acceptable to put their customers' data at risk in order to secure their "property", and only grudgingly refrain from doing so in the face of customer wrath and lawsuits. Let up on them, and they will be right back with more DRM.
Browsers are quite creaky and vulnerable enough, with drive by and click hijacking and the like, without deliberately adding DRM to the mess. That's the last thing we should allow. We try so hard to secure our systems, let's not blow it with a big mistake like voluntarily opening the door to DRM.
We don't have DRM on AM or FM radio, or broadcast TV. We are free to record any broadcast we want. We should aim for the broadcast TV model, not the cable TV model.
Forgot to mention Fritz Leiber and Andre Norton, and I'm sure I missed others. I didn't say I thought all those authors were great, or that they never "laid an egg". I've come to really dislike time travel in stories, and it was McCaffrey that inadvertently helped show me why time travel is so broken. Her dragons were crazy powerful--- in addition to the stock abilities of breathing fire and flying, they teleport even interplanetary distances faster than light speed (guess mere flying isn't an awesome enough method of travel), time travel, telepathically communicate, bond with humans so loyally that they suicide when their chosen human dies, and put Viagra to shame in their ability to arouse sexual passion. She resorted to flimsy excuses for why the dragonriders didn't do a whole lot more time travel to fix every mistake they ever made, prevent every tragedy from happening. I agree with your division, actually. But where would you put Tolkien? What is that criticism about Tolkien, that it is just "comfort food"?
Nevertheless, I enjoyed them all. Sometimes a body just wants a bit of light, fun reading, an escape, a happy ending with a few twists so it's not too boringly obvious.
What's wrong with you people? How many times do you have to lose your entire music, e-book, or game collection, have your systems root kitted, and even be accused of piracy and shaken down, before you'll refuse to ever knowingly consent to this invasive DRM again? DRM has no value whatsoever. No, there aren't any good uses for DRM. The few examples of "good DRM" I've heard are not DRM, they're just straight encryption, cryptographically secure authentication, digital signing, and the like. DRM is a bad idea that, like some damned zombie, keeps on coming back for another sequel. DRM is an offense to our rights and freedoms, a denial of reality, and an unnatural and harmful restriction upon society. It's mental indoctrination and slavery. That so many people are half convinced that maybe DRM isn't so bad, or though evil is a necessary evil, is disturbing, as it should also be seen for the insult to our intelligence that it is. DRM will never be a complete success unless they can install devices in our very brains to force us to forget that movie we saw last month or that song we heard last year. Should we also standardize a protocol for a DRM/human brain interface while we're thinking about letting it into HTML5?
Trusted Computing will never arrive as long as these special interests keep trying to twist it against us, make it into Treacherous Computing. They're still trying to give us bull about how it's actually for us because it's for our own good and the good of society, hoping we're stupid enough to accept this bad logic.
Seems all the authors I grew up on are going. Anne McCaffrey last year, David Eddings in 2009, Fred Saberhagen in 2007, Robert Jordan and Roger Zelazny at the far too young age of 58 in 2007 and 1995 respectively, Robert Asprin in 2008 at the hardly older age of 61, Isaac Asimov age 72 in 1992, Arthur Clarke in 2008, and Robert Heinlein in 1988. Just glad Jack Vance lived this long.
I suppose it's only natural-- published, successful authors were all at least 20 years older than I was when I started reading for fun. The first author I read for fun on my own was Tolkien, 4 years after his death, and from there I got into SF/Fantasy. It was also my introduction to bookstores, as the public libraries at that time either didn't carry Tolkien-- still too new for them, or always had all their copies checked out.
When the price of paperbacks went over $5 in the early 1990s, rising at more than double the rate of inflation, it seemed like sheer greed to me. Jarred with the generally positive morality depicted in the books, making that seem hypocritical. So I gradually dropped out, quit buying new from bookstores, and now I hardly ever even visit anymore, not even used bookstores or libraries, and have lost my familiarity with the titles available. Too many other leisure activities to do. And I haven't taken to the e-readers, too much DRM. For me the golden age of the SF/Fantasy book and bookstore was the 1980s. $1.95 each in the early 80s, cheap enough I'd try lots of books, no need to check a review or award list beforehand to see if it was worth the money. Was good while it lasted.
I had a TRS-80 for a short while. Was my first computer. But with no programs, no manuals, and no particular liking of the gray monochrome graphics, case, keyboard, tape recorder, and everything, I didn't do much with it. My father tried to interest me in a Vic 20, but at only 5k or RAM, it couldn't do much. What convinced him to stop being such a tightwad was when it ran out of memory trying to load a game on tape that happened to be handy. He finally caved and got what I wanted, an Apple II. Bought it used.
It was an Apple II+ with a language card, giving it 64k RAM. And it came with a floppy disk drive, not a crummy tape recorder. But most of all, the previous owner had a bunch of manuals and books that he included in the sale. I got Beneath Apple DOS, an Apple Pascal manual, another book about the 6502 machine language which included a schematic of the Apple II and other information such as the existence of the "monitor" (the built in disassembler in the ROM), and of course documentation about Apple BASIC.
Further, it was crucial that these early computers came with simple programming environments ready to go, and that others had used. Could always break into a game to look at the code and learn. And cheat of course. A look at the code was just a LIST command away, thanks to the built in BASIC interpreter. Copy protection was also educational. Many games, such as Dark Forest (sorry Tom Mornini), were slow and buggy. I fixed and improved some of these. When I realized that finding the Mark of the Snake in Ultima III was a boring find-the-needle-in-the-haystack problem (the clues in the game narrowed it down to the bottom floor of the dungeons, but that was still too much searching to suit me), I searched the disk instead, found the character information, and edited it to give myself the Mark so I could finish the silly game. Later, I did find the Mark the proper way. If I wanted to, I could flip the computer on, and instantly start writing some BASIC program. Wouldn't be able to save it if I hadn't taken the 45 seconds needed to boot DOS, but sometimes I just wanted to bang out a few lines of code to get a quick answer to a simple question. Later, better DOSes cut the boot time to 15 seconds. I never used Pascal, because it was horribly slow, and hardly anyone else used it either. Stuck with BASIC and assembler.
You ought to consider what the developers of Doom and Quake said, which is that you shouldn't get too attached to existing code. If you want the best code, you should throw everything away and start over, repeatedly.
Lest you think that rule of thumb can only apply when you need lots of optimization, and most code is hastily written garbage that is only worked on until it is barely good enough to do the job and doesn't need any more work than that, you ought to think about design. Hastily written is also hastily designed. No amount of patching can fix a bad design, you have to start over to do a different design.
Two examples: A company I was at had a dangerous and cumbersome process for updating the software on a website. The process was 1) log into machine with the repository, 2) launch the install script, giving the name of the target computer as a parameter, whereupon the script 3) shut down the services and deleted the existing version from the target computer, 4) extracted the latest source from the repository and copied that over to the target, 5) built the application on the target, 6) started the services back up. Then it was pray that the new version works, and if it didn't, the developers might hack the code right there on the production machine, and ask the system administrators to copy the changed files to where they could add the changes to the repository. (Why they couldn't do that themselves, while they were right there hacking? But the company wasn't insane enough to give all the developers access to the production machines.) It was a monolithic script, and it had a mess of conditional things to do depending on which machine was the target. Now, can you see that this design has tons and tons of problems? Not least is that the website had to be taken down for about 20 minutes during this update process. If the new version didn't work, and couldn't be made to work with a few hacks, it was another 20 minutes to restore the old version. The worst happened when a developer mistakenly aimed at the wrong target, meaning to update the demonstration site, but instead updating the production site. Wiped the company's production database. (The developers had insisted that the database have no password, for their convenience, and over the strenuous protests of our DBA. A password could also have stopped this disaster.) We were lucky to get the company's website back up at all, let alone in only 1 day. I thought about it and decided the only thing to do was start over from scratch and design a completely different process. What would you have done?
In the other case, they had another script that went through the web server's logs to extract useful information such as the number of unique visitors, time spent on each web page, and so on. This script worked at first, but began to fall behind. It began to take longer than 24 hours to process 24 hours worth of logs, and I was called in to deal with the problem when the backlog had built up to about 3 days. First thing I saw was a crazy design decision to just simply go through all the logs each day, redoing all the work it had done the day before, then doing the current day's work. It was doomed to break down as the logs grew. We were not about to throw out old logs, just to accomodate this quick and dirty design. It was easier to just start over, rather than try to fix the existing script as it was full of routines that assumed all the logs were being processed every time it ran.
He will also be away from family, who can be the worst distractions. All the time, I'm being called on for the most miserably petty computer problems. "I couldn't get gmail to use BCC instead of TO" (amazing that this user even learned about BCC), "I lost the window", "how do I send a video in an email", "the printer isn't working again", etc. It's often stuff they could figure out themselves, but they find it more convenient to bother me. I've tried to make it not convenient by making them wait a bit, and sometimes they do start playing around and figure out the problem themselves. Sometimes it really is a bug. Have stumbled over more than one Firefox bug this way. It's not all computer related either. I have to do pretty much all the talking needed over the phone for the elderly, hard of hearing family members, so I'm always being asked to call doctors and pharmacies, and merchants and banks, and deal with whatever con artist is calling to peddle magazine subscriptions or ask for donations. Really fun when one of those Windows Technical Support scammers calls to try to get us to believe our computers are infected, and one of the elders beats me to the phone.
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So some way to encourage disclosure could be beneficial. That way does NOT have to be exclusivity, monopoly. Certainly, no one should have the "right" to tell others that they can't use some idea at all. But not only do we hand out monopolies, we let monopoly holders refuse to deal, denying everyone else. They don't have to license at any price at all. One thing this does is allow obsolete and inefficient industries to continue. They acquire the patents to better methods and bury them, so that everyone has to continue using the old way.
Maybe we should set some standard pricing. We could set up a patent tax, and use the money to encourage more innovation. When someone uses a patented idea, they pay a modest, standard fee. This leads to other problems. What if you can't find the owner? Fees would be paid to one of the organizations set up for purposes of handling collection and distribution, not to patent holders. The patent holders can surface later and demand their share, which would be much less than 100% and would come from these "Patent Collections and Holdings" organizations, not from the users. What if you didn't know some trivial idea was patented? Could pay some kind of general product development tax to cover that contingency. In all cases, keep the very, very, very expensive courts and the lawyers out of this business. It is absolutely idiotic the way we use court cases to try to figure out how much an idea is worth when no one can really know, and the threat of a court case and all the extremely burdensome expenses of it to extort and blackmail those engaged in productive endeavor. We don't do this just once, we do it over and over, because we've bought so thoroughly into this notion that each idea is unique and precious, and therefore should be handled in about the most expensive way possible, case by case. Patent lawyers are laughing at us all the way to the bank. Patents are definitely not easily available.
You are referring to this: "They talk for a while, they start making out on the bed." That's NOT what happened. They did not start, he started. She did not want to start. She told him that she did not want to start. No account I have heard gives us any reason to think otherwise. Not even his account.
But let's, as you say, talk about this hypothetical situation. It is ridiculously unlikely that a woman would want to have sex with a stranger she only just met, so already the hypothetical situation is shaky. I realize prostitutes may do just that, but it cannot be said to be freely willing and only because they want to, they do it for money or because a pimp coerces them. But let's run with it anyway: They started, and then she changed her mind. She clearly told him to stop. Clearly. But he did not stop. He's in the wrong. Both have every right to break off anytime, and the other party is obliged to stop. Both must have a clear way to signal "stop", there can't be any of this bull about no really meaning yes but in a different way.
In some cultures, it is expect that a woman will say that ("no") even if she wants it to continue.
"Continue"? There is no "continue" here, there is only start. How is she supposed to signal that she does not want it to start? Not invite any men up to her room for just talk, nothing more, and definitely no make-out sessions? Only men can meet for a bit of shop talk in hotel rooms without it leading to a "misunderstanding"? Or is she not supposed to have any say at all, and these cultures you refer to are these extremely patriarchal cultures that treat women like slaves? In many cultures, it's customary for the man and the woman to get to know each other first, even, you know, wait until marriage before having sex.
The "no" could have been taken as "no, don't do stick your hands down my pants" and, because they continued to kiss...
Bullcrap again. How is she supposed to say "no" so it will not be misunderstood to mean "do something else" instead of "don't do anything"? They didn't continue to kiss, it was he started groping her. She didn't so much as want to start anything, let alone continue. When she fought back, he didn't stop to inquire, but tried to force her. Yeah, on the basis of all of an hour or 2 acquaintance, he just magically knows what she really means, knows all about her wants and expectations? No way!
Who the heck tries to rape someone, fails, and then thinks "Well I may as well leave with her passport, iPad, a cellphone, and whatever?"
The "who could be that stupid" thought, especially when the person in question is smart enough to be a researcher, is why my first thought on hearing about Nina Reiser was that Hans Reiser couldn't have murdered her because that would be such an unbelievably stupid way for a successful and even somewhat famous person to handle difficulties with another. No one smart and determined enough to create a good, viable file system used in the Linux kernel could possibly fail to think of all sorts of other courses of action, such as divorce, or could possibly choose a way so likely to end just the way it did, with him behind bars, his reputation hopelessly ruined, and his file system, his life work rotting away. As we all now know, he did indeed choose poorly. Yes, people, even very intelligent people, really will do very stupid things.
So, he starts getting handsy, she starts refuting him. He then does or says that she dislikes (moves his hands down her pants, says something offensive in her ear), and then, pay attention, she physically assaults him.
Do you even understand what you are saying? She said "no". That means, no touching. It sure as hell is attempted rape when he continues the "handsy" business. Stop kidding yourself on this point. We all understand very well what he was trying to do. If you touch someone, volutarily touch someone, after they told you not to, they are fully justified in considering it an assault at the least, and using whatever force is necessary to stop you. That's not assault, that's self defense. And I think the law agrees on this point. Touching is the line that you do not cross. Also, it occurred in her room. He was never confined to her room, he was free to leave any time. For so long as he remained in the room in spite of being told to leave, I'd say she was fully within her rights to fight back in any way she could.
Long ago, Xiph had a video code project they called Tarkin. When On2 gave out VP8, they abandoned Tarkin to focus on their own implementation of VP8 with a few tweaks, which they called Theora.
Here's hoping Daala makes it.
Star Wars is hardly original. Lucas evidently liked to double up vowels to give clones a slightly different name, ie. Luke Skywalker's clone is Luuke Skywalker. Daala might come from Dala, which according to a quick search is a board game from Sudan.
You could have sold your copy to a used bookstore. Could have ripped a copy you checked out from the library. Could have traded or given it to a friend.
DRM proponents have suggestions for those problems. The used bookstore and library could be forced to collect names and track every purchase or loan. Not too hard with most credit cards, but what if customers use cash or an anonymous kind of card? Customers could give false information. But of course their preferred solution is to outlaw the used bookstore entirely, and kill the public library with budget cuts. As to trading with friends, their solution seems to be to tie copies to devices so you can't. But you could still trade devices. To deal with that, they'd like to tie the device to the person, setting it up so it will only work after something like a retina scan matching the original purchaser. Would have to check quite frequently. This is of course marketed as enhancing the customer's security, because, assuming it can't be jail broken, thieves would not be able to use the device either.
It's all fantasy. People will not accept such patently absurd artificial limitations. Even if all that was accepted, it still wouldn't work because it takes only one crack to break out. Someone could use the 'analog hole", and simply type what they read right back into a general purpose computer, if necessary making alterations to throw off any watermarks and any Windows Vista style scanning for copyrighted material.
You're right. I meant, a probe to another star of course. Be awesome to get a close look at the Alpha Centauri system. That's what is way beyond us at present. Should launch the probe at something like 10% of the speed of light, which we simply can't do. Even if we could, would have to wait about 70 years. Making a probe capable of functioning for 70 years is doable, but a stretch. Greater longevity, such as the 100s or 1000s of years needed for a slower probe, is not only technology we haven't purposely attempted, it's a big gamble that our descendents will be in a position to receive and use the data when the probe finally does arrive. If civilization should fall during the centuries that the probe is underway, no one may be listening when it finally has something to show us. And that's still far faster than our current capabilities. To reach the nearest star at the speed of Voyager 1 would take about 80,000 years.
People don't think about how incredibly young we still are. Civilization has existed for less than 10,000 years. What will society be like in another 10,000 years? I think we will evolve to work better in groups than we now do. We will be more subtle in working with nature. Many of us are very controlling in our attitudes towards nature and each other. Cattle must be fenced in, employees must be pushed and driven, soldiers must obey orders and not do any thinking, information must be owned. We do this in the face of many examples and studies showing that we would profit more if we empowered more and controlled less. In our workplaces, we beat the spirit out of people, then complain about lack of initiative. It doesn't make for a stable enough society to have good hopes of seeing a 10,000 year long project to completion.
I think the community is more open than that. Like with many other touchy issues, it's a minority that's making all the noise and making it seem like Slashdot is more bigoted than it is.
I haven't had to face such issues, so I haven't thought about it much. For instance, could I date a woman knowing that she was born male? Could you? For men who want to have children and not by adoption, that won't do. Some day technology may allow sex changes that are so complete a person can have offspring after a sex change operation. It may also one day be possible to change peoples' minds to fit their bodies, rather than change their bodies to fit their minds, a sort of "cure" for homosexuality. Even if those days come, it may be wiser not to employ it. On the other hand, maybe in high school everyone should spend time as the other gender to really learn what it's like-- not solely what sex is like, but the day to day issues faced by the other gender.
We assume that we are best off if everyone is firmly wired for one gender. Could there be evolutionary advantages to there being a small percentage of the population having an ambiguous sexual identity? If homosexuality is so unnatural and disadvantageous, why hasn't it evolved out of the population entirely? If we should discover how to rewire our brains so that we are happy with our sexual lot and feel a "normal" attraction to the opposite sex, could it be harmful to employ it? Suppose we discovered a "cure" for black skin. We know that skin color darkens to protect people living in sunnier parts of the world. Obviously, it would be a bad idea to employ this technique to "cure" equatorial peoples of having black skin. Europeans really made a mess of Africa in other ways. A big mistake was herding people into big cities. Big cities work great in Europe, but the tropics have tons more horrible diseases that spread like wild among a concentration of people such as a city. Africans traditionally lived in many small villages for just that reason, to contain disease. Then the Europeans show up and arrogantly assume the lack of big cities shows a lack of civilization and perhaps intelligence, and try to "fix" this. When pandemics broke out, many just took it as a further sign that the Africans didn't know how to live right. It was also politically expedient to think that way. It let them carry on with conquest, slavery, and exploitation without their consciences bothering them as much.
When we don't know or are wrong about what constitutes normal, trying to enforce normality can be very harmful. Seems most sexual screw ups (2 penises, hermaphrodites, etc) really are mistakes of nature, same as cleft palates, and all kinds of birth defects, but we should not assume that. There's still a great deal we do not know about ourselves.
I'd like to see this:
Also, let's cancel the ISS. Not sure about Biosphere 2 style research. We will want to do that eventually, but right now I don't think we really know enough to know where to look. We also know about a lot of problems for which we don't have answers, such as cosmic rays. But if we could concoct a way to turn Mars regolith into soil, perhaps by introducing mixes of appropriate bacteria, then grow plants in that environment, that would be a step towards eventual colonization.
I'd love to see an interstellar probe launched, but that is far beyond our current technology. We just can't do it.
I recall you as one of the people who insists that copying is stealing. You vehemently denounce piracy, saying that artists deserve to be paid, and people who just make a copy without paying are cheating the artists. Pirates are not paying for the labor, the hard work artists put into the creation of their works, and are therefore allegedly making it impossible to earn a living from art.
But interns? If artists deserve compensation for labor, and not just once, but each time their work is used, surely interns deserve some pay for their labor, just once?
How do you justify what seems to me to be a huge double standard?
Figure out what convinced you that the head of IT is the problem.
runs at roughly twice the budget of what the CFO has deemed appropriate
Why is the CFO competent about this, but the IT chief isn't? We all know how expectations can easily inflate beyond all reason. I've seen competent people in trouble for failing to accomplish the impossible. A group with unrealistic expectations can burn through a lot of employees, before someone starts thinking that maybe the problem isn't that they can't find any good people, maybe it's them.
Given the extreme uncertainty in time and resources required for non-trivial software projects, on time (in the information we were given, there was no mention of projects being late) at only twice the estimated costs might be considered fair or even good results. What I've heard is that of all software projects, only 10% are finished on time and within budget. Only 10%! A further 30% are finished, but are late or over budget, or both. About 30% are only partly successful, achieving only some of the goals before being cancelled. The final 30% are total failures, abandoned when it becomes obvious that the plans were at best too ambitious, or at worst completely crazy, being not only utterly unrealistic, but also of no use even if they had been achieved. This last happens when you have managers who prefer hand waving and magical thinking to actual hard work and hard truths. All in all, that's a stunning rate of failure. It seems we ought to be able to do better than that, and I think we will get better. But until we improve, this manager's performance ought to be measured against that standard, not against some opposite expectation that 90% of software projects should succeed.
And perhaps the rest of the company could use more appreciation of the problems that IT faces. Then instead of being perpetually disappointed in IT, they might have a little more respect. I've seen IT used as the whipping boy, and the handy, go-to excuse for why others couldn't meet their targets. It's IT's fault! They didn't keep our computers running! (Nevermind that we spent hours surfing porn sites with IE 6, infected all our computers, and bogged down our network with gigabytes of video downloads.) If the company has the mentality that IT is a "cost center", and, given what the CFO said, they probably do, IT is at a serious disadvantage.
Land that was under ice sheets during the last Ice Age is still rising. The Gulf of Bothnia may vanish in a few thousand years-- the floor may lift above sea level. For land that was next to an ice sheet but not under it, the opposite is happening. It bulged up when all the ice pressed down the adjacent land, and now that the ice is gone, it is sinking. Much of the Eastern Seaboard, including NYC, is experiencing this. That's how apparent sea level rise is higher at NYC than elsewhere. The sinking of the land in combination with the rising sea levels makes global warming worse for NYC than most other coastal cities.
Other local effects can influence coasts. New Orleans is another coastal city that's in trouble. It's on a river delta, which must be constantly replenished with fresh deposits. Deltas are always eroding and packing down, but most grow because there's enough silt to more than offset those effects. Thanks to our efforts at flood control, not as much silt is reaching the Mississippi delta. But our interference has an upside for New Orleans. The main flow of the Mississippi would have probably shifted to the Atchafalaya by now, leaving New Orleans stuck on a sinking backwater, if we hadn't interfered.
Ahh, such simple minded thinking.
In science, there is no believing. Science is not about belief and faith. Science is not a religion. Science is facts, evidence, and logical deductions. The Big Bang is a theory that fits the facts we have. Is it right or wrong? Likely it is more subtle than that, and is correct as far as it goes, but is not anywhere close to a complete explanation. It certainly has difficult problems. There is no faith involved in that.
As to the idea that our observations may not be reliable, that what we see, hear, and measure may not reflect reality, and pretending otherwise is just acting on faith, this is an old problem in philosophy. How do we know anything we sense is real? We don't know. Is it faith to act as if what we sense is real? No! We accept that what we sense is reality, not out of faith, but because it doesn't make sense to follow any other line of reasoning. Imperfect though our understanding of reality is, and perhaps must be, we can still work with it, and we have. We would never have been able to make integrated circuits, radios, and all the other marvels of modern techonolgy if we didn't have some understanding of apparent reality.
What if we go with a hypothesis that we aren't sensing reality, that there is a deeper reality that we can't sense? Assuming it exists, what could the nature of this deeper reality be? If it is a supernatural reality, then that ends the scientific inquiry right there. Science is only about the natural, not the supernatural. Soon as the supernatural is invoked, it's all chaos. Anything at all might be true of a supernatural reality.
If you claim there is a deeper reality and it is natural, but that it cannot be observed, that makes things difficult, but hardly insurmountable. How can we know it even exists, if there is no way to observe it? Without any way to sense it, perform experiments on it, or extrapolate its effects to things we can observe, we can only speculate wildly. First, anyone making such a claim ought to have some sort of rationale for it. We do speculate, with ideas like that our universe is only a part of a multiverse, or that our reality is actually not 4 dimensions, but 10 or 26, with the extra dimensions being so small that we can't perceive them. This is not reaching for faith, this is simply speculation. Even if we can't sort this out now, we may be able to in the future.
We all know how messed up much corporate planning, decision making, and management is. They have the stupidest mental shortcuts for evaluating people and projects, and the queerest ideas about what attributes a model employee possesses. How they think and even wish people should behave is wildly unrealistic. So many employees are just playing the game, trying to appear to have the "proper" attitudes, while keeping their real opinions and thoughts to themselves. Management picks loudmouths and hardasses for management positions, mistaking noise and bullying for drive and vision. Instead of thoughtfully evaluating plans on the merits, choosing among them and measuring progress as best they can so they have some idea whether it's feasible and how long it will take, they set impossible deadlines, frantically ply the whips, and when that doesn't work blame the slave labor for letting the company down. They also can't resist working on hidden agendas driven by shockingly unprofessional and even childish motives. An upper manager might well lay off an entire department on trumped up questions about their value to the company, all because an attractive member of it refused a sexual advance. Wag the Dog would have been more likely if it had been about a corporate leader rather than a national leader.
You'd think such messed up organizations would collapse under their own incompetence every time. They do fail rather often, but surprisingly less often than one might think. I can only think a bad business survives in spite of their incompetence, because their competitors are just as incompetent. Or they don't have competitors.
Seems to me the problem is the the downright feudal nature of these organizations. Inheritance has been thoroughly discredited as a way to pick national leaders. But we still pick many corporate leaders that way, and accept it. It's as if ownership is held in the high regard that the monarchy and nobility once enjoyed. The rich are the new nobility. When the person at the top is unimaginitive and plodding, yet egotistical, arrogant and contemptuous towards the "lower classes", and also jealous and resentful of respect towards scientists, engineers, and other meritorious people, the company is not going to be well run. Ford Motor Company has had this problem. Used to refer to Henry Ford as "King Henry". What restrains them from acting too tyrannical and arbitrary is that employees are free to leave. Unless the economy stinks, or they manage to set up a company town, and collude with their competitors not to hire each other's former employees. Maybe do a bit of union busting as well. Top management strives entirely too much to achieve such dubious control. Sickening to see company resources expended for such purposes, but there it is.
So far, 3D printing seems like a solution in search of a problem. To date, what's the most useful item made by 3D printing? Clips for firearms? But all that really does is demonstrate the ineffectiveness of laws against weapons. Maybe customized medical implants are the most useful items? Even if they can design it themselves, no one is able to put an item like that to use by themselves, need lots of medical help. No reason to employ a vending machine in that process.
How about prototypes? Maybe, but while good for the start, a 3D printer could not be a serious contributor to the end of a design process that started with a scaled down prototype. It's not so good for full sized models of even modestly sized items, as most machines are limited to about 25 cm^3 (1 cubic foot). Can't fit a building or a car or just a car door in that area. Even the interior handle of a car door could be too large, if it includes a grip and arm rest in the design. Separate pieces that are held together by mechanical means may be fine for prototypes, but maybe not the final product, because when it gets old and loosens up a bit, it will cause all kinds of annoying rattles and squeaks in a environment subject to vibration, such as a car. If the prototype appears to be a good design, the production of the full sized product would be done with other methods.
Even in cases where the 3D printer could make the final product, there is still the issue of quantity. 3D printing is just too slow for runs of thousands of copies of an item.
All you can really do easily with a low cost 3D printer is small artistic sculptures and custom toys such as model cars and figurines for role playing games, and that's limited. A person can store thousands of flat items like photo prints, but can't so easily store thousands of 3D items, takes too much space.
I expect the single life is my lot. Even apart from my own blunders, or just the stigma of being too "white and nerdy", I'd have thought I'd have a bit more success. But I have gotten nowhere. Talk and talk on dating sites, maybe for weeks, seeming like we have much in common, and then suddenly she stops responding. What did I say wrong? What happened? I don't know. Communication? What communication?
Could be some were just using men. Maybe she was married, and misrepresented herself as single, or any number of other lies. I have no idea how common that is. But I think most people are mostly sincere and mostly honest. A few times, I did get a reason of sorts. One was a divorced woman who told me that her husband left her without a word of explanation, and she had no idea why. Hmm. A few weeks later, she told me she "wasn't ready", which sounded screwy to me. Another was a Life Coach, which, upon reading a bit about what that was, sounded like potentially a downright evil career. After a few weeks, told me she didn't want to chat with me any more, unless I wanted to be a customer and pay her money for advice on what I should do with my life! Had me wondering if the entire purpose of the conversation was just an attempt to drum up some business. Felt as if I'd been given directions to a party, only to discover upon arriving that there was nothing there, and worse, that I'd crossed a minefield to get to the place and that my correspondent knew all about that part.
Perhaps it's not me especially, it's the environment. Seems in recent times, the economy has been bad most years, and this stresses and depresses people. I fancy people aren't much interested in the pursuit of happiness, and are definitely less interested in having children, when life sucks. Also, we have the obesity epidemic. It's harder to get excited over someone who can't climb a stairway because they're too fat. And when that fat person is you, and you can hardly stand to look at yourself in the mirror, how can you feel confident enough to date? I wonder how many morbidly obese women have given up all hope and don't even bother trying? A review I saw of OKCupid complained that the women there weren't serious, and I'm thinking there may be something to that. I wonder how spoiled we all are. Are people's expectations so sky high that no one can meet them? I read a bit about some sisters of one of the King Louises of France. They didn't want to marry any man who was not worthy of them, and declined many offers. Seemed they were holding out for a king of a major nation. They ended up never marrying. Many daughters of nobility were pushed into nunneries, which were the dumping grounds for excess children. A noble might produce many daughters before he finally had enough sons to have good odds of one living long enough to succeed him. Also, some of the women in nunneries were the victims of rape by a nobleman, which in those days was considered the fault of the woman. But these sisters of King Louis weren't driven into the religious life, they just couldn't settle for any man. I wonder if we've all become a bit more like that.
You don't think that's enough money? Why is it that Work For Hire is okay for software developers, but is totally unfair for scientists and authors, and employers of software developers? What would you suggest for a fair method of calculating compensation? That is, other than the current method of "I dunno, let's hand them a monopoly and even spend public money on enforcement, so they can be as generous or as stingy and demanding as they want to be."
Which part? This: "I see nothing wrong with DRM for subscription based content." Well, I see everything wrong with that. DRM is categorically unacceptable.
You think it's okay to have DRM on, say, cable TV? And it's okay to implement this or a similar service on your computer, right down to the DRM? I disagree. Strongly. Either I must give up control of my computer to powers that have demonstrated time and again that they are not to be trusted with such control, or I must set up a sandbox, a totally separate system specially for viewing DRM content. I will take a third option. I just won't view it.
Now, if DRM gets shoved onto our systems in the form of browsers that conform to an HTML standard that has DRM grafted on, then to be secure we would have to hack the browsers to remove that part, or just not have browsers on any of our computers that have sensitive data. Wouldn't do to have the DRM capable software make a mistake and accidentally erase financial records. Do you recall the year Turbo Tax screwed with the boot sector of their customer's hard drives, endangering all the data on them? And do you suppose that fundamental attitude has changed? These people still really think that it's acceptable to put their customers' data at risk in order to secure their "property", and only grudgingly refrain from doing so in the face of customer wrath and lawsuits. Let up on them, and they will be right back with more DRM.
Browsers are quite creaky and vulnerable enough, with drive by and click hijacking and the like, without deliberately adding DRM to the mess. That's the last thing we should allow. We try so hard to secure our systems, let's not blow it with a big mistake like voluntarily opening the door to DRM.
We don't have DRM on AM or FM radio, or broadcast TV. We are free to record any broadcast we want. We should aim for the broadcast TV model, not the cable TV model.
Forgot to mention Fritz Leiber and Andre Norton, and I'm sure I missed others. I didn't say I thought all those authors were great, or that they never "laid an egg". I've come to really dislike time travel in stories, and it was McCaffrey that inadvertently helped show me why time travel is so broken. Her dragons were crazy powerful--- in addition to the stock abilities of breathing fire and flying, they teleport even interplanetary distances faster than light speed (guess mere flying isn't an awesome enough method of travel), time travel, telepathically communicate, bond with humans so loyally that they suicide when their chosen human dies, and put Viagra to shame in their ability to arouse sexual passion. She resorted to flimsy excuses for why the dragonriders didn't do a whole lot more time travel to fix every mistake they ever made, prevent every tragedy from happening. I agree with your division, actually. But where would you put Tolkien? What is that criticism about Tolkien, that it is just "comfort food"?
Nevertheless, I enjoyed them all. Sometimes a body just wants a bit of light, fun reading, an escape, a happy ending with a few twists so it's not too boringly obvious.
What's wrong with you people? How many times do you have to lose your entire music, e-book, or game collection, have your systems root kitted, and even be accused of piracy and shaken down, before you'll refuse to ever knowingly consent to this invasive DRM again? DRM has no value whatsoever. No, there aren't any good uses for DRM. The few examples of "good DRM" I've heard are not DRM, they're just straight encryption, cryptographically secure authentication, digital signing, and the like. DRM is a bad idea that, like some damned zombie, keeps on coming back for another sequel. DRM is an offense to our rights and freedoms, a denial of reality, and an unnatural and harmful restriction upon society. It's mental indoctrination and slavery. That so many people are half convinced that maybe DRM isn't so bad, or though evil is a necessary evil, is disturbing, as it should also be seen for the insult to our intelligence that it is. DRM will never be a complete success unless they can install devices in our very brains to force us to forget that movie we saw last month or that song we heard last year. Should we also standardize a protocol for a DRM/human brain interface while we're thinking about letting it into HTML5?
Trusted Computing will never arrive as long as these special interests keep trying to twist it against us, make it into Treacherous Computing. They're still trying to give us bull about how it's actually for us because it's for our own good and the good of society, hoping we're stupid enough to accept this bad logic.
Seems all the authors I grew up on are going. Anne McCaffrey last year, David Eddings in 2009, Fred Saberhagen in 2007, Robert Jordan and Roger Zelazny at the far too young age of 58 in 2007 and 1995 respectively, Robert Asprin in 2008 at the hardly older age of 61, Isaac Asimov age 72 in 1992, Arthur Clarke in 2008, and Robert Heinlein in 1988. Just glad Jack Vance lived this long.
I suppose it's only natural-- published, successful authors were all at least 20 years older than I was when I started reading for fun. The first author I read for fun on my own was Tolkien, 4 years after his death, and from there I got into SF/Fantasy. It was also my introduction to bookstores, as the public libraries at that time either didn't carry Tolkien-- still too new for them, or always had all their copies checked out.
When the price of paperbacks went over $5 in the early 1990s, rising at more than double the rate of inflation, it seemed like sheer greed to me. Jarred with the generally positive morality depicted in the books, making that seem hypocritical. So I gradually dropped out, quit buying new from bookstores, and now I hardly ever even visit anymore, not even used bookstores or libraries, and have lost my familiarity with the titles available. Too many other leisure activities to do. And I haven't taken to the e-readers, too much DRM. For me the golden age of the SF/Fantasy book and bookstore was the 1980s. $1.95 each in the early 80s, cheap enough I'd try lots of books, no need to check a review or award list beforehand to see if it was worth the money. Was good while it lasted.
I had a TRS-80 for a short while. Was my first computer. But with no programs, no manuals, and no particular liking of the gray monochrome graphics, case, keyboard, tape recorder, and everything, I didn't do much with it. My father tried to interest me in a Vic 20, but at only 5k or RAM, it couldn't do much. What convinced him to stop being such a tightwad was when it ran out of memory trying to load a game on tape that happened to be handy. He finally caved and got what I wanted, an Apple II. Bought it used.
It was an Apple II+ with a language card, giving it 64k RAM. And it came with a floppy disk drive, not a crummy tape recorder. But most of all, the previous owner had a bunch of manuals and books that he included in the sale. I got Beneath Apple DOS, an Apple Pascal manual, another book about the 6502 machine language which included a schematic of the Apple II and other information such as the existence of the "monitor" (the built in disassembler in the ROM), and of course documentation about Apple BASIC.
Further, it was crucial that these early computers came with simple programming environments ready to go, and that others had used. Could always break into a game to look at the code and learn. And cheat of course. A look at the code was just a LIST command away, thanks to the built in BASIC interpreter. Copy protection was also educational. Many games, such as Dark Forest (sorry Tom Mornini), were slow and buggy. I fixed and improved some of these. When I realized that finding the Mark of the Snake in Ultima III was a boring find-the-needle-in-the-haystack problem (the clues in the game narrowed it down to the bottom floor of the dungeons, but that was still too much searching to suit me), I searched the disk instead, found the character information, and edited it to give myself the Mark so I could finish the silly game. Later, I did find the Mark the proper way. If I wanted to, I could flip the computer on, and instantly start writing some BASIC program. Wouldn't be able to save it if I hadn't taken the 45 seconds needed to boot DOS, but sometimes I just wanted to bang out a few lines of code to get a quick answer to a simple question. Later, better DOSes cut the boot time to 15 seconds. I never used Pascal, because it was horribly slow, and hardly anyone else used it either. Stuck with BASIC and assembler.
You ought to consider what the developers of Doom and Quake said, which is that you shouldn't get too attached to existing code. If you want the best code, you should throw everything away and start over, repeatedly.
Lest you think that rule of thumb can only apply when you need lots of optimization, and most code is hastily written garbage that is only worked on until it is barely good enough to do the job and doesn't need any more work than that, you ought to think about design. Hastily written is also hastily designed. No amount of patching can fix a bad design, you have to start over to do a different design.
Two examples: A company I was at had a dangerous and cumbersome process for updating the software on a website. The process was 1) log into machine with the repository, 2) launch the install script, giving the name of the target computer as a parameter, whereupon the script 3) shut down the services and deleted the existing version from the target computer, 4) extracted the latest source from the repository and copied that over to the target, 5) built the application on the target, 6) started the services back up. Then it was pray that the new version works, and if it didn't, the developers might hack the code right there on the production machine, and ask the system administrators to copy the changed files to where they could add the changes to the repository. (Why they couldn't do that themselves, while they were right there hacking? But the company wasn't insane enough to give all the developers access to the production machines.) It was a monolithic script, and it had a mess of conditional things to do depending on which machine was the target. Now, can you see that this design has tons and tons of problems? Not least is that the website had to be taken down for about 20 minutes during this update process. If the new version didn't work, and couldn't be made to work with a few hacks, it was another 20 minutes to restore the old version. The worst happened when a developer mistakenly aimed at the wrong target, meaning to update the demonstration site, but instead updating the production site. Wiped the company's production database. (The developers had insisted that the database have no password, for their convenience, and over the strenuous protests of our DBA. A password could also have stopped this disaster.) We were lucky to get the company's website back up at all, let alone in only 1 day. I thought about it and decided the only thing to do was start over from scratch and design a completely different process. What would you have done?
In the other case, they had another script that went through the web server's logs to extract useful information such as the number of unique visitors, time spent on each web page, and so on. This script worked at first, but began to fall behind. It began to take longer than 24 hours to process 24 hours worth of logs, and I was called in to deal with the problem when the backlog had built up to about 3 days. First thing I saw was a crazy design decision to just simply go through all the logs each day, redoing all the work it had done the day before, then doing the current day's work. It was doomed to break down as the logs grew. We were not about to throw out old logs, just to accomodate this quick and dirty design. It was easier to just start over, rather than try to fix the existing script as it was full of routines that assumed all the logs were being processed every time it ran.
He will also be away from family, who can be the worst distractions. All the time, I'm being called on for the most miserably petty computer problems. "I couldn't get gmail to use BCC instead of TO" (amazing that this user even learned about BCC), "I lost the window", "how do I send a video in an email", "the printer isn't working again", etc. It's often stuff they could figure out themselves, but they find it more convenient to bother me. I've tried to make it not convenient by making them wait a bit, and sometimes they do start playing around and figure out the problem themselves. Sometimes it really is a bug. Have stumbled over more than one Firefox bug this way. It's not all computer related either. I have to do pretty much all the talking needed over the phone for the elderly, hard of hearing family members, so I'm always being asked to call doctors and pharmacies, and merchants and banks, and deal with whatever con artist is calling to peddle magazine subscriptions or ask for donations. Really fun when one of those Windows Technical Support scammers calls to try to get us to believe our computers are infected, and one of the elders beats me to the phone.