I think what makes great science fiction isn't the universe, it's the concept behind it.
Brilliant concepts are one of the things that makes me pick Cordwainer Smith's "Instrumentality of Mankind" as one of my favorite SF universes.
I'm also fond of time-travel stories, especially "parallel" and alternate timelines. Some favorites I haven't seen mentioned:
Michael McCollum's A Greater Infinity - An Everyman protagonist who is Destined For Greatness, and my favorite conception of Paratime, plus an epic war between the lines dominated by Cro-Magnons and those under Neanderthals.
Frederick Pohl's The Coming of the Quantum Cats - Dizzying interactions between at least four alternate realities, and a disturbing realization about the ramifications of the physics involved.
Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol" universe - Well thought out considerations of how changing the past could affect the future.
H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen - Detailed study of how one competent man can change things, and how difficult it can be to do so.
If it wasn't bad enough that he had to close down his site for lack of traffic and subscribers
Except for the fact that they intend to keep the site online despite it losing money. The last of the bimonthly Episodes will appear in August; after that, the plan is to continue adding background material, art, etc.
Wycliffe Bible Translators lists a number of computer-related opportunities at http://www.wycliffe.org/computer/home.htm
WBT works to make the Bible available to people in their native language. Doing this often includes setting up literacy programs, and sometimes even developing a written version of languages that only have an oral history.
I thought that I had burnt out, and dropped out of college about halfway through. I spent the next three years as a "migrant programmer", drifting from project to project that other people didn't want to do, usually because they were overqualified for the position. It wasn't until after I'd been fired from the third job for poor productivity that I was diagnosed with clinical depression, which in hindsight had started a year before I left school.
No longer enjoying things that you used to is one of the symptoms of depression. I strongly recommend a thorough medical exam to make sure it's not "just" burnout.
Shrapnel Games ( http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ ) is a small publisher that specializes in independent developers' products, and carries a number of award-winning strategy titles. Most of their games are TBS. My current favorite is Malfador Machinations' _Space Empires IV_, a 4X game with the design emphasis on customization by the player.
Comics, in particular, need almost no capital to produce.
If you only think about it in terms of the hardware and software to produce them, and the cost of Net access, it might not seem like much. No one ever seems to put any value on the artists' time and creativity in this type of discussion, though. People have no problem reimbursing people for doing jobs they don't want to do themselves, but they want things they can't do themselves for free.
Pre-emptive is usually more efficient in terms of time saved from having fewer crashes to recover from, IMO. You're right about the lack of protected memory on the Amiga, but my ancient Amiga 500 running AmigaOS 2.0 is still far more stable than this Win95 box.
"The Planck length is the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum effects dominate. This is the 'quantum of length', the smallest measurement of length with any meaning.
And roughly equal to 1.6 x 10^-35 m or about 10-20 times the size of a proton.
The Planck time is the time it would take a photon travelling at the speed of light to across a distance equal to the Planck length. This is the 'quantum of time', the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning, and is equal to 10^-43 seconds. No smaller division of time has any meaning. With in the framework of the laws of physics as we understand them today, we can say only that the universe came into existence when it already had an age of 10^-43 seconds."
I agree; cutting the strings tied to federal funding might be just the thing some libraries need. But there is the point someone else makes later in this thread; a library that can't afford the censorware can't afford to lose the meager funds they do get.
I have a crackpot theory about this one. Hypothesis: the incidence of mental illness in a society correlates with the density of the power grid. All the people who are afraid that high tension lines are a threat to physical health are missing the larger mental health problem. I haven't yet bothered to track down any statistics about number of cases of mental illness vs. degree of electrification. That would risk spoiling my theory with facts.:-)
Where do you live, that you can claim this? Here in Pennsylvania, school strikes are as much a part of autumn as falling leaves. The state government eventually put in a law that forces the teachers' unions to end walkouts so that a full school year can be completed before a certain date.
Of course, having all the IT people in the world get together, to force morality on the corportate world wouldn't work, but I'd be amused to see it tried. So, when do we plan to shut down every network and server in the US in protest?
As if the IT community has a monopoly on morality, or even a consensus of what's moral and ethical.
I seriously doubt they'll be able to avoid the impression that they've, as it was put, "stacked the deck".
They would have been accused of stacking the deck if they put anybody on the team who wasn't a convicted hacker. The media and most of the Slashdot community have already judged the government guilty; I'll be surprised if I see any objective reporting on this at all.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this bias in the article. C'mon, people, are any of you really naive enough to believe that the government wasn't going to require security clearances for any one they let look at their surveillance software?
...why people get so up in arms about collecting and selling consumer information? Who cares who knows your buying habits? My local grocery store, like many others, has a customer discount card which allows me to buy items at sale prices, in exchange for giving them tracking information of my purchases. I save a surprising amount of money, and get to fill their dataset with outriders from my peculiar shopping habits. Why do people get so upset over this?
Natural language is ambiguous way beyond peoples imagination, and if there's anything we don't need it is ambiguity in giving commands to a computer. NL doesn't _seem_ ambiguous because we are so good at disambiguating it (most of the time, anyway) using our own extensive knowledge base, about what is "reasonable". For a computer to have access to a similar knowledge base (simulating a brain, in short), is a pretty impossible task at this point in time.
Giving a computer access to such a knowledge base is the goal of Doug Lenat's Cyc Project:
Two of his points that I found hard to swallow: 21. The windows-menus-mouse "desktop" interface...forces users to choose icons for the desktop when the system could choose them better itself... I cannot believe any system could judge what is a "better" icon for something. This would require an intelligent AI agent that could be programmed with the user's own aesthetic sense and tastes, and predict what image the user would most likely free-associate to the item in question. 35. Computers make alphabetical order obsolete. I imagine he didn't expand on this any further because he couldn't defend it. Alphabetical order is a perfectly convenient tool for categorizing things. A trivial example: In the old empire-building game Master of Orion, I routinely name new colonies alphabetically as I establish them. This lets me quickly find the youngest colonies when allocating resources to build them up, and remember which worlds I've already looked at when I'm doing serious micromanagement.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what makes great science fiction isn't the universe, it's the concept behind it.
Brilliant concepts are one of the things that makes me pick Cordwainer Smith's "Instrumentality of Mankind" as one of my favorite SF universes.
I'm also fond of time-travel stories, especially "parallel" and alternate timelines. Some favorites I haven't seen mentioned:
Michael McCollum's A Greater Infinity - An Everyman protagonist who is Destined For Greatness, and my favorite conception of Paratime, plus an epic war between the lines dominated by Cro-Magnons and those under Neanderthals.
Frederick Pohl's The Coming of the Quantum Cats - Dizzying interactions between at least four alternate realities, and a disturbing realization about the ramifications of the physics involved.
Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol" universe - Well thought out considerations of how changing the past could affect the future.
H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen - Detailed study of how one competent man can change things, and how difficult it can be to do so.
That is a paradox of a Google log: it does not capture social phenomena per se, but merely the shadows they cast across the Internet.
Wow. Google has implemented Plato's Cave.
http://www.vrc.iastate.edu/why.html
If it wasn't bad enough that he had to close down his site for lack of traffic and subscribers Except for the fact that they intend to keep the site online despite it losing money. The last of the bimonthly Episodes will appear in August; after that, the plan is to continue adding background material, art, etc.
Wycliffe Bible Translators lists a number of computer-related opportunities at http://www.wycliffe.org/computer/home.htm
WBT works to make the Bible available to people in their native language. Doing this often includes setting up literacy programs, and sometimes even developing a written version of languages that only have an oral history.
I thought that I had burnt out, and dropped out of college about halfway through. I spent the next three years as a "migrant programmer", drifting from project to project that other people didn't want to do, usually because they were overqualified for the position. It wasn't until after I'd been fired from the third job for poor productivity that I was diagnosed with clinical depression, which in hindsight had started a year before I left school.
No longer enjoying things that you used to is one of the symptoms of depression. I strongly recommend a thorough medical exam to make sure it's not "just" burnout.
Shrapnel Games ( http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ ) is a small publisher that specializes in independent developers' products, and carries a number of award-winning strategy titles. Most of their games are TBS. My current favorite is Malfador Machinations' _Space Empires IV_, a 4X game with the design emphasis on customization by the player.
Comics, in particular, need almost no capital to produce.
If you only think about it in terms of the hardware and software to produce them, and the cost of Net access, it might not seem like much. No one ever seems to put any value on the artists' time and creativity in this type of discussion, though. People have no problem reimbursing people for doing jobs they don't want to do themselves, but they want things they can't do themselves for free.
Pre-emptive is usually more efficient in terms of time saved from having fewer crashes to recover from, IMO. You're right about the lack of protected memory on the Amiga, but my ancient Amiga 500 running AmigaOS 2.0 is still far more stable than this Win95 box.
It's been too many years since I read the books, but I had the impression that the whites of the eyes turned blue as well, not just the irises.
Does anyone know if time is similiary quantized?
Quoted from:
http://www.physlink.com/ae281.cfm
"The Planck length is the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum effects dominate. This is the 'quantum of length', the smallest measurement of length with any meaning.
And roughly equal to 1.6 x 10^-35 m or about 10-20 times the size of a proton.
The Planck time is the time it would take a photon travelling at the speed of light to across a distance equal to the Planck length. This is the 'quantum of time', the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning, and is equal to 10^-43 seconds. No smaller division of time has any meaning. With in the framework of the laws of physics as we understand them today, we can say only that the universe came into existence when it already had an age of 10^-43 seconds."
I agree; cutting the strings tied to federal funding might be just the thing some libraries need. But there is the point someone else makes later in this thread; a library that can't afford the censorware can't afford to lose the meager funds they do get.
I have a crackpot theory about this one. Hypothesis: the incidence of mental illness in a society correlates with the density of the power grid. All the people who are afraid that high tension lines are a threat to physical health are missing the larger mental health problem. I haven't yet bothered to track down any statistics about number of cases of mental illness vs. degree of electrification. That would risk spoiling my theory with facts. :-)
Video/computer games are notorious for their gratuitous violence and lots of blood and gore, along with the fact that the primary users are children.
The fact is that the vast majority of computer gamers are adults. The myth that this is a youth market is part of the problem.
Where do you live, that you can claim this? Here in Pennsylvania, school strikes are as much a part of autumn as falling leaves. The state government eventually put in a law that forces the teachers' unions to end walkouts so that a full school year can be completed before a certain date.
It corresponds to the demographics of the most crime prone age group. I expect that it's going to go up again as this group grows.
That's a parody of the gospel tune "Put Your Hand in the Hand".
Of course, having all the IT people in the world get together, to force morality on the corportate world wouldn't work, but I'd be amused to see it tried. So, when do we plan to shut down every network and server in the US in protest?
As if the IT community has a monopoly on morality, or even a consensus of what's moral and ethical.
I seriously doubt they'll be able to avoid the impression that they've, as it was put, "stacked the deck".
They would have been accused of stacking the deck if they put anybody on the team who wasn't a convicted hacker. The media and most of the Slashdot community have already judged the government guilty; I'll be surprised if I see any objective reporting on this at all.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this bias in the article. C'mon, people, are any of you really naive enough to believe that the government wasn't going to require security clearances for any one they let look at their surveillance software?
...why people get so up in arms about collecting and selling consumer information? Who cares who knows your buying habits? My local grocery store, like many others, has a customer discount card which allows me to buy items at sale prices, in exchange for giving them tracking information of my purchases. I save a surprising amount of money, and get to fill their dataset with outriders from my peculiar shopping habits. Why do people get so upset over this?
Natural language is ambiguous way beyond peoples imagination, and if there's anything we don't need it is ambiguity in giving commands to a computer. NL doesn't _seem_ ambiguous because we are so good at disambiguating it (most of the time, anyway) using our own extensive knowledge base, about what is "reasonable". For a computer to have access to a similar knowledge base (simulating a brain, in short), is a pretty impossible task at this point in time.
Giving a computer access to such a knowledge base is the goal of Doug Lenat's Cyc Project:
http://www.cyc.com/index.html
Lawyers ain't cheap. Seems like darned expensive advertising to me.
Two of his points that I found hard to swallow:
21. The windows-menus-mouse "desktop" interface...forces users to choose icons for the desktop when the system could choose them better itself...
I cannot believe any system could judge what is a "better" icon for something. This would require an intelligent AI agent that could be programmed with the user's own aesthetic sense and tastes, and predict what image the user would most likely free-associate to the item in question.
35. Computers make alphabetical order obsolete.
I imagine he didn't expand on this any further because he couldn't defend it. Alphabetical order is a perfectly convenient tool for categorizing things. A trivial example: In the old empire-building game Master of Orion, I routinely name new colonies alphabetically as I establish them. This lets me quickly find the youngest colonies when allocating resources to build them up, and remember which worlds I've already looked at when I'm doing serious micromanagement.
If you're interested, Steve Jackson Games ( http://www.sjgames.com ) sells a GURPS Discworld worldbook for their tabletop RPG.