I think you have do what has to be done to end the war. Remember, people were estimating that an invasion of Japan would cost one million Allied casulties, and probably at least that many Japanese. Horrible though the two bombs were, they still cost less lives than an invasion would have.
How much market penetration did Apple really ever have at schools? I've heard about this marketing strategy, but I never saw it.
That's exactly my point. Apple has, over the years, made a big deal about giving computers to schools, but it hasn't gotten them much except for some publicity.
Having the impact cause a tsunami could be reasoned out on its own; after all, 70% of the Earth's surface is water. However, the surfer would have been clear evidence of plagerism. I'm sure they both would have been glad to sign a release if asked before hand, so it's not like they were being a pair of dogs in the manger.
I don't think Niven & Pournelle would have got far.
They might have, though. Neither of those two cases you mention had the tsunami caused by a strike from space, such as the Hammerfall. I think they let Escape From LA past only because the surfer didn't wipe out on the Berrington Plaza.
Re:Japanese Gaming Aesthetic
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Interesting to contemplate how a society could consciously create other micro-cultures for competitive advantage.
Jack Vance wrote a book about that in 1958, The Languages of Pao in which various parts of a planet's people were changed into great merchants, warriors, technicians and so on simply by being raised in a culture with a language designed to instill the appropriate mindsets. Not one of Vance's best, but still well worth reading.
The era of scientists being depicted as whining and dreary eggheads who cowardly scamper about in the shadow of the macho leading man left vogue with Doctor Zarkov.
I take it then, that you've never watched the original Flash Gordon serials, as I have. Dr. Zarkov had enough guts to build his space ship and launch it against an un-known force that was threatening to kill everybody on the Earth, and looked capable of doing it. He also had the sense to take along a "man of action," for those deeds of derring do that Zarkov himself wasn't capable of doing. Zarkov, Flash and Dale made a great team: brains and brawn, plus Dale as a highly-skilled lab assistant. (Ming respected her brain just as much as he wanted her body.) Not that there haven't been any number of cowardly scientists, mind you, but Zarkov doesn't fit the mold. He was quite willing to risk his life standing up to Ming, even if he wasn't the man to run around in close combat with the guards.
And when that movie about the asteroid came out, two major SF authors went to watch it. They'd already agreed that if there were a surfer on a tsunami, they were calling their lawyers. Now, for extra geek points, name the two authors and the reason to loose the dogs of lawsuit.
It isn't the mass-time relationship that affects Mercury's orbit, it's the gravitational effect of the mass equivalence of the Sun's gravity. Mercury is neither close enough to the Sun that the gravity well significantly affects time, nor moving fast enough for major relativistic effects.
That was a minor plot point in the first SF story I ever wrote. A ship that'd been used for years for proscpecting on Mercury was being reconditioned to go back to Earth, and a tech found the clock was behind by several seconds, but not drifting. As the timing of a number of events during and after launch are critical, he wanted to find out why before adjusting the time. Finally, after hours of testing, he asked a friend. The friend told him to check the ship's log, and it turned out that there'd been several leap seconds and the owner'd never corrected for them.
As for 'nobody uses a sextant' since we have good old GPS, tell that to the sailors not too many years ago who lost all nav equip and used hmm... a sextant.
Back in the early '70s when I was in the Navy, they were using Loran, mostly. When they used a sextant, they generally used the quartermaster's Omega watch because it was more accurate than either of the ship's two chronometers.
However, we still had to have the two chronometers, and the quartermasters had to make sure they were kept wound up. There'd have been big trouble, and a number of people including all the quartermastes would have been up on charges if either of them stopped because it ran down. That's because they had to be there to give a known accurate time for navigation if needed.
The author is, of course, responsible for correcting as many mistakes as possible. Part of the editor's job is to catch those that got past the author, and those that were missed because of ignorance. The author can consistantly misuse "their," "there" and "they're," but with a good editor, the audience will never know.
Yes, the authors made the mistakes. But it's still the editor's responsibility to catch them and correct them. We're all only human, and an occasional one slips by, but there shouldn't be that many. If there are enough that the reviewer thinks it worth mentioning, the editors didn't do their jobs properly.
STN: Identityf reads like a catalog of beginning-fiction-writer mistakes, from misspellings and homophones (from Chapter 5: "He called me a Windows administrator, and it wasn't a complement") to characters with no feelings or personality.
The beginning mistakes listed here, except for lack of characterization, could all have been fixed if the book had been run past a competant editor. Just using a spelling checker and (maybe) a grammer checker isn't enough. You need to make sure the words are the right words, and a computer just can't do that. Blame the publishers for that, not the authors.
I swear, the greatest myth is that the new generation is different from the last one. People have been complaining that children are only interested in "instant gratification" for hundreds of years.
"Why can't they be like we wer,e
Perfect in every way?
Yes, what's the matter with kids today?"
Bye, Bye Birdie probably said it best in an early '60s musical made into a great film in '63. Too many people still feel that way and, I'll admit, it's easy to do so. We all remember the good things we did as kids and forget (or maybe never realized) the things we did wrong and the ways we bugged our parents.
Yes, overgrown children in their twenties and thirties expect everything to happen right now. Thus, when we went into Afganastan, and later Iraq, they started calling our efforts a failure because we didn't obviously win in the first few days. Now, they're trying to make us think we've failed in Iraq because there are still some die-hard insurgents and foreign mercinaries giving trouble. They have no idea what it means to give something time to work; if there isn't clear success right from the start, they lose interest.
Yes, I know children are like that, I can remember how I felt and acted as a child. However, I'd learned better long before I was twenty, let alone thirty simply because almost anything you really wanted took time and you had to be patient. There's so much today that gives you that instant response that today's children have never had to learn patience and have no intention of trying.
Nothing that's worth doing doesn't have a risk of failure, possibly even a risk of life. Exploration of space is no exception. But we were lucky for so long that we forgot this. Now, the idea of astronauts taking a risk, or possibly dying during a flight is simply unacceptable to too many Americans. We have to accept the fact that people will die doing this, and that they willingly took that risk. Yes, we need to develop a better way to go to space than the shuttle, but we have to regard astronauts as specialized test pilots, not fragile figurines that must be protected at all costs.
What happened to Democrats being for free speech, free thought...
The Deomocrats believe you should be free to say what they want you to say and think what they want you to think. Of course, so are the Republicans, but right now they're not being quite so obvious about it.
In real life obviously there are going to be people wearing lenses or carrying metal objects so what gives???
Obviously. However, they were trying to avoid making the experience worse for the subjects than it needed to be. I'd suggest that you take a moment to think things through before posting, but of course, this is Slashdot.
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I think you have do what has to be done to end the war. Remember, people were estimating that an invasion of Japan would cost one million Allied casulties, and probably at least that many Japanese. Horrible though the two bombs were, they still cost less lives than an invasion would have.
That's exactly my point. Apple has, over the years, made a big deal about giving computers to schools, but it hasn't gotten them much except for some publicity.
You mean like Apple's been using to get Macs into classrooms and get kids hooked on using them instead of PCs?
I presume you're neither familiar with them nor their works.
Having the impact cause a tsunami could be reasoned out on its own; after all, 70% of the Earth's surface is water. However, the surfer would have been clear evidence of plagerism. I'm sure they both would have been glad to sign a release if asked before hand, so it's not like they were being a pair of dogs in the manger.
They might have, though. Neither of those two cases you mention had the tsunami caused by a strike from space, such as the Hammerfall. I think they let Escape From LA past only because the surfer didn't wipe out on the Berrington Plaza.
Jack Vance wrote a book about that in 1958, The Languages of Pao in which various parts of a planet's people were changed into great merchants, warriors, technicians and so on simply by being raised in a culture with a language designed to instill the appropriate mindsets. Not one of Vance's best, but still well worth reading.
I take it then, that you've never watched the original Flash Gordon serials, as I have. Dr. Zarkov had enough guts to build his space ship and launch it against an un-known force that was threatening to kill everybody on the Earth, and looked capable of doing it. He also had the sense to take along a "man of action," for those deeds of derring do that Zarkov himself wasn't capable of doing. Zarkov, Flash and Dale made a great team: brains and brawn, plus Dale as a highly-skilled lab assistant. (Ming respected her brain just as much as he wanted her body.) Not that there haven't been any number of cowardly scientists, mind you, but Zarkov doesn't fit the mold. He was quite willing to risk his life standing up to Ming, even if he wasn't the man to run around in close combat with the guards.
And when that movie about the asteroid came out, two major SF authors went to watch it. They'd already agreed that if there were a surfer on a tsunami, they were calling their lawyers. Now, for extra geek points, name the two authors and the reason to loose the dogs of lawsuit.
Strictly speaking, breasts aren't carburetors, they're fuel injectors.
It isn't the mass-time relationship that affects Mercury's orbit, it's the gravitational effect of the mass equivalence of the Sun's gravity. Mercury is neither close enough to the Sun that the gravity well significantly affects time, nor moving fast enough for major relativistic effects.
That was a minor plot point in the first SF story I ever wrote. A ship that'd been used for years for proscpecting on Mercury was being reconditioned to go back to Earth, and a tech found the clock was behind by several seconds, but not drifting. As the timing of a number of events during and after launch are critical, he wanted to find out why before adjusting the time. Finally, after hours of testing, he asked a friend. The friend told him to check the ship's log, and it turned out that there'd been several leap seconds and the owner'd never corrected for them.
Back in the early '70s when I was in the Navy, they were using Loran, mostly. When they used a sextant, they generally used the quartermaster's Omega watch because it was more accurate than either of the ship's two chronometers.
However, we still had to have the two chronometers, and the quartermasters had to make sure they were kept wound up. There'd have been big trouble, and a number of people including all the quartermastes would have been up on charges if either of them stopped because it ran down. That's because they had to be there to give a known accurate time for navigation if needed.
The author is, of course, responsible for correcting as many mistakes as possible. Part of the editor's job is to catch those that got past the author, and those that were missed because of ignorance. The author can consistantly misuse "their," "there" and "they're," but with a good editor, the audience will never know.
Yes, the authors made the mistakes. But it's still the editor's responsibility to catch them and correct them. We're all only human, and an occasional one slips by, but there shouldn't be that many. If there are enough that the reviewer thinks it worth mentioning, the editors didn't do their jobs properly.
The beginning mistakes listed here, except for lack of characterization, could all have been fixed if the book had been run past a competant editor. Just using a spelling checker and (maybe) a grammer checker isn't enough. You need to make sure the words are the right words, and a computer just can't do that. Blame the publishers for that, not the authors.
Windows Update doesn't work with Firefox in general because it disables ActiveX by default.
"Why can't they be like we wer,e
Perfect in every way?
Yes, what's the matter with kids today?"
Bye, Bye Birdie probably said it best in an early '60s musical made into a great film in '63. Too many people still feel that way and, I'll admit, it's easy to do so. We all remember the good things we did as kids and forget (or maybe never realized) the things we did wrong and the ways we bugged our parents.
Yes, I know children are like that, I can remember how I felt and acted as a child. However, I'd learned better long before I was twenty, let alone thirty simply because almost anything you really wanted took time and you had to be patient. There's so much today that gives you that instant response that today's children have never had to learn patience and have no intention of trying.
Nothing that's worth doing doesn't have a risk of failure, possibly even a risk of life. Exploration of space is no exception. But we were lucky for so long that we forgot this. Now, the idea of astronauts taking a risk, or possibly dying during a flight is simply unacceptable to too many Americans. We have to accept the fact that people will die doing this, and that they willingly took that risk. Yes, we need to develop a better way to go to space than the shuttle, but we have to regard astronauts as specialized test pilots, not fragile figurines that must be protected at all costs.
The Deomocrats believe you should be free to say what they want you to say and think what they want you to think. Of course, so are the Republicans, but right now they're not being quite so obvious about it.
They must be; the install CD will include a copy of Duke Nukem Forever.
I thought they were planning to have it run Duke Nukem Forever.
What OS is BlueGene going to use? Calvin Klein?
Obviously. However, they were trying to avoid making the experience worse for the subjects than it needed to be. I'd suggest that you take a moment to think things through before posting, but of course, this is Slashdot.