Can I expect to see pickets of authors next time I go to a library?
I don't know about the US, but in the UK, Canada and Australia, authors get paid according to how frequently their books are withdrawn in libraries. The amount is pathetically small, but it's there.
I have my domain, cowlark.com, registered through Gandi. I'm in my second year with them and have had no problems whatsoever. They're cheap (12 euros a year), reliable (in my experience), easy to use (everything is done via web interfaces), they handle COM, ORG, NET (and INFO, BIZ and NAME if you feel so inclined), you own the domain, they do basic parking (5 email redirections and an HTTP redirection), and they do DNS hosting (withing limits; A, MX and CNAME records). There are no penalties for transferring to another registrar. And they speak French as well as English.
I read rec.arts.sf.composition. A lot. There are an awful lot of professional authors there, and whenever someone says, "I sent my manuscript to [publisher] and they accepted it. They sent me this great huge contract to sign. What do I do now?" there is only one reply.
GET AN AGENT.
Yes, the publisher will screw you if you sign that contract. That's because they don't seriously expect you to sign it; it's the first step in the negotiation process. If you get an agent, that agent will know all about this, and will get you a much fairer contract in practically no time. That's what the agent is for.
A good agent can get you a far better deal than you can. All professionals use agents. (Unless they're lawyers writing in their spare time... does happen.)
Americium decay doesn't power the smoke detector, it's part of the detection circuitry. It provides neutrons that are used in a sort of single purpose mass spectrometer.
It's even simpler than that, actually --- the alpha particles emitted by the americium ionise the air inside the detector cell, making it slightly conductive. When smoke enters the cell, the conductivity changes and the alarm goes off.
That's why you can stop smoke alarms by blowing at them --- you're blowing the smoke out of the detector cell.
The Domesday Disc (note spelling) was a double-sided videodisk that ran into a modified videodisk drive attached to a likewise modified BBC Master, a rather nice 6502-based microcomputer. The Master's video output went through the videodisk player. What happened was the client software told the player to display a particular frame, and the Master would overlay graphics on top of it. There was also a mechanism for reading raw data from the audio portion of the videodisk. It was really quite simple (but horribly expensive).
I would have thought that a conventional computer Laserdisk player would be able to get all the data off.
A few discs were made for the system, but the Domesday Disc was the only one that was mass produced. If you're interested, there's lots of information on the Domesday Project page.
Alas, they've got wise to us and it doesn't work any more.
And before people tell me I should register... well, I would, but it doesn't work. Some cookie interaction between their site and Galeon means it nevers notices that I've logged in. So the only way I can see their content is to hack round their login mechanism.
(Actually, there are five national BBC radio stations. Radio 5 is mostly sport-related.)
The BBC does do local radio, which is broadcast seperately. So to hear about the Scotland-Croatia match, you'd want to tune into Radio Scotland. Where I live it's Radio Berkshire.
All the stations are broadcast in FM and AM, in long-wave. The programming varies slightly (Radio 4 LW gets wall-to-wall cricket in the summer, which is annoying if you can't get FM and don't like cricket). The FM frequencies shift slightly as you move from one station to another, the LW frequencies are fixed nation-wide. LW is mono, of course.
Interestingly, we don't get the World Service in Britain, for some interesting legal reason. It's available on-line --- RealAudio, pah --- and Radio 4 turns into the World Service in the middle of the night when it would normally shuts down, but it's not normally available. Pity; it's quite interesting --- the news reports have a quite different point of view than on national radio.
BTW, Radio 4 is currently doing a series of science fiction radio plays. Last Thursday they did John Campbell's Who Goes There; this Thursday it's Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, featuring Harlan himself as the computer. Well worth a look, or a listen.
>Aggregate? Not Iridium, Gold, Plutonium,
>Scandium, or "rare earth" metals so expensive we
>haven't even heard of them? AGGREGATE? Rock?
Yup.
You see, you're thinking in terms of mining it and bringing it back to Earth. And yes, there will be a slow trickle of rare earth metals and other stuff.
But the real value is in mining stuff and not bringing it back down to Earth. You don't have to lift it out of Earth's steep gravity well. You use it in situ. For example, space habitats, outside the Van Allen belts, will need several metres of radiation shielding. You want to pay thousands of USD per kilo to lift ten thousand tonnes of rock off Earth? Are you mad? You use rock that's already there. Now, you're suddenly saving all that money, which is why space rock appears to be so valuable.
It's not how much money people will pay for it on Earth. It's how much money people will pay for it to be *in orbit*.
Yep. I have a 30-year old set of Meccano, and it's impossible to find any new trusses for it that will fit. (I have a set of trusses that *nearly* fit --- which is about as useful as having *nearly* all four wheels on your car.)
But damn, that Meccano was good. I had Lego as well, and the clockwork motors for both. The Lego motor was plastic and broke within six months. The Meccano motor was steel, sandwiched between two slabs of 1mm steel, had a forward/neutral/reverse integral gearbox, and was completely indestructible.
BTW, yes, the nuts tended to come loose on parts that vibrated a lot. Simple solution --- use locknuts. (Two nuts on each bolt.)
You forgot about the laser reflectors. At least one was placed on the moon by the Apollo programme; carefully shaped chunks of glass with corner-reflectors. You shine a laser at the moon, time how long it takes for the pulse to come back, and you can work out the distance to staggering accuracy. They're getting a little dusty by now, but as they require no power they're still working fine...
I program in MUMPS, a terse database/language written in the late sixties. It's a decent language, as far as that goes, but it also uses whitespace for blocking. I have seen more bugs due to stray spaces than misplaced braces (in C, Perl, etc). Plus, it makes it a pain in the ass when re-formatting huge blocks of code.
Remember the Golden Rule of Programming:
There is no language in which it is the least bit hard to write incorrect programs.
I use Python a lot. I use C a lot. As far as I'm concerned, the indentation issue is a non-starter --- you're going to indent your code *anyway*, otherwise you're not worthy of that paycheque. In C you have a bit of extra effort involved placing braces correctly. In Python you have a bit of extra effort involved getting the indentation right. When all's said and done, there's equal effort involved in each approach.
Remember: you cannot enforce good programming. You can only help. Python's pervasive dynamicity, data structures, class structures, module library all help good programming *far* more than the indentation style.
One reason why mammals have so few genes compared to, say, amphibians, is because we're better designed. Being warm-blooded, there's a controlled environment inside the body; so you only need enzymes that work for that environment.
Amphibians need enzymes that work in all temperatures from about ten centigrade up. And because each enzyme only works in a limited range of temperatures, they need lots of different enzymes to do the same task; and these all need encoding. Hence the very large sequences.
*THIS* type of vunerability is exactly one of the reasons that you should not be using HTML for email, particular with the email clients that use an embedded browser window to display the information. Because not only do you as a malicious email sender gain access to the bugs that arise from the email client itself (eg the ability to email everyone in the address book from a script), but bugs inherit from the browser.
I'm currently in the process of writing a mailer. (http://sqmail.sourceforge.net, if anyone's interested.) I'm including HTML rendering, because we use it at work, but I am determinedly *not* implementing Java, Javascript, image fetching, or indeed any kind of implicit networking by the HTML document.
I'm thinking about allowing cid: URLs to access images sent in the mail message itself, but can't seem to find any reference for these. It may be an Outlookism.
Oh, yes, and the mailer has no ability whatsoever to generate HTML messages. Plain text only.
You might be interested to know that Scrapheap Challenge, as it's known here, was produced by Channel 4. Channel 4 is a *commercial* channel. It's not publically funded and it has commercials.
Many years ago I worked out a simple way of preventing spam. AFAICT, it'll still work. It's dead simple:
Only allow one message to be sent per second, per client, by each mail server.
To individual users, this is no hardship. (My mailer takes longer than that just to do its housekeeping.) Mailing lists will, of course, need special treatment, but they should be on special mail servers anyway.
But this would be the kiss of death to spammers. Now they can only send 60 messages per minute, 3600 per hour! Now it'll take them just under two weeks of continuous connect time to send a million messages. It's now not worth the effort to do it.
The changes to the mail servers should be pretty simple, too. There'd be a bit of extra overhead, but not much. You'd have to keep track of who connected in the last second to prevent people connecting, sending one message, disconnecting, reconnecting, sending another message, etc.
Any ideas if there's anyone I could suggest this to to find out if it's actually workable? (Other than here?)
I bet you're using a serial mouse, right? Serial mice only sample at about 10Hz. This means they look dreadful. Try moving the mouse in small circles; on a serial mouse you'll only get about four pointer images on the entire circle.
If you switch to using a PS/2 or USB mouse, you'll be far, far better off. They sample at 25Hz or up (and I gather you can configure the rate, too). The first time you try one you'll be astounded at how smooth it is, and shortly after you'll never be able to use a serial mouse again without wincing.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about the US, but in the UK, Canada and Australia, authors get paid according to how frequently their books are withdrawn in libraries. The amount is pathetically small, but it's there.
I reckon they're well worth a look.
GET AN AGENT.
Yes, the publisher will screw you if you sign that contract. That's because they don't seriously expect you to sign it; it's the first step in the negotiation process. If you get an agent, that agent will know all about this, and will get you a much fairer contract in practically no time. That's what the agent is for.
A good agent can get you a far better deal than you can. All professionals use agents. (Unless they're lawyers writing in their spare time... does happen.)
GET AN AGENT.
(Disclaimer: IAmNotAnAuthorIJustPretendToBeOne.SeeALicensedProf essionalIfSymptomsPersist.)
It's even simpler than that, actually --- the alpha particles emitted by the americium ionise the air inside the detector cell, making it slightly conductive. When smoke enters the cell, the conductivity changes and the alarm goes off.
That's why you can stop smoke alarms by blowing at them --- you're blowing the smoke out of the detector cell.
The Domesday Disc (note spelling) was a double-sided videodisk that ran into a modified videodisk drive attached to a likewise modified BBC Master, a rather nice 6502-based microcomputer. The Master's video output went through the videodisk player. What happened was the client software told the player to display a particular frame, and the Master would overlay graphics on top of it. There was also a mechanism for reading raw data from the audio portion of the videodisk. It was really quite simple (but horribly expensive).
I would have thought that a conventional computer Laserdisk player would be able to get all the data off.
A few discs were made for the system, but the Domesday Disc was the only one that was mass produced. If you're interested, there's lots of information on the Domesday Project page.
And before people tell me I should register... well, I would, but it doesn't work. Some cookie interaction between their site and Galeon means it nevers notices that I've logged in. So the only way I can see their content is to hack round their login mechanism.
The BBC does do local radio, which is broadcast seperately. So to hear about the Scotland-Croatia match, you'd want to tune into Radio Scotland. Where I live it's Radio Berkshire.
All the stations are broadcast in FM and AM, in long-wave. The programming varies slightly (Radio 4 LW gets wall-to-wall cricket in the summer, which is annoying if you can't get FM and don't like cricket). The FM frequencies shift slightly as you move from one station to another, the LW frequencies are fixed nation-wide. LW is mono, of course.
Interestingly, we don't get the World Service in Britain, for some interesting legal reason. It's available on-line --- RealAudio, pah --- and Radio 4 turns into the World Service in the middle of the night when it would normally shuts down, but it's not normally available. Pity; it's quite interesting --- the news reports have a quite different point of view than on national radio.
BTW, Radio 4 is currently doing a series of science fiction radio plays. Last Thursday they did John Campbell's Who Goes There; this Thursday it's Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream , featuring Harlan himself as the computer. Well worth a look, or a listen.
You can implement Bruce Schneier's Solitaire using nothing but a deck of cards. High-grade encryption, no electronics required.
And if it comes to that, I can implement a totally unbreakable one-time pad using nothing but a coin, pencil and paper, and the ability to count.
>Aggregate? Not Iridium, Gold, Plutonium,
>Scandium, or "rare earth" metals so expensive we
>haven't even heard of them? AGGREGATE? Rock?
Yup.
You see, you're thinking in terms of mining it and bringing it back to Earth. And yes, there will be a slow trickle of rare earth metals and other stuff.
But the real value is in mining stuff and not bringing it back down to Earth. You don't have to lift it out of Earth's steep gravity well. You use it in situ. For example, space habitats, outside the Van Allen belts, will need several metres of radiation shielding. You want to pay thousands of USD per kilo to lift ten thousand tonnes of rock off Earth? Are you mad? You use rock that's already there. Now, you're suddenly saving all that money, which is why space rock appears to be so valuable.
It's not how much money people will pay for it on Earth. It's how much money people will pay for it to be *in orbit*.
Yep. I have a 30-year old set of Meccano, and it's impossible to find any new trusses for it that will fit. (I have a set of trusses that *nearly* fit --- which is about as useful as having *nearly* all four wheels on your car.)
But damn, that Meccano was good. I had Lego as well, and the clockwork motors for both. The Lego motor was plastic and broke within six months. The Meccano motor was steel, sandwiched between two slabs of 1mm steel, had a forward/neutral/reverse integral gearbox, and was completely indestructible.
BTW, yes, the nuts tended to come loose on parts that vibrated a lot. Simple solution --- use locknuts. (Two nuts on each bolt.)
No-one cries when you cut up a banjo.
If they hadn't burned their house down, then no one would have to sleep in the gym!
Hey, that's what you getting when the build's on fire.
You forgot about the laser reflectors. At least one was placed on the moon by the Apollo programme; carefully shaped chunks of glass with corner-reflectors. You shine a laser at the moon, time how long it takes for the pulse to come back, and you can work out the distance to staggering accuracy. They're getting a little dusty by now, but as they require no power they're still working fine...
Remember the Golden Rule of Programming:
There is no language in which it is the least bit hard to write incorrect programs.
I use Python a lot. I use C a lot. As far as I'm concerned, the indentation issue is a non-starter --- you're going to indent your code *anyway*, otherwise you're not worthy of that paycheque. In C you have a bit of extra effort involved placing braces correctly. In Python you have a bit of extra effort involved getting the indentation right. When all's said and done, there's equal effort involved in each approach.
Remember: you cannot enforce good programming. You can only help. Python's pervasive dynamicity, data structures, class structures, module library all help good programming *far* more than the indentation style.
http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/03/27/science/27QU AN.html
D'oh. It really helps if you reply to the right article, doesn't it? Moderators, please nuke...
Try http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/science/08SU PE.html. (Replace the `www' with `archive'. `Partners' doesn't work any more.)
One reason why mammals have so few genes compared to, say, amphibians, is because we're better designed. Being warm-blooded, there's a controlled environment inside the body; so you only need enzymes that work for that environment.
Amphibians need enzymes that work in all temperatures from about ten centigrade up. And because each enzyme only works in a limited range of temperatures, they need lots of different enzymes to do the same task; and these all need encoding. Hence the very large sequences.
Have you been to ATI's web site recently? If you use Mozilla, like I do, all you get is:
Internet Browser:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x or greater
Netscape Navigator 4.x
We currently we do not support Netscape Navigator 6.x
(unless you turn Javascript off, of course). Obviously they've decided that they don't care about selling to the people who use Mozilla.
I'm currently in the process of writing a mailer. (http://sqmail.sourceforge.net, if anyone's interested.) I'm including HTML rendering, because we use it at work, but I am determinedly *not* implementing Java, Javascript, image fetching, or indeed any kind of implicit networking by the HTML document.
I'm thinking about allowing cid: URLs to access images sent in the mail message itself, but can't seem to find any reference for these. It may be an Outlookism.
Oh, yes, and the mailer has no ability whatsoever to generate HTML messages. Plain text only.
>Go out there and try selling a soft drink in a wasp waisted bottle shape and
>see how long you last before Coca-Cola is serving you papers.
You mean like Virgin Cola? They seem to be doing all right.
And I was under the impression that the whole look-and-feel business was squashed years ago
when Apple tried to kill GEM.
Thomas Disch is also known as the man who perpetrated _The Brave Little Toaster_ (and its sequel, _The Brave Little Toaster Goes To Mars_).
Make of this what you will.
You might be interested to know that Scrapheap Challenge, as it's known here, was produced by Channel 4. Channel 4 is a *commercial* channel. It's not publically funded and it has commercials.
Many years ago I worked out a simple way of preventing spam. AFAICT, it'll still work. It's dead simple:
Only allow one message to be sent per second, per client, by each mail server.
To individual users, this is no hardship. (My mailer takes longer than that just to do its housekeeping.) Mailing lists will, of course, need special treatment, but they should be on special mail servers anyway.
But this would be the kiss of death to spammers. Now they can only send 60 messages per minute, 3600 per hour! Now it'll take them just under two weeks of continuous connect time to send a million messages. It's now not worth the effort to do it.
The changes to the mail servers should be pretty simple, too. There'd be a bit of extra overhead, but not much. You'd have to keep track of who connected in the last second to prevent people connecting, sending one message, disconnecting, reconnecting, sending another message, etc.
Any ideas if there's anyone I could suggest this to to find out if it's actually workable? (Other than here?)
I bet you're using a serial mouse, right? Serial mice only sample at about 10Hz. This means they look dreadful. Try moving the mouse in small circles; on a serial mouse you'll only get about four pointer images on the entire circle.
If you switch to using a PS/2 or USB mouse, you'll be far, far better off. They sample at 25Hz or up (and I gather you can configure the rate, too). The first time you try one you'll be astounded at how smooth it is, and shortly after you'll never be able to use a serial mouse again without wincing.