Out of the Silent Planet sure; it's an okay little homage to From The Earth To The Moon in its own way, and also interesting as a cultural artifact of the genre just a moment before the launch of the Space Age, which would forever alter the way such works would be written (as did also the atomic age). I can, in fact, recommend Silent Planet as obscure, forgotten sci-fi novel worth reading.
But Perelandra... well, it isn't really sci-fi or fantasy, except as a really thin veneer of that on top of some religious ruminations on matters such as: the creation of man, the Garden of Eden, the problem of Evil, and spiritual warfare. It is of some interest to the reader who is interested in Christian thought (either as a Christian or an outsider interested in how Christians think about things), but aside from some clever floating islands, its offerings to the genre of science fiction (or fantasy for that matter) are sorely limited. It has more in common with the likes of The Screwtape Letters than science fiction proper.
That Hideous Strength. It's obscure - obscure for a reason; it combines dystopian sci-fi with Christian allegory and British academic politics, so there's not a large natural audience. But it's culturally significant as one of George Orwell's inspirations for 1984, and Orwell himself thought reasonably well of it ("by the standards of books today", at least). It's also an interesting little moment before the atomic bomb but still within the realm of dystopian WWII-inspired science fiction.
Next, a government agency dedicated to monitoring body fat content for all employees of media companies. It will "create" 50,000 jobs in the federal bureaucracy. When an editor for the New York Times cheats on her diet, it will be a federal offense punishable by a fine of $50,000 or up to 5 years imprisonment. Lawsuits and lobbyists will fight over whether Twitter and Facebook qualify as a "media" company and thus whether said legislation applies to all users who have created an account on those services. The Department of Health and Human Services will decline a waiver for employees of organizations affiliated with religious groups who have religious dietary restrictions.
That's not really a terrible idea for a cash register. It seems like it would make things less error-prone, even for people who are good at counting cash. When they switched from manual price stickers to UPC barcodes, fat-finger errors in the "here let me type that price in" process became a thing of the past.
Of course, at the local Safeways, the cashier gives you back change in bills and an automatic device dispenses all the coins. This is faster than handling the coins. The self-checkout stands can dispense bills as well.
I trust Steam with my games... at least, I trust them to keep the games around longer on average than I can be trusted to keep the discs operational. There are also an operating-system lifetime issues, too.
It helps that Steam wrecking my games like this would totally demolish their primary business model (not so much with Sony).
The era of cheap gas has a few miles on it left, if the current Iran situation calms itself a little. Sure, $4 a gallon is higher than historical norms... but not by all that much, if you adjust for inflation (which is what really makes the current prices bad). Check it out. It may not be getting massively better, but there's still a long way to go before it's really panicking time for the average driver.
(Cutting back on extra trips? Sure. Looking for a more fuel-efficient car? Probably. Bicycles, high speed trains and mass transit takes over? Don't count on it, even if you like trains as much as I do.)
You should ask Japan how effective the "economic stimulus" from their earthquake/tsunami has been working out for them. Or ask Thailand about their floods. Or ask Florida about how much good old Hurricane Andrew pumped up their economy.
I mean, if your post were modded Funny instead of Insightful that would be one thing...
Maybe, but there are plenty of people who walk around working for TLAs all the time and not really trying to hide it. Perhaps they'd still like to encrypt their conversations?
Google and Facebook are more about renting your personal information - as in, here, let us send this ad to someone whose personal information matches your desired profile. No way they're going to sell their core business.:)
Look, the 1% are jerks, honestly - but if you want to use the 1% as tools to grow the economy, or even just to generate tax revenue, you have to understand that they are independent people with their own incentives. You can't just expect them to not care and do nothing when you tell them you're going to take their money.
The US tax on repatriating foreign profits is a great way to keep companies spending more of their money overseas and less in America - and, in case you don't know any recent college graduates who remain woefully unemployed, and haven't noticed - we really don't need that to be any harder than it already is.
(That said, the 80% figure cited above is too high, it's true.)
You leave out the role of WWII-era wage controls in the formation of the current system - when a maximum wage was capped at $N, a company could still compete for the best workers on health care and other related benefits.
You miss the obvious question of why do we have this nonsensical tax treatment for employer healthcare, let alone these ridiculous employer-oriented health-care coverage mandates?
What we should have done all along is to remove the special tax treatment, let individuals buy their own healthcare, and then have an meaningful honest debate about whether or not we want to be more or less socialist about directing federal funds towards covering people who still can't afford it.
Then you don't have to strong-arm anyone into doing anything (at least not any more than taxes in general), and exempt religious organizations remain exempt, and can do whatever the heck they want, in compliance with the likes of the First Amendment, the 1999 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and Hosanna-Tabor vs EEOC.
But no, this is really about waging the culture wars, pleasing the Planned Parenthood lobby and rubbing it in the face of the Catholic Church.
Yeah... and I don't know if I trust "billionaires", but I don't know if I trust City Hall a whole lot more, either. Especially when the existing teachers unions are making campaign contributions.
I've lived in San Francisco and visited for more than just "over Christmas" when traffic is reduced and ridership is depressed. Muni actually kind of sucks. Worlds ahead of the rest of the US, mind you, but pretty bad. Its reliability is legendary... legendarily bad.
It's not like it couldn't be better, but the government agency and the union are both pretty dysfunctional. You'd think that a bunch of professional tree-huggers who hate cars, like they purport to elect in these parts, would actually care about pulling off a decent transit system, but at the end of the day it seems they care more about talking the talk and sending more money to the transit union (who are, of course, highly involved in politics as well). And don't even get me started on the pissing contest of San Jose vs San Francisco, Caltrain/VTA vs BART, that's apparently been going on for decades.
In the olden days they called a strong adherence to "procedure" something else, at least in the public sphere - the rule of law. The great thing about that ideal is that the law applies to everyone, popular or unpopular, powerful or not. England's been under some measure of "the rule of law" since the signing of the Magna Carta, and even the King was at least partially subject. It can be a powerful force for justice, peace, and prosperity.
Which isn't to say that it's entirely perfect, but rather that before you go piss on it, you ought to spare a moment to understand and respect what it is and nuance your opinion instead of making snide remarks about those stupid British.
Programming is one field where you can say "screw their degree" and just ask someone to write little pieces of code and talk about system design with a toy problem, and then get a reasonably good sense of how competent they are. Essentially this is a simulation of the position they're going to be hired for. It's not perfect, of course, but it'll be worlds better than many other fields. And, of course, some programming questions can reveal more than others.
It seems like most of the things they're talking about with computer-automated simulations are only likely to be effective for grunt work, though. Myself, I'd rather work on software to run robots than software to test how robot-like people can be.:P
It occurred to me the other day that, while I have been programming and working with network monitoring tools and the like for a while, and I can get an email alert (or text message) whenever a piece of equipment goes down, the rest of the world doesn't have that sort of capability. A big chunk of of California Highway 1 could fall into the ocean, and people could fall off after it, and no one would notice until someone called it in. If my hard disk is on fire, I can get a message, but if the woods are on fire, you need to wait for someone to see the smoke.
Tiny Tower is in the class of games which I personally think of as "real-time impatience machines". There are a couple of iffy mechanics at work, but the most insidious is the dual-currency model. One currency (coins) you get by playing normally. The other (Towerbucks), which makes useful things happen faster, you only get occasionally or at random, but they can be bought with real money. So the point of the game is essentially to addict you and then make you impatient enough to spend real money.
I was riding Caltrain the week that the whole "we're clawing back your RSUs or you're fired" thing went down, and met some Zynga employees. The good news is that it didn't damage morale too much; the bad news is that it's because said employees had a rather mercenary holding-out-for-the-big-bucks attitude of "as long as it doesn't happen to me". Sounds like they were a perfect fit.
Chrome sacrifices operating-system paradigms to build Google's brand; you are meant to look at the shiny colors and think 'yay google! google google google.'.
Operating-system-style widgets and the like make sense for users, but Google makes Chrome for the benefit of Google first and users second.
While it is indeed laughable and sad that these unprepared devices were attached to the Internet, it is also worth highlighting that being detached from the Internet is not itself a pancaea. Stuxnet was able to damage Iranian uranium centrifuges without those centrifuges ever being attached to the Internet.
But yes, detaching them further is a very good plan.
Usually after the prototype the modern inventor will need to raise money to set up factories and production lines to make working devices. (Possibly outsourced, but they'll still want money up front.) This is the purpose of venture capital, IPOs, and the like.
From what I've heard, if you're doing geothermal power where you squirt water down into layers of rock, you're already going to have to deal with tons of obnoxious dissolved minerals all over the place. I'm not sure whether salt would make it much worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yeah. Everything's bigger in Taxes.
But Perelandra ... well, it isn't really sci-fi or fantasy, except as a really thin veneer of that on top of some religious ruminations on matters such as: the creation of man, the Garden of Eden, the problem of Evil, and spiritual warfare. It is of some interest to the reader who is interested in Christian thought (either as a Christian or an outsider interested in how Christians think about things), but aside from some clever floating islands, its offerings to the genre of science fiction (or fantasy for that matter) are sorely limited. It has more in common with the likes of The Screwtape Letters than science fiction proper.
That Hideous Strength. It's obscure - obscure for a reason; it combines dystopian sci-fi with Christian allegory and British academic politics, so there's not a large natural audience. But it's culturally significant as one of George Orwell's inspirations for 1984, and Orwell himself thought reasonably well of it ("by the standards of books today", at least). It's also an interesting little moment before the atomic bomb but still within the realm of dystopian WWII-inspired science fiction.
Next, a government agency dedicated to monitoring body fat content for all employees of media companies. It will "create" 50,000 jobs in the federal bureaucracy. When an editor for the New York Times cheats on her diet, it will be a federal offense punishable by a fine of $50,000 or up to 5 years imprisonment. Lawsuits and lobbyists will fight over whether Twitter and Facebook qualify as a "media" company and thus whether said legislation applies to all users who have created an account on those services. The Department of Health and Human Services will decline a waiver for employees of organizations affiliated with religious groups who have religious dietary restrictions.
Of course, at the local Safeways, the cashier gives you back change in bills and an automatic device dispenses all the coins. This is faster than handling the coins. The self-checkout stands can dispense bills as well.
It helps that Steam wrecking my games like this would totally demolish their primary business model (not so much with Sony).
(Cutting back on extra trips? Sure. Looking for a more fuel-efficient car? Probably. Bicycles, high speed trains and mass transit takes over? Don't count on it, even if you like trains as much as I do.)
You should ask Japan how effective the "economic stimulus" from their earthquake/tsunami has been working out for them. Or ask Thailand about their floods. Or ask Florida about how much good old Hurricane Andrew pumped up their economy.
I mean, if your post were modded Funny instead of Insightful that would be one thing...
Maybe, but there are plenty of people who walk around working for TLAs all the time and not really trying to hide it. Perhaps they'd still like to encrypt their conversations?
Google and Facebook are more about renting your personal information - as in, here, let us send this ad to someone whose personal information matches your desired profile. No way they're going to sell their core business. :)
The US tax on repatriating foreign profits is a great way to keep companies spending more of their money overseas and less in America - and, in case you don't know any recent college graduates who remain woefully unemployed, and haven't noticed - we really don't need that to be any harder than it already is.
(That said, the 80% figure cited above is too high, it's true.)
Thanks again, FDR!
You miss the obvious question of why do we have this nonsensical tax treatment for employer healthcare, let alone these ridiculous employer-oriented health-care coverage mandates? What we should have done all along is to remove the special tax treatment, let individuals buy their own healthcare, and then have an meaningful honest debate about whether or not we want to be more or less socialist about directing federal funds towards covering people who still can't afford it. Then you don't have to strong-arm anyone into doing anything (at least not any more than taxes in general), and exempt religious organizations remain exempt, and can do whatever the heck they want, in compliance with the likes of the First Amendment, the 1999 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and Hosanna-Tabor vs EEOC.
But no, this is really about waging the culture wars, pleasing the Planned Parenthood lobby and rubbing it in the face of the Catholic Church.
Yeah... and I don't know if I trust "billionaires", but I don't know if I trust City Hall a whole lot more, either. Especially when the existing teachers unions are making campaign contributions.
I've lived in San Francisco and visited for more than just "over Christmas" when traffic is reduced and ridership is depressed. Muni actually kind of sucks. Worlds ahead of the rest of the US, mind you, but pretty bad. Its reliability is legendary... legendarily bad.
It's not like it couldn't be better, but the government agency and the union are both pretty dysfunctional. You'd think that a bunch of professional tree-huggers who hate cars, like they purport to elect in these parts, would actually care about pulling off a decent transit system, but at the end of the day it seems they care more about talking the talk and sending more money to the transit union (who are, of course, highly involved in politics as well). And don't even get me started on the pissing contest of San Jose vs San Francisco, Caltrain/VTA vs BART, that's apparently been going on for decades.
In the olden days they called a strong adherence to "procedure" something else, at least in the public sphere - the rule of law. The great thing about that ideal is that the law applies to everyone, popular or unpopular, powerful or not. England's been under some measure of "the rule of law" since the signing of the Magna Carta, and even the King was at least partially subject. It can be a powerful force for justice, peace, and prosperity.
Which isn't to say that it's entirely perfect, but rather that before you go piss on it, you ought to spare a moment to understand and respect what it is and nuance your opinion instead of making snide remarks about those stupid British.
It seems like most of the things they're talking about with computer-automated simulations are only likely to be effective for grunt work, though. Myself, I'd rather work on software to run robots than software to test how robot-like people can be. :P
It occurred to me the other day that, while I have been programming and working with network monitoring tools and the like for a while, and I can get an email alert (or text message) whenever a piece of equipment goes down, the rest of the world doesn't have that sort of capability. A big chunk of of California Highway 1 could fall into the ocean, and people could fall off after it, and no one would notice until someone called it in. If my hard disk is on fire, I can get a message, but if the woods are on fire, you need to wait for someone to see the smoke.
Sensors and the like are pretty awesome to have.
I hate this game mechanic.
I was riding Caltrain the week that the whole "we're clawing back your RSUs or you're fired" thing went down, and met some Zynga employees. The good news is that it didn't damage morale too much; the bad news is that it's because said employees had a rather mercenary holding-out-for-the-big-bucks attitude of "as long as it doesn't happen to me". Sounds like they were a perfect fit.
Operating-system-style widgets and the like make sense for users, but Google makes Chrome for the benefit of Google first and users second.
But yes, detaching them further is a very good plan.
(oblig. "I'll probably get modded down for this.")
Usually after the prototype the modern inventor will need to raise money to set up factories and production lines to make working devices. (Possibly outsourced, but they'll still want money up front.) This is the purpose of venture capital, IPOs, and the like.
From what I've heard, if you're doing geothermal power where you squirt water down into layers of rock, you're already going to have to deal with tons of obnoxious dissolved minerals all over the place. I'm not sure whether salt would make it much worse.