They're just starting to publish him here.
on
The Star Fraction
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· Score: 2
Another of MacLeod's books, "Cassini Division" is indeed available in the states here. It takes place in the same world with the same characters. I'm not sure about the order of the series but there aren't any real spoilers in the books at all. A review of the Cassini division can be found on Salon .
You can argue on the pros and cons about whether or not an employer should be responsible for the ergo-correctness of a tele-commuters workstation, but this seems to miss a more distrubing ramification of the decision. If this were to be true, then workers would be forces to alter there homes to reflect their employer's understanding of the legality of certain workspaces; i.e. I live in a studio apartment which allows only 25 square feet to devote to anything like an office, my landlord refuses to turn on the heat until it's 20 degrees outside, etc. Now I like living here because I pay about nothing in rent, but it's clearly not a healthy working environment. So what is my employer supposed to do? They must force me to move to a "better apartment" which is properly heated and large enough for a standard working area, and then they'll force me to give up my grandfather's desk which is 6 inches too tall for anyone but my grandfather. in short they'll have invaded my private living space. Not to mention the fact my boss will have to see the mess i live in. With the privledges this ruling requires employees to accept come some unacceptable violations of basic privacy.
now that you've sold yourselves to andover.net and made yourselves and andover a chunk oof change, don't you think that maybe it would be better to be better if slashdot went by slashdot.com? I assume that Andover is planing on making money from the adverts on all the pages and stuff and everything, what exactly makes this a.org these days?
Katz is completely off-base here. Your problem is in completely conflating two distinct forms of freedom, only one of which we are promised. Criticism and censorship can pretty much be divided into two groups (and their really called norms but i forget to actual definitions for them so bear with me); govermental: you write something that's deemed wrong by some judge, or worse yet, a violation of security by the NSA and you get sent to jail; and social: you say something that pisses me off and I erturn the favor by making your life such a living hell that you simply shut up. Our constitution only protects us from the former, and in fact life with out the latter would be entirely boring and bleak. Can you imagine a sociaety where you weren;t allowed to respond excessively to soem of the bile and bigotry out there? Everyone has the right to speak without fear of governmental censhorship, but everyone has the resposibility to own up to their words, even if that means being tossed out of your political party.
With it becoming increasingly obvious that computer games are going the way of Hollywood blockbusters and costing somewhere in the eight digit range, and involving increasingly expensive detailing, do you see any chance for first timers to produce their own games with any hope of market acceptance? Or are we stuck with computer game 'productions' instead?
There's no quick fix here. you need to adjust the way you sit and the way you type to avoid putting too much strain on your wrists. Raise your chair so that your elbows are higher than the keyboard. If your chair isn't adjustable get a new one, because your wrists aren't going to get any better if you have to sit in a bizarre manner. The idea here is not to stretch your wrists, or you'll cause undo burden on them. I use a UNIX workstation without the benefit of 'Natural' keyboards, but I found that sticking a small three-ring binder under the eyboard so that it leaned away from me helped alot. Other than that take some time off and let yourself heal.
This really isn't the biggest discovery ever. In fact what they've accomplished is to rediscover the base assumptions of the bell curve. The normal curve (bell curve) is a product of stochastic interactions between atomistic events; it pretty much only reflects behavior in systems where new actions are not affected by the history of the system. If you have a saturated system (like the ground being unable to absorb more water in the case of the floding example) you've got a messed up curve. Any decent book on statistics will give you the basics about this.
The curve is weird looking, but still readily quantifiable. Besides the mean, and standard deviation, you can use skew (un-centeredness) and kurtosis (bulging in the middle) to describe how different a given curve is from a bell-curve.
More interesting though, is that fact that the curves shown in the ft.com article weren't properly normalized; comparing these graphs visualy doesn't begin to show what the differences are, and the axis on the graphs didn't make to much sense. It x = "rarity" then what does y correspond to. Typically you would show y and frequency and x as a value, and from this you would determine rarity.
What makes the Blair Witch Project such a good film has little to do with the suspense instilled in the viewer, nor is it (The Blair Witch Project) a terribly revolutionary vehical for horror. Instead it is am insanely great take on how our modern society actually copes with the mythological. What was so interesting to see in the film was the manner in which these overly educated teens, completely aware of their predicament (one notable difference from the traditional horror film constructions) continued to depend upon technology for their solutions. Hiding behind the second-hand view of the camera was a defensive mechanism for the characters, who it seems, have great faith in the protective nature of reporting. That is, as the students proceed into the witch's home[den] (one presumes) they obviously derive some confort from the fact that a recording of the events will both absolve them of any wrong doing (as in the case of the tearful apology to the party's mothers given by the director) or perhaps even to provide retribution. Somehow walking out of the theater I couldn't help but remember the feeling of helpfulness I had after the R. King verdict, knowing that the visual transcript of what happened was available, but yet being unable to exact the justice so obvisiously called for. In the end, I think the most powerful message available in the movie is the uselessness of modern solutions in dealing with the unknown.
Slashdot Mirror
Another of MacLeod's books, "Cassini Division" is indeed available in the states here. It takes place in the same world with the same characters. I'm not sure about the order of the series but there aren't any real spoilers in the books at all. A review of the Cassini division can be found on Salon .
You can argue on the pros and cons about whether or not an employer should be responsible for the ergo-correctness of a tele-commuters workstation, but this seems to miss a more distrubing ramification of the decision. If this were to be true, then workers would be forces to alter there homes to reflect their employer's understanding of the legality of certain workspaces; i.e. I live in a studio apartment which allows only 25 square feet to devote to anything like an office, my landlord refuses to turn on the heat until it's 20 degrees outside, etc. Now I like living here because I pay about nothing in rent, but it's clearly not a healthy working environment. So what is my employer supposed to do? They must force me to move to a "better apartment" which is properly heated and large enough for a standard working area, and then they'll force me to give up my grandfather's desk which is 6 inches too tall for anyone but my grandfather. in short they'll have invaded my private living space. Not to mention the fact my boss will have to see the mess i live in. With the privledges this ruling requires employees to accept come some unacceptable violations of basic privacy.
now that you've sold yourselves to andover.net and .org these days?
made yourselves and andover a chunk oof change, don't you think that maybe it would be better to be better if slashdot went by slashdot.com? I assume that Andover is planing on making money from the adverts on all the pages and stuff and everything, what exactly makes this a
Katz is completely off-base here. Your problem is in completely conflating two distinct forms of freedom, only one of which we are promised. Criticism and censorship can pretty much be divided into two groups (and their really called norms but i forget to actual definitions for them so bear with me); govermental: you write something that's deemed wrong by some judge, or worse yet, a violation of security by the NSA and you get sent to jail; and social: you say something that pisses me off and I erturn the favor by making your life such a living hell that you simply shut up. Our constitution only protects us from the former, and in fact life with out the latter would be entirely boring and bleak. Can you imagine a sociaety where you weren;t allowed to respond excessively to soem of the bile and bigotry out there? Everyone has the right to speak without fear of governmental censhorship, but everyone has the resposibility to own up to their words, even if that means being tossed out of your political party.
With it becoming increasingly obvious that computer games are going the way of Hollywood blockbusters and costing somewhere in the eight digit range, and involving increasingly expensive detailing, do you see any chance for first timers to produce their own games with any hope of market acceptance? Or are we stuck with computer game 'productions' instead?
There's no quick fix here. you need to adjust the way you sit and the way you type to avoid putting too much strain on your wrists. Raise your chair so that your elbows are higher than the keyboard. If your chair isn't adjustable get a new one, because your wrists aren't going to get any better if you have to sit in a bizarre manner. The idea here is not to stretch your wrists, or you'll cause undo burden on them. I use a UNIX workstation without the benefit of 'Natural' keyboards, but I found that sticking a small three-ring binder under the eyboard so that it leaned away from me helped alot. Other than that take some time off and let yourself heal.
This really isn't the biggest discovery ever. In fact what they've accomplished is to rediscover the base assumptions of the bell curve. The normal curve (bell curve) is a product of stochastic interactions between atomistic events; it pretty much only reflects behavior in systems where new actions are not affected by the history of the system. If you have a saturated system (like the ground being unable to absorb more water in the case of the floding example) you've got a messed up curve. Any decent book on statistics will give you the basics about this.
The curve is weird looking, but still readily quantifiable. Besides the mean, and standard deviation, you can use skew (un-centeredness) and kurtosis (bulging in the middle) to describe how different a given curve is from a bell-curve.
More interesting though, is that fact that the curves shown in the ft.com article weren't properly normalized; comparing these graphs visualy doesn't begin to show what the differences are, and the axis on the graphs didn't make to much sense. It x = "rarity" then what does y correspond to. Typically you would show y and frequency and x as a value, and from this you would determine rarity.
anyway, my two cents
m.d.
What makes the Blair Witch Project such a good film has little to do with the suspense instilled in the viewer, nor is it (The Blair Witch Project) a terribly revolutionary vehical for horror. Instead it is am insanely great take on how our modern society actually copes with the mythological. What was so interesting to see in the film was the manner in which these overly educated teens, completely aware of their predicament (one notable difference from the traditional horror film constructions) continued to depend upon technology for their solutions. Hiding behind the second-hand view of the camera was a defensive mechanism for the characters, who it seems, have great faith in the protective nature of reporting. That is, as the students proceed into the witch's home[den] (one presumes) they obviously derive some confort from the fact that a recording of the events will both absolve them of any wrong doing (as in the case of the tearful apology to the party's mothers given by the director) or perhaps even to provide retribution. Somehow walking out of the theater I couldn't help but remember the feeling of helpfulness I had after the R. King verdict, knowing that the visual transcript of what happened was available, but yet being unable to exact the justice so obvisiously called for. In the end, I think the most powerful message available in the movie is the uselessness of modern solutions in dealing with the unknown.