They still make Agent Orange, and it's still primarily used as herbicide in modern farming. The original toxic compound was a mistake caused by poor controls in manufacturing of a component of Agent Orange.
This is a good thing. The farmer should buy real soy bean seeds and plant those. They're whining because they can't soak your soy beans in a constant stream of Monsanto pesticides.
The normal pesticide is actually Agent Orange, but manufactured correctly. It's a blend of Round-Up and something else (2-D-4-methylsomething or some such); Agent Orange was this blend, but we've been assured that it was so toxic because the manufacturing process produces certain other toxic chemicals that must be controlled, and the control was botched in that particular instance. That's been fixed.
Rather than tilling the land and weeding properly, farmers will buy Monsanto stuff that kills their crops, mixed with other stuff that kills grass but NOT their crops, and cover their crops in it. They'll get Monsanto seeds that won't be killed by the pesticides, and thus not have to worry about it killing their crops. "Organic" doesn't mean much, but organic farming and non-GMO crops can't be flooded with these particular herbicidal chemicals. They can still use Pyrithren pesticides, but not with PBO and certainly not Permethrin.
Global warming is an arab plot. All those sand-bound camel-jockeys live in the desert where it's 150 degrees and they don't have AC. When the earth melts off the face of the planet, they'll inherit what's left easily. Europeans are so soft and gushy.
Politicians only work for PR and will only take steps to address PR. If the release of gaseous nitric acid was slowly killing us but everyone was screaming about CO2, the politicians would take steps to deal with harmless CO2. Useless steps like shifting production from one fossil fuel to a different fossil fuel, claiming it's "greener" and "cheaper", and then taking credit for the expanded economy that results from cheap energy availability and greater output of CO2 and toxic gasses by way of burning more shit to produce more energy. It's an art form, making things worse while getting praise for making them better.
You can buy a DVR device. Every DVR is not Tivo. Stupid slashdotters with their "what the hell is MythTV or XBMC?" But now you can't HDMI in on those, so you need to spend $300 one time on a hardware device that prohibits copying out.
Plants take an amazing amount of energy to make. They require constant solar input and ground water to convert Carbon (from CO2, waste product O2) and Water (H2O) into sugars (CH2O) arranged as structure (cellulose), readily-available energy (simple sugars), and long-term storage (starches, i.e. potato). Initially a plant starts out as a seed containing a bunch of basic materials plus a bulk mass of energy (starch). Barley for example contains bulk mass starch and amylase; when wet, the amylase reacts with the starch to produce maltose, which provides the energy fuel to produce a plant capable of collecting a small amount of energy from sunlight. The plant then expends most of its resources manufacturing structure to grow and collect more energy. After it's grown enough, it expends a large amount of its own energy to produce seeds.
Plants cannot provide energy required for locomotion; some can produce tension by slow processes, such as by osmotic pressure or by generating chemicals and structures that respond to the chemicals to give one fast-twitch that takes up of 24 hours to reset (if they can ever reset--lots of one-shotters out there). Some plants are also under energy pressure due to predators stealing the structural and energy resources the plant has produced.
Plants primarily move by producing small seeds with little enough mass to float on the wind. This means the entire construction process must begin again to move one plant from one place to another--a maple seed must float on the wind several miles, then grow an entire tree. Plants accomplish this growth using only local resources, because they are expending all of their energy growing rather than driving trucks. The majority resources are water and air--redwoods are comprised of dense plant cellulose fiber, which is constructed by using carbon from CO2 and hydrogen and oxygen from H2O. All other components of plants are trace, comprising very little percentage of the mass, derived from the environment as well.
Solar panels are solid sheets of refined glass and other compounds. No energy is wasted constructing a massive redwood body to act as a substrate for a few sheets; instead, energy is wasted constructing solid silicon-based substrate at high concentrations. A plant attempting to achieve these high concentrations would require millions of years and an ungodly amount of energy expenditure.
Plants expend a lot of energy to use a lot of space to produce very little usable energy.
It came from that animals eat plants and get big and strong and they only retain 10% of the energy, so plants must be fucking awesome. The planet isn't covered with animal bodies, though; it's a giant mass of plant coverage, right down to algae in the sea. Plants are a collection grid for mobile harvesters.
Came to say this. 35% is hilariously lol though, the best solar cells are like 19%. The best plants are 10%-12% but those are VERY specialized and at peak (they need a lot of direct sun to hit 12%); 2% is the normal baseline, anything above that is very specialized.
You want 30%, use a polished metal parabolic reflector dish and a sterling engine.
Yes I love how my $40 cable bill has become a $10 Netflix "but we don't have not-popular series for you to stream", and then Amazon Streaming Video "And you can buy each episode in the season for $2, so if you want to watch a month's worth of TV it's like $8 per show you watch since there's 4 weeks at $2." Now instead of having a constant stream of everything, I can pick the five series I want to watch and pay the same amount.
Perfect if you have a wife or kids, too, since now with two people in the house they'll probably have 3-4 series each they like to watch, which you can pay $2 per episode for. That's great, because then you can spend $48 for shit you want instead of $40 for basic cable. Of course your kids will want Teletubbies and Barney and Dora the Sexually Abused Mexican who Ran Away From Her Pervert Father and Now Lives In The Wilderness With No Parental Observation (how is a six year old girl going all over the damn world without her parents!?), so another $24 a month. $72 is better.
Or you could just get cable. With SyFy shit, and TNT, and Fox for $10 each instead of the ludicrous $16 to have Futurama AND Family Guy (seriously, $10 for JUST FOX, with Futurama, Family Guy, American Dad, the works!). Oh and your wife will want Soap and Lifetime, and your kids want Cartoon Network and Disney. And you know, most Slashdorks want the History Channel for whatever godforsaken reason, and Discovery because they're painsluts. So yeah, $90 for not only greater personalization, but also access to a wider array of stuff for cheaper (yeah not paying $16/mo to have Futurama and Family Guy when I could pay $10 to have a channel with both and a bunch of other cool shit).
Definitely a good opportunity. I don't have TV service now and I'm looking forward to this passing.
I've read a lot of decent self-published stories, but I'm good at sniping them. Some of them are iffy, some are trash. Nassise's series "The Heretic" was fucking excellent, and then it was published in paperback.
Donaldson experiments with styles and concepts a LOT. He's a very good writer, consistently, but very capable of taking that in a direction you don't like. Just being a good writer isn't enough to get an audience; a story won't necessarily interest you just because it's well written, has a good plot and implementation, and is in a genre you like. It's very easy for things to take a direction you don't like.
I liked the Thomas Covenant books, I considered them "light reading." I gave one to a well-read coworker and his eyes glazed over. The nice thing about those books, though, is the literary mechanism: it's completely novel. Donaldson writes the same fucking plot over and over again, very flat, with little variation. It's extremely direct and linear. What keeps it interesting is progression: Every round, something changes. Yes, the Big Bad is immortal and cannot be ended. Yes it's always him. But this time, it's really him and not an underling. This time, you've broken the Law of Death and now the threats are completely different. This time, other natural Laws are no longer in effect and the stuff that can happen and does happen is now new, and that's being abused again. And so on. The same story, told over and over, just gets more and more deep and epic every time, while we're still back here doing the SAME. FUCKING. THING.
The Gap Cycle is one long epic. It's sci-fi, the style of writing is MUCH different--it's always narrated by the character of focus, which changes around between chapters. Attitude and personality is expressed. It's also very complex--there are multiple things going on and they mirror each other. There is shit going on on Earth, and shit going on on the other side of the fucking galaxy, and these things both impact each other. The first book is a pile of fluffy junk, dark and brutal, that tells the same story over and over again in increasing detail--the first paragraph tells the entire story. Aptly titled, "The Real Story," he repeatedly shows that what happened here is NOT the real story, and shows what people didn't see, what you didn't see, what nobody saw. The rest of the story follows a completely different direction, and just becomes one huge, massive, ungodly epic that I've never seen anything else stand up to.
Mordant's need? Interesting. Slow and boring. I liked it, but it's a very different story from these, a different style. The Gap Cycle actually somewhat repeats Mordant's Need--but there's more exposure. In Mordant's Need we get a story about a girl and about a kingdom, eventually finding out what's going on with the people in the east and west at a glance, and then finding out what the bad guys were up to at the end, and killing them. In The Gap Cycle, we get a story about EVERYTHING. The only thing not explored is the Amnion, and that's done mostly because the story is driven by not knowing (and it's heavily implied you wouldn't find it interesting anyway. You'll see what I mean). But I don't consider Mordant's Need to be the first, failed attempt at writing something like The Gap Cycle; I consider it a different direction. A singly-focused epic is a very valid, known writing style.
Yes, basically. They said, "... we did this.... No no we didn't, humanity as a whole can't be like that, THIS BOY WAS THE MONSTER! He made the decision, on his own, to kill them all!" He was manipulated into it by people who wanted him to pull the trigger, but didn't want to be responsible for pulling the trigger themselves; then they tried to wash their hands of the whole thing. The whole of humanity wanted to exterminate that entire alien species, and now they've gone and tried to absolve themselves.
Ender's Game is written like shit. If you want engaging writing, read The Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson--you can't make it film because yeah, you'd lose the amazing writing. It would make a great film, but the whole "The book was better" thing is just elitist bullshit...except with The Gap Cycle, where holy shit the writing is god damn amazing.
I particularly enjoy Sanderson's writing as well, but it's not on that level. It flows great, it's great to read, but it's not striking. You could adapt Sanderson to film, but they'd cut a lot of shit out because it would otherwise be a whole lot of HUGE film that nobody wants to pay to produce (this is why the book is often considered "better"--more "complete", but really the adaptation isn't always without merit or technically not as good, and the acting and pacing can tell the story just as well if not better than in book form).
It's written at a third grade reading level. Orson Scott Card actually posted a huge review of his own book on Ender's Game where he explains that the level of competence of writing is unimportant; it's the story that matters. This is in direct conflict with his books about HOW to write, where he insists that being a writer is hard because you have to take on story writing and storytelling--story writing being the whole "I have unique and entertaining ideas" bit, and storytelling being "my book has to not sound like trash originally written in crayon by a six year old."
It's the result of seeing something; going, "Hey, that's neat, and I have no fucking clue why it works"; and then deciding that a part of it you don't understand is expensive and accomplishing the same sort of thing as another thing you know about that's cheap, and so you should do it that way. It's what you get when you don't employ expert judgment, and instead make decisions based on the analysis of completely unqualified non-technicians.
No, it takes years of practice and skill and some talent. It doesn't take expensive software; people used to do that shit without even using a computer.
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They still make Agent Orange, and it's still primarily used as herbicide in modern farming. The original toxic compound was a mistake caused by poor controls in manufacturing of a component of Agent Orange.
He should counter-sue that their seeds polluted his crop. Write his farm up as "organic" or "non-GMO".
Theory. Singular. There is one conspiracy run from a group of powerful individuals dating back to Ancient Egypt.
This is a good thing. The farmer should buy real soy bean seeds and plant those. They're whining because they can't soak your soy beans in a constant stream of Monsanto pesticides.
The normal pesticide is actually Agent Orange, but manufactured correctly. It's a blend of Round-Up and something else (2-D-4-methylsomething or some such); Agent Orange was this blend, but we've been assured that it was so toxic because the manufacturing process produces certain other toxic chemicals that must be controlled, and the control was botched in that particular instance. That's been fixed.
Rather than tilling the land and weeding properly, farmers will buy Monsanto stuff that kills their crops, mixed with other stuff that kills grass but NOT their crops, and cover their crops in it. They'll get Monsanto seeds that won't be killed by the pesticides, and thus not have to worry about it killing their crops. "Organic" doesn't mean much, but organic farming and non-GMO crops can't be flooded with these particular herbicidal chemicals. They can still use Pyrithren pesticides, but not with PBO and certainly not Permethrin.
Global warming is an arab plot. All those sand-bound camel-jockeys live in the desert where it's 150 degrees and they don't have AC. When the earth melts off the face of the planet, they'll inherit what's left easily. Europeans are so soft and gushy.
CO2 levels were up to 400ppm about 800 years ago. They've since dropped, but are now up again. Not exactly thousands of years.
Politicians only work for PR and will only take steps to address PR. If the release of gaseous nitric acid was slowly killing us but everyone was screaming about CO2, the politicians would take steps to deal with harmless CO2. Useless steps like shifting production from one fossil fuel to a different fossil fuel, claiming it's "greener" and "cheaper", and then taking credit for the expanded economy that results from cheap energy availability and greater output of CO2 and toxic gasses by way of burning more shit to produce more energy. It's an art form, making things worse while getting praise for making them better.
You can buy a DVR device. Every DVR is not Tivo. Stupid slashdotters with their "what the hell is MythTV or XBMC?" But now you can't HDMI in on those, so you need to spend $300 one time on a hardware device that prohibits copying out.
Yeah we do not need any research into other energy forms. We have all we need.
It's kind of like doing research into the energy generation potential of pederasty via thermal generation from friction.
Plants take an amazing amount of energy to make. They require constant solar input and ground water to convert Carbon (from CO2, waste product O2) and Water (H2O) into sugars (CH2O) arranged as structure (cellulose), readily-available energy (simple sugars), and long-term storage (starches, i.e. potato). Initially a plant starts out as a seed containing a bunch of basic materials plus a bulk mass of energy (starch). Barley for example contains bulk mass starch and amylase; when wet, the amylase reacts with the starch to produce maltose, which provides the energy fuel to produce a plant capable of collecting a small amount of energy from sunlight. The plant then expends most of its resources manufacturing structure to grow and collect more energy. After it's grown enough, it expends a large amount of its own energy to produce seeds.
Plants cannot provide energy required for locomotion; some can produce tension by slow processes, such as by osmotic pressure or by generating chemicals and structures that respond to the chemicals to give one fast-twitch that takes up of 24 hours to reset (if they can ever reset--lots of one-shotters out there). Some plants are also under energy pressure due to predators stealing the structural and energy resources the plant has produced.
Plants primarily move by producing small seeds with little enough mass to float on the wind. This means the entire construction process must begin again to move one plant from one place to another--a maple seed must float on the wind several miles, then grow an entire tree. Plants accomplish this growth using only local resources, because they are expending all of their energy growing rather than driving trucks. The majority resources are water and air--redwoods are comprised of dense plant cellulose fiber, which is constructed by using carbon from CO2 and hydrogen and oxygen from H2O. All other components of plants are trace, comprising very little percentage of the mass, derived from the environment as well.
Solar panels are solid sheets of refined glass and other compounds. No energy is wasted constructing a massive redwood body to act as a substrate for a few sheets; instead, energy is wasted constructing solid silicon-based substrate at high concentrations. A plant attempting to achieve these high concentrations would require millions of years and an ungodly amount of energy expenditure.
Plants expend a lot of energy to use a lot of space to produce very little usable energy.
It came from that animals eat plants and get big and strong and they only retain 10% of the energy, so plants must be fucking awesome. The planet isn't covered with animal bodies, though; it's a giant mass of plant coverage, right down to algae in the sea. Plants are a collection grid for mobile harvesters.
Came to say this. 35% is hilariously lol though, the best solar cells are like 19%. The best plants are 10%-12% but those are VERY specialized and at peak (they need a lot of direct sun to hit 12%); 2% is the normal baseline, anything above that is very specialized.
You want 30%, use a polished metal parabolic reflector dish and a sterling engine.
Yes I love how my $40 cable bill has become a $10 Netflix "but we don't have not-popular series for you to stream", and then Amazon Streaming Video "And you can buy each episode in the season for $2, so if you want to watch a month's worth of TV it's like $8 per show you watch since there's 4 weeks at $2." Now instead of having a constant stream of everything, I can pick the five series I want to watch and pay the same amount.
Perfect if you have a wife or kids, too, since now with two people in the house they'll probably have 3-4 series each they like to watch, which you can pay $2 per episode for. That's great, because then you can spend $48 for shit you want instead of $40 for basic cable. Of course your kids will want Teletubbies and Barney and Dora the Sexually Abused Mexican who Ran Away From Her Pervert Father and Now Lives In The Wilderness With No Parental Observation (how is a six year old girl going all over the damn world without her parents!?), so another $24 a month. $72 is better.
Or you could just get cable. With SyFy shit, and TNT, and Fox for $10 each instead of the ludicrous $16 to have Futurama AND Family Guy (seriously, $10 for JUST FOX, with Futurama, Family Guy, American Dad, the works!). Oh and your wife will want Soap and Lifetime, and your kids want Cartoon Network and Disney. And you know, most Slashdorks want the History Channel for whatever godforsaken reason, and Discovery because they're painsluts. So yeah, $90 for not only greater personalization, but also access to a wider array of stuff for cheaper (yeah not paying $16/mo to have Futurama and Family Guy when I could pay $10 to have a channel with both and a bunch of other cool shit).
Definitely a good opportunity. I don't have TV service now and I'm looking forward to this passing.
I've read a lot of decent self-published stories, but I'm good at sniping them. Some of them are iffy, some are trash. Nassise's series "The Heretic" was fucking excellent, and then it was published in paperback.
Donaldson experiments with styles and concepts a LOT. He's a very good writer, consistently, but very capable of taking that in a direction you don't like. Just being a good writer isn't enough to get an audience; a story won't necessarily interest you just because it's well written, has a good plot and implementation, and is in a genre you like. It's very easy for things to take a direction you don't like.
I liked the Thomas Covenant books, I considered them "light reading." I gave one to a well-read coworker and his eyes glazed over. The nice thing about those books, though, is the literary mechanism: it's completely novel. Donaldson writes the same fucking plot over and over again, very flat, with little variation. It's extremely direct and linear. What keeps it interesting is progression: Every round, something changes. Yes, the Big Bad is immortal and cannot be ended. Yes it's always him. But this time, it's really him and not an underling. This time, you've broken the Law of Death and now the threats are completely different. This time, other natural Laws are no longer in effect and the stuff that can happen and does happen is now new, and that's being abused again. And so on. The same story, told over and over, just gets more and more deep and epic every time, while we're still back here doing the SAME. FUCKING. THING.
The Gap Cycle is one long epic. It's sci-fi, the style of writing is MUCH different--it's always narrated by the character of focus, which changes around between chapters. Attitude and personality is expressed. It's also very complex--there are multiple things going on and they mirror each other. There is shit going on on Earth, and shit going on on the other side of the fucking galaxy, and these things both impact each other. The first book is a pile of fluffy junk, dark and brutal, that tells the same story over and over again in increasing detail--the first paragraph tells the entire story. Aptly titled, "The Real Story," he repeatedly shows that what happened here is NOT the real story, and shows what people didn't see, what you didn't see, what nobody saw. The rest of the story follows a completely different direction, and just becomes one huge, massive, ungodly epic that I've never seen anything else stand up to.
Mordant's need? Interesting. Slow and boring. I liked it, but it's a very different story from these, a different style. The Gap Cycle actually somewhat repeats Mordant's Need--but there's more exposure. In Mordant's Need we get a story about a girl and about a kingdom, eventually finding out what's going on with the people in the east and west at a glance, and then finding out what the bad guys were up to at the end, and killing them. In The Gap Cycle, we get a story about EVERYTHING. The only thing not explored is the Amnion, and that's done mostly because the story is driven by not knowing (and it's heavily implied you wouldn't find it interesting anyway. You'll see what I mean). But I don't consider Mordant's Need to be the first, failed attempt at writing something like The Gap Cycle; I consider it a different direction. A singly-focused epic is a very valid, known writing style.
Yes, that trailer, where they show you the final scene and the biggest and most important plot point.
Yes, basically. They said, "... we did this. ... No no we didn't, humanity as a whole can't be like that, THIS BOY WAS THE MONSTER! He made the decision, on his own, to kill them all!" He was manipulated into it by people who wanted him to pull the trigger, but didn't want to be responsible for pulling the trigger themselves; then they tried to wash their hands of the whole thing. The whole of humanity wanted to exterminate that entire alien species, and now they've gone and tried to absolve themselves.
Ender's Game is written like shit. If you want engaging writing, read The Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson--you can't make it film because yeah, you'd lose the amazing writing. It would make a great film, but the whole "The book was better" thing is just elitist bullshit...except with The Gap Cycle, where holy shit the writing is god damn amazing.
I particularly enjoy Sanderson's writing as well, but it's not on that level. It flows great, it's great to read, but it's not striking. You could adapt Sanderson to film, but they'd cut a lot of shit out because it would otherwise be a whole lot of HUGE film that nobody wants to pay to produce (this is why the book is often considered "better"--more "complete", but really the adaptation isn't always without merit or technically not as good, and the acting and pacing can tell the story just as well if not better than in book form).
It's written at a third grade reading level. Orson Scott Card actually posted a huge review of his own book on Ender's Game where he explains that the level of competence of writing is unimportant; it's the story that matters. This is in direct conflict with his books about HOW to write, where he insists that being a writer is hard because you have to take on story writing and storytelling--story writing being the whole "I have unique and entertaining ideas" bit, and storytelling being "my book has to not sound like trash originally written in crayon by a six year old."
His "Special Powers" are that he's a fucking nerd and nobody likes him.
I avoid Shakespeare because it's terribly boring, unimaginative, and basically literary trash.
It's the result of seeing something; going, "Hey, that's neat, and I have no fucking clue why it works"; and then deciding that a part of it you don't understand is expensive and accomplishing the same sort of thing as another thing you know about that's cheap, and so you should do it that way. It's what you get when you don't employ expert judgment, and instead make decisions based on the analysis of completely unqualified non-technicians.
No, it takes years of practice and skill and some talent. It doesn't take expensive software; people used to do that shit without even using a computer.
Adobe only made 16 bit channels in Photoshop because somebody added them to a fork of Gimp...
We already have Noopept.