I can only write in one candidate for county commissioner, but there are eight slots.
Why can't I write in Knuth and Lessig?
I love the ballot choices, by the way--they're witty, especially the Libertarian presidential line. You have no idea what I'd give to have choices like these in real life--or maybe you do.
I installed FreeBSD at home for the first time this week, and have had some very basic problems. On the advice of an acquaintance who runs it himself professionally (and yes, he gave me a pointer or two, but once it became clear I had problems, I asked him for a good information source so I could let him get back to work), I joined a FreeBSD list and got step-by-step help.
I've had much worse support from paid contracts and major vendors.
Someday I'll get around to trying this newfangled Linux thing out, but for now, the employer I'm looking at back home wants familiarity with BSD, and so my spare time is allocated.
Aside from what goes to the wife and kid, that is.
Wherever this was quoted from, it's got an additional point to be made from it:
Perl is probably fine for half arsed system scripts that don't exceed 50 lines or so, but it is a hindrance and an abomination to a professional development environment
Perl can be used by people who are not professional developers--people like "half arsed system" administrators who like to actually do useful things. Non-technical people can do things with Perl, too. Granted, sometimes they make awful mistakes, and on a networked device, that's scary. But tools for the n0n-l33t are a Good Thing, except maybe for some 3(g0)l33t15t5.
I thought there was a strong strain of it all through The Number of the Beast.
And there's this little exchange, as the four characters are batting around their lists of twenty favorite story worlds, trying to figure out where they might be going next:
"Did Heinlein get his name in the hat?"
"Four votes, split. Two for his 'Future History', two for 'Stranger in a Strange Land.' So I left him out."
"I didn't vote for 'Stranger' and I'll refrain from embarrassing anyone by asking who did. My God, the things some writers will do for money!"
The attentive reader will note that, shortly thereafter, the characters end up in the 'Future History'. Not long after that, they are drinking with Jubal Harshaw.
Heinlein's editor at Scribner's objected to his original ending, whereupon Heinlein rewrote it.
Later on in life, Heinlein could have used some editorial guidance. In this case, though, Heinlein was right and the editor was wrong--the original ending was true.
What I believe you are thinking of is the first publication of Podkayne of Mars with both the original ending (first published standalone in Grumbles from the Grave) and the edited ending. When that publication came out, readers were invited to vote on their preferred ending. (This from Nitrosyncretic Press's Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader's Companion.)
Eventually, a version came out in paperback where both endings were accompanied by essays about the two endings and which the readers preferred--a good frind of mine wrote one of those!
He was being interviewed in The Alien Critic and when I Will Fear No Evil came up, he said, "Robert Heinlein at his worst is more interesting than most writers at their best."
That book had a hell of a good premise and was set in one of Heinlein's coolest dytopian worlds.
If he'd been in better health, had a better edit job, or not needed the money right then (pick your favorite theory), it'd've been one of Heinlein's best. As it turned out...
Exactly right--and note how Heinlein puts a Japanese-American into the story as a tragic hero.
Heinlein was sometimes chowderheaded in his thinking about race--"Jerry Was A Man" comes to mind--but it was sentimental paternalism at worst and never truly racist. The Star Beast touches on this, as does Tunnel In The Sky, and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, and Double Star. There is so much explicit anti-racism--xenophilia, really--in his work that his lapses are forgivable.
And that's only the later, cranky Heinlein--the earlier Heinlein was a bit more balanced.
Government is a technology, so I say:
Libertarianism == Luddism.
Now, as to Mike the computer running odds on the revolution, I have a different take on that.
Mike had a sense of humor--it's what made him human, eh? And the reason his odds didn't make sense (something Panshin, I believe, points out but explains wrongly as Heinlein using the odds as a means of artificially raising the suspense) is that Mike was playing a prank. Those odds running up and down in an irrational manner--it was a practical joke Mike played on his friends.
And a good joke, too--it really kept them hopping, but did no harm in the end.
...as it is the most overrated science fiction novel in existence. It features:
bad world-building--the demographic imbalance between male and female so important to the plot is mathematically bad thinking.
impossibly stupid villains--a Lunar Authority incapable of understanding the Lunar society as a closed system being drained by exports.
dumbass social thinking--sure, a lawless society made up of convicts and juvenile deliquents would develop an unfailing politeness and great respect for private property. Sure.
an unrealistically rosy presentation of the process of violent revolution--there are approximately three paragraphs of genuine grief in a book filled with death.
all adding up to a loonier work of libertarian Luddism than all Ayn Rand's books put together.
It's a great read--I've read it dozens of times--until you think too closely about it.
Now, what's a good Heinlein to start with? I recommend these:
Waldo and Magic, Inc. and The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (also published as 6 x H), both available in a single volume, The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein. These stories show the breadth and humanity of Heinlein's work, from early in his career till the midpoint of 1958. Heinlein's work can be divided into two or four discrete periods, but either way you cut it, up to 1958 is distinctly different from 1959 on. Start with any of these--"Waldo" is a particularly brilliant coming of age story.
Double Star, published in 1958, was the first and best of his four Hugo-winning novels. Light on science but heavy on fiction, short on preaching but long on politics. This was the last sign of Heinlein the liberal. The main plot device has gone from implausible but believable to impossible but a pleasant thought. Since Heinlein was a good writer, it remains enjoyable--but you really can't go wrong with any of the pre-1959 adult books, except maybe the new one.
Among the juveniles, Citizen of the Galaxy, The Star Beast, and Starman Jones stand out. Each is a solidly entertaining novel with enough meat on its bones to satisfy a grown-up reader. Avoid starting with Space Cadet or Rocket Ship Galileo.
The Past Through Tomorrow collects his Future History stories, including the first Lazarus Long book, Methuselah's Children, and it's uniformly wonderful. The Lazarus Long books which start with Time Enough for Love are a separate creature altogether. Time Enough for Love is pretty good, too, if a bit uneven, and more than worth reading--the subsequent Long books are an acquired taste at best. (My beautiful and talented wife disagrees--she likes all the Long books.)
Other books from 1959 on that are very much worth reading:
Stranger in a Strange Land is now a bit underrated but still among Heinlein's strongest works. Get the original version rather than the uncut--I've read this so many times I can nearly mark the uncut version with the edits Heinlein made, and you know what? Almost every restored sentence reads better, but the book as a whole suffers from the extra length. It's moving and optimistic and, unlike some of Heinlein's other preachy books, the preaching in this one is interesting. It's also noteworthy that the fundamentalist Christian fanatics in this book turn out to be the good guys, more or less, and have an absolutely true religion.
Glory Road is Heinlein's sword-and-sorcery novel, and it's a heck of a lot of fun!
Friday suffers from an implausible happy ending, but up to that point it's awfully good. (My beautiful and talented wife likes it best of all his books--did I mention she's a smart woman with good taste?) Friday is the most appealing of Heinlein's heroines, with the possible exception of
Podkayne of Mars, the title character of one of Heinlein's darker novels. The restored ending is better--get a copy with the essays, to which a friend of mi
The first acceleration is the one (as noted in the article) where a network cable gets yanked and the box comes off the table. Will a 0.1 second reaction time to pull back the heads help?
Let's see: the initial velocity (downward) is zero, so that simplifies things to half gravity times a tenth of a second squared--that'd be less than a foot, if I'm doing the math right.
That's pretty good--I think that'll even catch a machine being knocked over on its side. (That's another problem, and I don't feel like doing the math right now.)
This ain't academic: I have a friend who lost everything on many large drives to exactly this just last month, someone tripping over a badly-placed cable attached to a badly-placed box.
(Yeah, yeah, shoulda backed up, shoulda placed the box better. I told him that, too. Very gently.)
I'd be worried about false positives, especiallly on laptops, and given proper site prep, falling running boxes shouldn't happen, but this could be great for consumer boxes.
Re:What's wrong with national IDs?
on
Beyond Fear
·
· Score: 1
You say: "In fact we are an entire country founded on the thought that the government should get the fuck out of our lives." Sorry, but that's just not the case, and I think any one of the Founders would tell you so. In fact, my computer is currently running off power generated by several of them spinning in their graves at this Libertarian variation on the Big Lie.
If you want massive casualties, you'll need to look at organized warfare and genocide. There's where you find the routine killings of hundreds and thousands of people. Terrorists are penny-ante killers.
I'm not denying that killing a lot of people pleased the terrorists at the Trade Center, but I am saying that their primary goal was to put the killing on television, body count being secondary.
The rest of your comment shows you've drunk the anti-idiotarian koolaid. In lieu of ipecac, I can't help you there. But I will leave you with this thought:
Just because someone hates idiots doesn't mean he isn't an idiot himself.
A: All they're interested in is eyeballs.
Terrorists go for symbolic targets, and body count is secondary. If they had weapons capable of killing millions instead of thousands, they'd be something more than terrorists.
Look, this bill is about public sector buying, so not only are your opinions about private sector buyers irrelevant, they show that you don't think before you post.
What's important about bills like these? They put Open Source/Free Software on a level playing field with Closed Source/Proprietary Software. That means Open Source/Free Software is going to lose sometimes. If you can't accept that, then you are the mirror image of the straw man buyer you put up: The idiot in IT who wants worthless free software because it's cool, not useful or usable.
Can you explain to me why MS Excel is inferior to the OpenOffice spreadsheet? And why corporate buyers who purchase it are "idiots who don't know what they're buying"? Tell me what the OpenOffice solution is for desktop databases--what do they have to substitute for MS Access? Tell me about ODBC drivers. Tell me what you're substituting in for MS Project Manager, and how it interoperates.
By the way, I use OpenOffice at home nearly exclusively, both on OS X and on Windows--I like it. But I'm not blind to its flaws and failings, either.
I fight these battles nearly every day. I'm contracting in an extremely unfriendly environment (where Open Source==Freeware==Shareware). We've still managed to keep some paths open for OS/FS. We didn't do it by telling people they were idiots for buying software which--oddly enough--works for their purposes, fulfills their requirements, and is cost-effective to use.
There once was a hacker named Stallman Who held it as gospel that all man- Kind should share source Code, and to force Them to pay for it takes lots of gall, man.
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't I write in Knuth and Lessig?
I love the ballot choices, by the way--they're witty, especially the Libertarian presidential line. You have no idea what I'd give to have choices like these in real life--or maybe you do.
Ancient history, when he was a teenager. He writes about it--I forget where.
The most notable US literary award I'm aware of being given to a graphic novel was the Pulizer Prize given to Art Spiegelman for Maus.
I've had much worse support from paid contracts and major vendors.
Someday I'll get around to trying this newfangled Linux thing out, but for now, the employer I'm looking at back home wants familiarity with BSD, and so my spare time is allocated.
Aside from what goes to the wife and kid, that is.
Perl is probably fine for half arsed system scripts that don't exceed 50 lines or so, but it is a hindrance and an abomination to a professional development environment
Perl can be used by people who are not professional developers--people like "half arsed system" administrators who like to actually do useful things. Non-technical people can do things with Perl, too. Granted, sometimes they make awful mistakes, and on a networked device, that's scary. But tools for the n0n-l33t are a Good Thing, except maybe for some 3(g0)l33t15t5.
And there's this little exchange, as the four characters are batting around their lists of twenty favorite story worlds, trying to figure out where they might be going next:
"Did Heinlein get his name in the hat?"
"Four votes, split. Two for his 'Future History', two for 'Stranger in a Strange Land.' So I left him out."
"I didn't vote for 'Stranger' and I'll refrain from embarrassing anyone by asking who did. My God, the things some writers will do for money!"
The attentive reader will note that, shortly thereafter, the characters end up in the 'Future History'. Not long after that, they are drinking with Jubal Harshaw.
Later on in life, Heinlein could have used some editorial guidance. In this case, though, Heinlein was right and the editor was wrong--the original ending was true.
What I believe you are thinking of is the first publication of Podkayne of Mars with both the original ending (first published standalone in Grumbles from the Grave) and the edited ending. When that publication came out, readers were invited to vote on their preferred ending. (This from Nitrosyncretic Press's Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader's Companion.)
Eventually, a version came out in paperback where both endings were accompanied by essays about the two endings and which the readers preferred--a good frind of mine wrote one of those!
That book had a hell of a good premise and was set in one of Heinlein's coolest dytopian worlds.
If he'd been in better health, had a better edit job, or not needed the money right then (pick your favorite theory), it'd've been one of Heinlein's best. As it turned out...
Hey! You know what Fritz Leiber said?
Heinlein was sometimes chowderheaded in his thinking about race--"Jerry Was A Man" comes to mind--but it was sentimental paternalism at worst and never truly racist. The Star Beast touches on this, as does Tunnel In The Sky, and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, and Double Star. There is so much explicit anti-racism--xenophilia, really--in his work that his lapses are forgivable.
Government is a technology, so I say:
Libertarianism == Luddism.
Now, as to Mike the computer running odds on the revolution, I have a different take on that.
Mike had a sense of humor--it's what made him human, eh? And the reason his odds didn't make sense (something Panshin, I believe, points out but explains wrongly as Heinlein using the odds as a means of artificially raising the suspense) is that Mike was playing a prank. Those odds running up and down in an irrational manner--it was a practical joke Mike played on his friends.
And a good joke, too--it really kept them hopping, but did no harm in the end.
all adding up to a loonier work of libertarian Luddism than all Ayn Rand's books put together.
It's a great read--I've read it dozens of times--until you think too closely about it.
Now, what's a good Heinlein to start with? I recommend these:
Waldo and Magic, Inc. and The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (also published as 6 x H), both available in a single volume, The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein. These stories show the breadth and humanity of Heinlein's work, from early in his career till the midpoint of 1958. Heinlein's work can be divided into two or four discrete periods, but either way you cut it, up to 1958 is distinctly different from 1959 on. Start with any of these--"Waldo" is a particularly brilliant coming of age story.
Double Star, published in 1958, was the first and best of his four Hugo-winning novels. Light on science but heavy on fiction, short on preaching but long on politics. This was the last sign of Heinlein the liberal. The main plot device has gone from implausible but believable to impossible but a pleasant thought. Since Heinlein was a good writer, it remains enjoyable--but you really can't go wrong with any of the pre-1959 adult books, except maybe the new one.
Among the juveniles, Citizen of the Galaxy, The Star Beast, and Starman Jones stand out. Each is a solidly entertaining novel with enough meat on its bones to satisfy a grown-up reader. Avoid starting with Space Cadet or Rocket Ship Galileo.
The Past Through Tomorrow collects his Future History stories, including the first Lazarus Long book, Methuselah's Children, and it's uniformly wonderful. The Lazarus Long books which start with Time Enough for Love are a separate creature altogether. Time Enough for Love is pretty good, too, if a bit uneven, and more than worth reading--the subsequent Long books are an acquired taste at best. (My beautiful and talented wife disagrees--she likes all the Long books.)
Other books from 1959 on that are very much worth reading:
Stranger in a Strange Land is now a bit underrated but still among Heinlein's strongest works. Get the original version rather than the uncut--I've read this so many times I can nearly mark the uncut version with the edits Heinlein made, and you know what? Almost every restored sentence reads better, but the book as a whole suffers from the extra length. It's moving and optimistic and, unlike some of Heinlein's other preachy books, the preaching in this one is interesting. It's also noteworthy that the fundamentalist Christian fanatics in this book turn out to be the good guys, more or less, and have an absolutely true religion.
Glory Road is Heinlein's sword-and-sorcery novel, and it's a heck of a lot of fun!
Friday suffers from an implausible happy ending, but up to that point it's awfully good. (My beautiful and talented wife likes it best of all his books--did I mention she's a smart woman with good taste?) Friday is the most appealing of Heinlein's heroines, with the possible exception of
Podkayne of Mars, the title character of one of Heinlein's darker novels. The restored ending is better--get a copy with the essays, to which a friend of mi
The first acceleration is the one (as noted in the article) where a network cable gets yanked and the box comes off the table. Will a 0.1 second reaction time to pull back the heads help?
Let's see: the initial velocity (downward) is zero, so that simplifies things to half gravity times a tenth of a second squared--that'd be less than a foot, if I'm doing the math right.
That's pretty good--I think that'll even catch a machine being knocked over on its side. (That's another problem, and I don't feel like doing the math right now.)
This ain't academic: I have a friend who lost everything on many large drives to exactly this just last month, someone tripping over a badly-placed cable attached to a badly-placed box.
(Yeah, yeah, shoulda backed up, shoulda placed the box better. I told him that, too. Very gently.)
I'd be worried about false positives, especiallly on laptops, and given proper site prep, falling running boxes shouldn't happen, but this could be great for consumer boxes.
You say: "In fact we are an entire country founded on the thought that the government should get the fuck out of our lives." Sorry, but that's just not the case, and I think any one of the Founders would tell you so. In fact, my computer is currently running off power generated by several of them spinning in their graves at this Libertarian variation on the Big Lie.
If you want massive casualties, you'll need to look at organized warfare and genocide. There's where you find the routine killings of hundreds and thousands of people. Terrorists are penny-ante killers. I'm not denying that killing a lot of people pleased the terrorists at the Trade Center, but I am saying that their primary goal was to put the killing on television, body count being secondary. The rest of your comment shows you've drunk the anti-idiotarian koolaid. In lieu of ipecac, I can't help you there. But I will leave you with this thought: Just because someone hates idiots doesn't mean he isn't an idiot himself.
A: All they're interested in is eyeballs. Terrorists go for symbolic targets, and body count is secondary. If they had weapons capable of killing millions instead of thousands, they'd be something more than terrorists.
Look, this bill is about public sector buying, so not only are your opinions about private sector buyers irrelevant, they show that you don't think before you post.
What's important about bills like these? They put Open Source/Free Software on a level playing field with Closed Source/Proprietary Software. That means Open Source/Free Software is going to lose sometimes. If you can't accept that, then you are the mirror image of the straw man buyer you put up: The idiot in IT who wants worthless free software because it's cool, not useful or usable.
Can you explain to me why MS Excel is inferior to the OpenOffice spreadsheet? And why corporate buyers who purchase it are "idiots who don't know what they're buying"? Tell me what the OpenOffice solution is for desktop databases--what do they have to substitute for MS Access? Tell me about ODBC drivers. Tell me what you're substituting in for MS Project Manager, and how it interoperates.
By the way, I use OpenOffice at home nearly exclusively, both on OS X and on Windows--I like it. But I'm not blind to its flaws and failings, either.
I fight these battles nearly every day. I'm contracting in an extremely unfriendly environment (where Open Source==Freeware==Shareware). We've still managed to keep some paths open for OS/FS. We didn't do it by telling people they were idiots for buying software which--oddly enough--works for their purposes, fulfills their requirements, and is cost-effective to use.
See that last sentence in the story? Who made the mistake? Paul Allen, or the Times's writer?
Sci-Fi Today, the Seattle PI, and The Seattle Times all got it right.
Only the Times and The Tacoma News Tribune have it wrong.
The Tacoma paper deserves special recognition for combining the Times story and AP wire reports, then getting the error into their lead sentence.
There once was a hacker named Stallman
Who held it as gospel that all man-
Kind should share source
Code, and to force
Them to pay for it takes lots of gall, man.