The NASA/JPL page says that the planned closest orbit will be at an altitude of 375km (235 miles). (I'm not sure how that'll be measured from a somewhat irregular object like Ceres.) The orbit at 1470km will take 14 orbits to make 11 passes.
Does anyone have any idea of how many small objects might orbit Ceres and pose a threat to Dawn?
For all that I've hated Flash for years (for idiosyncratic reasons), and loathe Flash now (for all the usual reasons), there is a great deal of (old) content dependent on Flash. Will that content (like a Flash version of Portal) become inaccessible?
Archivists are probably dreading dealing with this.
State support of public colleges and universities has been declining for decades - developing a big endowment is the obvious thing for a state college or university to do if it can - which makes a (lucky) state college/university begin to look like a private one.
And then there are all the private (if non-profit) colleges and universities. Whether to develop fund management skills in-house or out-source them probably seems like a loose-loose proposition - except that they think they can apply legal talent to incompetent outside fund managers.
The real problem is that fund management is so lucrative (for the few fund managers who are lucky enough to have had a winning record - whether that reflects competence or not.) The real solution is to make fund management less lucrative by increasing the capital gains tax and possibly introducing a transaction tax. Fund management should be boring - not something for adrenaline junkies hooked on betting with other people's money.
So, instead of the Death Star being a moon-sized platform for a laser, it becomes a kind of delivery truck for antimatter mini-moons with a self-unloader (the laser.)
Cool
But these antimatter mini-moons take a tremendous amount of energy to produce. Given that the calculated power to blast apart an earth-like world is the output of a Sun-like star for several weeks - and even assuming that the efficiency of the production of antimatter from energy is likely to better than CERN's billion to one ratio of energy in to anti-matter out, we're still looking at ratios likely to be in the order of millions to thousands. That means the entire output of a sun-like star from 19 to 58,000 years or so for one weapon. And that's with an enormous amount of waste heat.
And that doesn't consider the size of the Galactic Federation or "The Rim" and whether the purpose of the Death Star is solely internal or if it is appropriate for use against external enemies as well. Which suggests that a "SWATting-like" strategy should be used against the Death Star as there can't be more than one or two of these anti-matter weapons available at any one time. It also suggests attacking the systems for producing these weapons might be a more appropriate Rebel strategy.
I took the time to skim the paper for the LEO detains that the Australian ITNews article skimmed over. The ITNews article was (sadly) a good summary - discussion of LEO satellites was limited to the altitude (160 to 2000 kilometers) and why LEO is better for signal strength than synchronous orbits. No mention at all about the inclination of the orbits (or even if polar orbits were considered). No consideration was given in the paper to existing uses of LEO (such as the Hubble Telescope or the ISS - but they'd probably be out-of-commission by the time anything remotely like this proposal was attempted.) No thought was given to what it would take to replenish the satellites in orbit (i.e.: how many launches per. year) or how small satellites would de-orbit at the end of their useful life or any consideration at all about satellites that had failed and needed to de-orbit.
A particular point I'd like to consider is that the authors didn't seem to give any consideration of the coverage the satellites would offer based on the inclination of the orbits. It appears that the authors assumed equatorial orbits - which would certainly exclude coverage of polar regions (including coverage of trans-arctic flights.) I'd be curious if any consideration was given of coverage north (or south) of 45 degrees - such as Canada, all of Scandinavia, most of Russia, and so on.
Even more - Ad Blockers don't "cost" publishers anything. They just deny publishers the use of broken business process technology. While accountants might like to treat this as a "cost", it's really nonsense.
However the continued use of "cost" in this way does reveal publishers to be whingy blood suckers whose protestations are of no merit.
Advertising is mostly noise in my environment, against which I develop coping strategies. Hidden within some advertising are threats (malware) which encourages me to adopt even more coping strategies.
Proving that there might be some unsolicited advertisements that I'd welcome is like proving a negative. That many websites I enjoy depend for funding on unsolicited advertisements - is understandable, in the same way that the Confederate Flag represents Southern Heritage is understandable.
My attention is my possession. It is not unethical to use ad blockers, and any advertisers or websites that cry out against the use of ad blockers are damn fools. What is more, my desktop/tablet/browser is a valuable resource to me, one that it is prudent for me to use carefully. Just as I don't leave them out in foul weather, or fling them around, so too will I take steps to prevent malware - and that includes using ad blockers.
I mostly enjoy the content I find on places like SlashDot, Wired, HuffPo, etc., but I have noticed that the more the owners try to "monetize" the content, the poorer quality the content is and the less appealing it is. While some might offer advertisement free content if I subscribe and pay - my cynical expectation is that I'll eventually end up with advertisements anyway, much like Cable TV was once offered as an advertisement-free venue yet became so congested with advertisements that I no longer subscribe. Having been burned by Cable TV, I see no reason to believe any promises that paid-for content will be advertisement free.
Swift depends on LLVM (and presumably linkers too.) LLVM depends on C++, gmake, etc. Those depend on C. Insofar as Swift depends on LLVM and doesn't do it's own code generation, it can hardly be considered to be self-hosting.
Yes.
I'd also wish hardware generated integer overflow exceptions as well.
But if someone who doesn't understand that math on computers involves finite math and claims to be a programmer, I don't know what to say other than he's an ambulance chasing code weasel.
May as well allow null pointer dereferences return 0. (Oh, yeah - the the old MIT Kerberos and X11 code assumed that and that's why the code base was crap for so long!)
My first programs were on a TI-59 programmable calculator. There's a limited amount you can do with a 7-segment (with decimal point) 10 digit display.
But the FIRST program I still recall fondly creating from that time was on that device - it used up all available memory for a 2-player (with a simple AI able to play either player) space-battle game with a refueling base. It was also the BEST and LAST game I ever wrote. (As you might imagine, I'm not a gamer nor do I write games.)
Games seem to be a gateway into programming - but from everything I understand about the games programming industry (from a college aged son interested in such), games programming is cut-throat and speculative. I wouldn't consider it a career suitable for supporting a family - or if you have no other means of support. (My parents were disabled by the time I was out of college.)
I don't see how a mileage tax can be applied to visitors (tourists) or transients (triple-bottom long haul truckers.) In fact, a state based mileage tax penalizes citizens who frequently cross state borders or otherwise drive frequently out-of-state.
I don't think I need to justify running an ad-blocker (and poisoning my home DNS) for any reasons other than the following:
Advertisements are known vectors for malware
Of course, I also find advertisements annoying - and the more aggressive the advertisement is about demanding my attention, the more annoying I find it. (Indeed, these Canvas Ads seem to be extremely annoying as they demand that I have to click/swipe on a page I wish to visit AGAIN - and the motion is at present sufficiently unfamiliar that I briefly struggle with it.)
I understand that many of the websites I enjoy are supported by advertising - and so by using ad-blocking techniques, I'm denying those sites whatever financial benefit there is of those (valid) advertisements being displayed (that I'll NEVER click on anyway.) But I satisfy myself with thoughts of schadenfreude - that advertisements are (like state lotteries) a tax on the stupid, gullible, poor, and desperate. (Yes, a rather mean spirited attitude, but that's schadenfreude.)
But basically, the whole internet advertising business is so shabbily done that blocking advertisements is only safe computing, like washing your hands after using the bathroom.
This is another way of saying that "everyone's responsible" (and therefore no-one's responsible.)
Insuring that a tool (app) suits a business process (and vice versa) can be a non-trivial process - but is one that the business itself is ultimately responsible for.
I wonder if 'C' encourages or has a culture of having more comments than some of the other languages.
And as other posters have hinted at when noting code that's trying to run in different environments, the environment C runs in (standard library, etc.) has varied longer (in time) and more (in versions) than the other languages mentioned. Seriously, is anyone writing new code for Ultrix anymore?
The USPS has been using automated systems of sorting mail for decades. It's why mail across town goes to a consolidated center (perhaps halfway across the state) first for sorting into carrier routes and has been for decades.
That Homeland Security want to capture this information - which has long been determined to accessible (the original pen-trace) isn't surprising at all.
And they only have to photograph/image the ones that the machines can't read. It's only surprising to people who drink the conservative kool-aide that government can't do anything right.
I've been playing around with my own (tunneled) IPv6 prefix at home for some time now. (I think Comcast will deliver IPv6 to me - but I haven't bothered yet.)
I run IPv6 on some of my home LANs, but not on the one I have with legacy equipment on it like webcams, TV sets, printers, and other "Internet of Things" like devices that never get patches. Those networks get the usual NAT'd IPv4 stuff.
On my IPv6 networks, I have EUI addressing turned off - a pseudo-random address gets generated from time to time (within the IPv6 LAN network prefix), and I often see those devices having multiple simultaneous IPv6 addresses. I believe that this is the default anyway for modern OSes.
And so I think that any counting of adoption by full 128-bit IPv6 addresses will dramatically over-count IPv6 adoption - even if NAT could be taken into account. Google's technicians will know this. Google's marketeers might not care.
Young people are already abandoning car ownership as a value in and of itself. This kind of lawyered-up intellectual property protection will only insure that innovation will be eliminated in the automobile market - and continue to discourage personal ownership of vehicles. The Trans Pacific Partnership will help spread this pernicious model across the world, so everyone will become sheeple together.
I understand the idea of ablation propulsion works - I just have no (intuitive) feel for it. I can't help but think that it amounts to burning off paint on one side of an object in order to provide reaction mass for pushing it the other way. Perhaps if the system could survey the space junk and was able to target within a millimeter or so at a range of 1000Km, it might be able to push the junk into a different orbit - but deorbiting seems very ambitious.
So, instead of fixing the horrible problem that California's (the West's - pretty much all of the US's) archaic system of legacy water rights has created, the solution is to do more of the same, except more expensively? Isn't one definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again, expecting things to change?
As for it being a fix for California's immediate drought problem - as I recall, the project he compares this to - the Alaska Oil Pipeline - took 20 years to survey, design, & build. Even if the political and legal environment could work it's way around the idea that this is extremely urgent and absolutely necessary, I don't see a water pipeline taking less than 10 years to build - 5 years at massive cost.
This is not exactly how I envisioned the ISS years and years ago - as a kind of space going pooper-scooper.
Unless the laser can cause the space junk to emit reaction mass - from the space junk, I don't see how heating it with a laser is going to be effective. It's space-junk, after all - and while we sort of know what we put up there (for certain values of "we") I doubt we know the characteristics well enough to blast the stuff from orbit well enough to avoid causing more problems.
Lastly, 3000 tons (metric or english) is a lot of mass to do this with over the anticipated remaining life of the ISS and the power available - but I'm just going by a gut feeling about the power budget of the ISS.
I'd never given much thought to the Hugo or Nebula awards, other than they seemed to be an attempt to promote Science Fiction writing beyond the Semi-Literate Boy's Comic Book Adventure model of writing. (I.e.: you could still write Boilerplate Boy's Adventures - as long as you used multi-syllable words.) However, the idea that they wouldn't be a festering nest of some kind of politics was ridiculous. That politics would be whatever the dominant clique would be.
That the outward expression of the politics has anything to do with the Culture Wars is somewhat startling. It's as if the people running the show think that now that Science Fiction has some kind of money earning power (at least occasionally) that the awards mean something more than advertising for fizzy sugar water that really is fizzy and sugary when you buy it at the store.
Personally, I've been finding it hard to take enjoyment in the genre as much as I used to. Of course, most Science Fiction doesn't age very well - technological developments and their consequence in real life too often rip apart the necessary suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy the other elements of the story. However, I'm also finding discomfort in some of the same sorts of issues (which I'd prefer to think of as moral or ethical rather than political) embedded in some stories (and favored by some authors) that I used to either overlook or had a different perspective on when I was younger. That kind of change is inevitable - a lot of the stories I enjoyed most when I was younger use the polemics of extreme positions in order to remark on (then) contemporary issues (and they did it very well.) But many of those issues have changed since then - some resolved, some partially resolved, and even a few that have become irrelevant. (Think of some of the perspectives on privacy and government intrusion expressed in works from the 1960s - they seem rather naive now in a world with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Stingrays, and the Patriot Act. If only we could go back to a Nixonian era of privacy!)
However, my own laments about maturity and the disappointments of aging aren't the issue here. That issue is the petty nature of the issues inflaming these awards. The issue here is that these cliques forget that the purpose of the Hugo and Nebula awards setting some lower bound to distinguish the illiterate hack writer from the literate hack writer. It's a damn low bar, but I'd rather it not be stirring up the mud in the pigpen.
Slashdot Mirror
The NASA/JPL page says that the planned closest orbit will be at an altitude of 375km (235 miles). (I'm not sure how that'll be measured from a somewhat irregular object like Ceres.) The orbit at 1470km will take 14 orbits to make 11 passes.
Does anyone have any idea of how many small objects might orbit Ceres and pose a threat to Dawn?
For all that I've hated Flash for years (for idiosyncratic reasons), and loathe Flash now (for all the usual reasons), there is a great deal of (old) content dependent on Flash. Will that content (like a Flash version of Portal) become inaccessible?
Archivists are probably dreading dealing with this.
State support of public colleges and universities has been declining for decades - developing a big endowment is the obvious thing for a state college or university to do if it can - which makes a (lucky) state college/university begin to look like a private one.
And then there are all the private (if non-profit) colleges and universities. Whether to develop fund management skills in-house or out-source them probably seems like a loose-loose proposition - except that they think they can apply legal talent to incompetent outside fund managers.
The real problem is that fund management is so lucrative (for the few fund managers who are lucky enough to have had a winning record - whether that reflects competence or not.) The real solution is to make fund management less lucrative by increasing the capital gains tax and possibly introducing a transaction tax. Fund management should be boring - not something for adrenaline junkies hooked on betting with other people's money.
So, instead of the Death Star being a moon-sized platform for a laser, it becomes a kind of delivery truck for antimatter mini-moons with a self-unloader (the laser.)
Cool
But these antimatter mini-moons take a tremendous amount of energy to produce. Given that the calculated power to blast apart an earth-like world is the output of a Sun-like star for several weeks - and even assuming that the efficiency of the production of antimatter from energy is likely to better than CERN's billion to one ratio of energy in to anti-matter out, we're still looking at ratios likely to be in the order of millions to thousands. That means the entire output of a sun-like star from 19 to 58,000 years or so for one weapon. And that's with an enormous amount of waste heat.
And that doesn't consider the size of the Galactic Federation or "The Rim" and whether the purpose of the Death Star is solely internal or if it is appropriate for use against external enemies as well. Which suggests that a "SWATting-like" strategy should be used against the Death Star as there can't be more than one or two of these anti-matter weapons available at any one time. It also suggests attacking the systems for producing these weapons might be a more appropriate Rebel strategy.
I took the time to skim the paper for the LEO detains that the Australian ITNews article skimmed over. The ITNews article was (sadly) a good summary - discussion of LEO satellites was limited to the altitude (160 to 2000 kilometers) and why LEO is better for signal strength than synchronous orbits. No mention at all about the inclination of the orbits (or even if polar orbits were considered). No consideration was given in the paper to existing uses of LEO (such as the Hubble Telescope or the ISS - but they'd probably be out-of-commission by the time anything remotely like this proposal was attempted.) No thought was given to what it would take to replenish the satellites in orbit (i.e.: how many launches per. year) or how small satellites would de-orbit at the end of their useful life or any consideration at all about satellites that had failed and needed to de-orbit.
A particular point I'd like to consider is that the authors didn't seem to give any consideration of the coverage the satellites would offer based on the inclination of the orbits. It appears that the authors assumed equatorial orbits - which would certainly exclude coverage of polar regions (including coverage of trans-arctic flights.) I'd be curious if any consideration was given of coverage north (or south) of 45 degrees - such as Canada, all of Scandinavia, most of Russia, and so on.
Even more - Ad Blockers don't "cost" publishers anything. They just deny publishers the use of broken business process technology. While accountants might like to treat this as a "cost", it's really nonsense.
However the continued use of "cost" in this way does reveal publishers to be whingy blood suckers whose protestations are of no merit.
Advertising is mostly noise in my environment, against which I develop coping strategies. Hidden within some advertising are threats (malware) which encourages me to adopt even more coping strategies.
Proving that there might be some unsolicited advertisements that I'd welcome is like proving a negative. That many websites I enjoy depend for funding on unsolicited advertisements - is understandable, in the same way that the Confederate Flag represents Southern Heritage is understandable.
My attention is my possession. It is not unethical to use ad blockers, and any advertisers or websites that cry out against the use of ad blockers are damn fools. What is more, my desktop/tablet/browser is a valuable resource to me, one that it is prudent for me to use carefully. Just as I don't leave them out in foul weather, or fling them around, so too will I take steps to prevent malware - and that includes using ad blockers.
I mostly enjoy the content I find on places like SlashDot, Wired, HuffPo, etc., but I have noticed that the more the owners try to "monetize" the content, the poorer quality the content is and the less appealing it is. While some might offer advertisement free content if I subscribe and pay - my cynical expectation is that I'll eventually end up with advertisements anyway, much like Cable TV was once offered as an advertisement-free venue yet became so congested with advertisements that I no longer subscribe. Having been burned by Cable TV, I see no reason to believe any promises that paid-for content will be advertisement free.
Secure Internet of Things is going to be like Safe Drunk Driving.
Why install Java on desktop systems anymore - unless you're forced to by some hideous commercial application you're stuck with?
(For that matter, why install Adobe Flash - unless you just have to watch every cat-video and fail-video there ever way.)
Swift depends on LLVM (and presumably linkers too.) LLVM depends on C++, gmake, etc. Those depend on C. Insofar as Swift depends on LLVM and doesn't do it's own code generation, it can hardly be considered to be self-hosting.
Yes.
I'd also wish hardware generated integer overflow exceptions as well.
But if someone who doesn't understand that math on computers involves finite math and claims to be a programmer, I don't know what to say other than he's an ambulance chasing code weasel.
May as well allow null pointer dereferences return 0. (Oh, yeah - the the old MIT Kerberos and X11 code assumed that and that's why the code base was crap for so long!)
My first programs were on a TI-59 programmable calculator. There's a limited amount you can do with a 7-segment (with decimal point) 10 digit display.
But the FIRST program I still recall fondly creating from that time was on that device - it used up all available memory for a 2-player (with a simple AI able to play either player) space-battle game with a refueling base. It was also the BEST and LAST game I ever wrote. (As you might imagine, I'm not a gamer nor do I write games.)
Games seem to be a gateway into programming - but from everything I understand about the games programming industry (from a college aged son interested in such), games programming is cut-throat and speculative. I wouldn't consider it a career suitable for supporting a family - or if you have no other means of support. (My parents were disabled by the time I was out of college.)
I don't see how a mileage tax can be applied to visitors (tourists) or transients (triple-bottom long haul truckers.) In fact, a state based mileage tax penalizes citizens who frequently cross state borders or otherwise drive frequently out-of-state.
I don't think I need to justify running an ad-blocker (and poisoning my home DNS) for any reasons other than the following:
Of course, I also find advertisements annoying - and the more aggressive the advertisement is about demanding my attention, the more annoying I find it. (Indeed, these Canvas Ads seem to be extremely annoying as they demand that I have to click/swipe on a page I wish to visit AGAIN - and the motion is at present sufficiently unfamiliar that I briefly struggle with it.)
I understand that many of the websites I enjoy are supported by advertising - and so by using ad-blocking techniques, I'm denying those sites whatever financial benefit there is of those (valid) advertisements being displayed (that I'll NEVER click on anyway.) But I satisfy myself with thoughts of schadenfreude - that advertisements are (like state lotteries) a tax on the stupid, gullible, poor, and desperate. (Yes, a rather mean spirited attitude, but that's schadenfreude.)
But basically, the whole internet advertising business is so shabbily done that blocking advertisements is only safe computing, like washing your hands after using the bathroom.
This is another way of saying that "everyone's responsible" (and therefore no-one's responsible.)
Insuring that a tool (app) suits a business process (and vice versa) can be a non-trivial process - but is one that the business itself is ultimately responsible for.
I wonder if 'C' encourages or has a culture of having more comments than some of the other languages.
And as other posters have hinted at when noting code that's trying to run in different environments, the environment C runs in (standard library, etc.) has varied longer (in time) and more (in versions) than the other languages mentioned. Seriously, is anyone writing new code for Ultrix anymore?
This really suggests that the Comcast/TWC merger had more to do with empire building (or expanding an effective monopoly) than good business.
Too often, mergers and acquisitions are driven by ego and result in an overall conglomerate that is less efficient.
The USPS has been using automated systems of sorting mail for decades. It's why mail across town goes to a consolidated center (perhaps halfway across the state) first for sorting into carrier routes and has been for decades.
That Homeland Security want to capture this information - which has long been determined to accessible (the original pen-trace) isn't surprising at all.
And they only have to photograph/image the ones that the machines can't read. It's only surprising to people who drink the conservative kool-aide that government can't do anything right.
I've been playing around with my own (tunneled) IPv6 prefix at home for some time now. (I think Comcast will deliver IPv6 to me - but I haven't bothered yet.)
I run IPv6 on some of my home LANs, but not on the one I have with legacy equipment on it like webcams, TV sets, printers, and other "Internet of Things" like devices that never get patches. Those networks get the usual NAT'd IPv4 stuff.
On my IPv6 networks, I have EUI addressing turned off - a pseudo-random address gets generated from time to time (within the IPv6 LAN network prefix), and I often see those devices having multiple simultaneous IPv6 addresses. I believe that this is the default anyway for modern OSes.
And so I think that any counting of adoption by full 128-bit IPv6 addresses will dramatically over-count IPv6 adoption - even if NAT could be taken into account. Google's technicians will know this. Google's marketeers might not care.
Young people are already abandoning car ownership as a value in and of itself. This kind of lawyered-up intellectual property protection will only insure that innovation will be eliminated in the automobile market - and continue to discourage personal ownership of vehicles. The Trans Pacific Partnership will help spread this pernicious model across the world, so everyone will become sheeple together.
I understand the idea of ablation propulsion works - I just have no (intuitive) feel for it. I can't help but think that it amounts to burning off paint on one side of an object in order to provide reaction mass for pushing it the other way. Perhaps if the system could survey the space junk and was able to target within a millimeter or so at a range of 1000Km, it might be able to push the junk into a different orbit - but deorbiting seems very ambitious.
So, instead of fixing the horrible problem that California's (the West's - pretty much all of the US's) archaic system of legacy water rights has created, the solution is to do more of the same, except more expensively? Isn't one definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again, expecting things to change?
As for it being a fix for California's immediate drought problem - as I recall, the project he compares this to - the Alaska Oil Pipeline - took 20 years to survey, design, & build. Even if the political and legal environment could work it's way around the idea that this is extremely urgent and absolutely necessary, I don't see a water pipeline taking less than 10 years to build - 5 years at massive cost.
This is not exactly how I envisioned the ISS years and years ago - as a kind of space going pooper-scooper.
Unless the laser can cause the space junk to emit reaction mass - from the space junk, I don't see how heating it with a laser is going to be effective. It's space-junk, after all - and while we sort of know what we put up there (for certain values of "we") I doubt we know the characteristics well enough to blast the stuff from orbit well enough to avoid causing more problems.
Lastly, 3000 tons (metric or english) is a lot of mass to do this with over the anticipated remaining life of the ISS and the power available - but I'm just going by a gut feeling about the power budget of the ISS.
Clearly, evolution in the Dutch population is anticipating a massive collapse of the dikes.
I'd never given much thought to the Hugo or Nebula awards, other than they seemed to be an attempt to promote Science Fiction writing beyond the Semi-Literate Boy's Comic Book Adventure model of writing. (I.e.: you could still write Boilerplate Boy's Adventures - as long as you used multi-syllable words.) However, the idea that they wouldn't be a festering nest of some kind of politics was ridiculous. That politics would be whatever the dominant clique would be.
That the outward expression of the politics has anything to do with the Culture Wars is somewhat startling. It's as if the people running the show think that now that Science Fiction has some kind of money earning power (at least occasionally) that the awards mean something more than advertising for fizzy sugar water that really is fizzy and sugary when you buy it at the store.
Personally, I've been finding it hard to take enjoyment in the genre as much as I used to. Of course, most Science Fiction doesn't age very well - technological developments and their consequence in real life too often rip apart the necessary suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy the other elements of the story. However, I'm also finding discomfort in some of the same sorts of issues (which I'd prefer to think of as moral or ethical rather than political) embedded in some stories (and favored by some authors) that I used to either overlook or had a different perspective on when I was younger. That kind of change is inevitable - a lot of the stories I enjoyed most when I was younger use the polemics of extreme positions in order to remark on (then) contemporary issues (and they did it very well.) But many of those issues have changed since then - some resolved, some partially resolved, and even a few that have become irrelevant. (Think of some of the perspectives on privacy and government intrusion expressed in works from the 1960s - they seem rather naive now in a world with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Stingrays, and the Patriot Act. If only we could go back to a Nixonian era of privacy!)
However, my own laments about maturity and the disappointments of aging aren't the issue here. That issue is the petty nature of the issues inflaming these awards. The issue here is that these cliques forget that the purpose of the Hugo and Nebula awards setting some lower bound to distinguish the illiterate hack writer from the literate hack writer. It's a damn low bar, but I'd rather it not be stirring up the mud in the pigpen.