What I found was Stephenson's demonstration of his own obvious intelligence in recreating a parallel world whose development too closely paralleled this one. Even if I suspended belief, his invention of a parallel vocabulary to meet the timeline of his story was flawed.
His 'close your eyes and imagine....' descriptions were like slogging through a seemingly endless journey predicated in two feet deep mud. My mental legs tired of it, and was unrewarded by its relentlessness. If you can't get my attention in the first 250 pages, the 750 remaining aren't going to be worth it. The gymnastics remind me of the same D&D- induced madness that is fantasy sci fi, a genre that I find wholly unsatisfying.
I recognize some find such a tome invigorating. I do not. _Anathem_ was overly 'clever' to me. The fact that it was a "#1 New York Times Bestseller" shows its market relevance, and I'm not that market.
I just put down Anathem from Neal Stephenson. I got through 250+ pages of this nearly 1000 page tome, and it's just plainly awful. It's Stephenson boorishly showing off his obvious intelligence in yet another fantasy parallel universe world. His seemingly brilliant descriptions may fit the needs of a very small audience, but for a fan of 'hard' sci fi, it's waterboarding.
And it's not the first, but perhaps the 100th time this has happened. The D&D world has altered sci fi forever. I wish it would fork..... and solidly. I don't mind the fantasy world for other consumers. But it's not my diet at all.
The sad thing is that when you look on a bookstore's shelf, there's hardly anything left of 'hard' science fiction.
Apparently, to sell a book in the 'sci fi genre', it needs to have a touch of orc death, or perhaps an alternate universe where there's a some sort of hierarchical plot involving robes, old truths, and perhaps incantations.
I long for Azimov, Heinlein, Dickson, Ellison, Sheckley, etc. Even Pournelle and Niven have seemingly hung up their stirrups.
Movies from these guys' works? Unlikely to work. The CGI of the mind is not the CGI of the screen.
Your point #1 seems to be different than history is portrayed.
Your point #2 also seems to lack evidence, as well.
Your point #3 flies in the face of 28 people being killed in the citation article. It also betrays upthread QA problems also noted. If this is a realtime system, then it's realtime in a parallel universe. The only saving grace is that as mentioned, there've been some 17 years to fix it. It ought to be able to be run by your average mobile phone. Who knows..... maybe google maps + a side button.
And so you drive by several antenna towers, each pumping out several megawatts at freqs ranging from the 540khz range through FM around 100mhz to TV starting under 100mhz to say 600mhz+. You add in cells starting in at 450mhz and various VHF/UHF transmitters-- yes, at a lower power.
But as you travel by the non-microwave towers, and their 20-30megawatts comes into close proximity to you, you might recall the days of St Elmo's fire, when there was enough EMF being broadcast to make fences literally glow and dance with little electrons.
Now, you carry a cell/mobile on your body, somewhere. In your ear might be a microwatt bluetooth device at 2.4ghz, and your laptop is using similar or 5ghz spectra at several milliwatts.
The aggregate amount of EMF exposure is pretty high compared to say, 1900 when there was effectively on the amount generated by lightning. Are DNA immune to electrons and various state charges? If so, at what freqs and with what kinds of modulation?
We agree. I'm not trying to go all tin-foil hat, but there are gigawatts in major cities floating around, nudging things in your body. You tell me which ones are ok [add your own citations, and I'll add mine] and everything will be fine. They'll stop the ones that have a higher statistical possibility of blowing apart DNA, RNA, or otherwise wreaking havoc, right? And everyone will follow the rule, right?
My citation is admittedly anecdotal. But her surgeries weren't. They were damn painful.
Already, a friend of mine that's a cell phone addict (and has been since they were 'perfected') has had numerous benign growths removed from her face.
EMI apparently has, at various freqs, the ability to rattle our anatomy. To what extent-- we need to know, and know soon.
When I go through the airport scanners and get stripped by UUHF waves, I wonder just what's getting blown around inside me. Maybe low and vhf weren't as nasty. Maybe they were. The problem is: we don't know and we oughta find out in finality.
No, leaks are spin control, pimping products, and controling the 'conversation'.
They're like the proverbial flags run up the pole to see who salutes. If they were serious, like Apple, they'd jump right down the throat of the leak and drop a grenade.
Leaks done by a few are designed to make them look good somehow, as though they're kewl or trying to assert some 'creds'. Mostly it's random BS.
Otherwise, it's a marketing department decision, and they know exactly what they're doing. It's calulcated and it works. Disinformation can also be useful to see who and what gets more traction. It's a game. Some play it for keeps, some play it like it's a game.
Consider an alternate solution that's a comparatively cheap: broadband via mobiles/cellphone technology is perhaps easier to implement. The backhaul costs are lower, oversubscription is a potential problem, but it's been shown that the leap from no phones to mobiles is easier than supporting landlines investments. As people can start to afford shared PCs, netbooks, etc., speeds like EDGE, UMTS, even GPRS aren't untennable. Although oversubscription can slow things down, by that point others are seeking (and paying for) faster alternatives, like DSL, cable, and T's and D's.
Yes, food and water and clothing and medical are certainly necessary, but developing nations can get a lot of wireless bandwidth that's commercially driven by demand with less capex through wireless "broadband" deployments.
It's always important to follow the money. Once found, most explanations become clear. Yet the telcos aren't taking stimulus money, as it comes with strings. So complaining loudly will have to do for them.
Sadly, this is what it's come to. I long for the entrepreneurial days when someone would take a long, jaundiced look at something like a telco, and figure out how to lay several hundred thousand miles of dark fiber.
Yeah, they're for-profit, built on the scam of "municipal utilities" where the infrastructure was stolen outright on the lie of developing communications infrastructures. In fact, the communities own the easements, right of ways, in favor of property owners.
As regards peace, no one argues the basis for WW2. The Soviets were dogs because we were. Violence can be overcome, just like hunger. You have to work at it. So I do.
Your otherwise black and white world is devoid of wisdom, only reacting in a binary way. Too bad. There are other dimensions to humanity.
The US Consitutional right to free assembly also embues a right to anonymity.
Kapersky is just looking for a new revenue stream. Indeed there ought to be a way to partition out obvious malware sites and even those that are infected because their management didn't patch them.
But you'll not get rid of anonymity. It's the human condition.
These are utilities and common carriers. They're supposed to work for US. Instead, the propaganda pushes have become obtuse. They threaten to slow down expenditure-- slowing down broadband speed and reach. In fact, what happens is that the vacuum breeds ISP investment in areas the current crop of jerks don't want to reach. The BPL initiative starts. Sat from Hughes gets cheaper. Even gas companies figure out how to get into the broadband business.
The group of Democrats that have been suckered in by the propaganda become their stooges, once again. They won't learn. But why should they as long as their own campaign finances are good.... filled and lined by the telcos?
In the end, there is a real price and value paid. It's possible to shave pennies, but the long term ownership cost is skewed when the sales guy on the golf course low-balls the competition. Stuff costs money; good stuff costs good money.
As various searches reveal that in 2007 he was using Ubuntu, the "long time now" must mean gosh, what, using Windows 7 a couple of years? Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "early release".
Seem disingenuous.
Dell needs a good quarter, folks. Those nasty guys on Wall Street will be all over them if they don't squeeze out a good quarter to make Dell look good against Acer. Or not.
And computer companies wonder why their credibility is so dubious.
I disagree with your last sentence, as time bomb after time bomb goes off, even with the non-aggressive types. I've seen the victims of emotional abuse (non-physical aggression) and the walking wounded that have been victimized.
Leaving it 'like it is' is a mollification of the condition, rather than a remediation. The strategies require 1) self-identification, which isn't common 2) cogent strategy providers-- with reasonable cost and 3) civil/societal feedback mechanisms. Lacking any of these, the ability to successfully integrate individuals seems lost.
Education of young people to understand psyco/sociopathy outside of religious mythos/dogma would be a first step, but we don't even do that. Instead, we breed a victim culture after the fact. Not good enough.
As I'm not a psych worker, rather an observer, I've heard of objectivism as a civil remediation technique. Yet the value system can be defined in a slippery, even non-linear way that portends uncivil behavior. It's my belief that there's a need to evolve the speciation to deal with what's otherwise an enormous divide in humanity, more palpable and difficult than perhaps any other division we have.
The Office characterizations are full of symptoms of pathologies, some of which border or jump in to sociopathy/psychopathy. I suppose it's real world... but it's more onerous to me than entertaining.
Sociopathy may look like a 'disease' but it's really a condition, and it's not 'curable'. Only the behavior can be modified, often with conditional behavioral therapy/CBT. But the sociopath usually doesn't see the errors and is unmotivated to want to modify their behavior.
These individuals are, IMHO, a separate and distinct species as while they may have homo sapiens bodies, their minds do not think like the vast majority.
I have autistic relatives, and the same can be said of them.
Add a sociopath to management, and you're screwed, generally. It usually ends badly for them, thus intensifying their resolve, too. Best of luck to those working 'under' the PHBs.
Planck Time lives in just four dimensions. Imagine opening up, say the sixth dimension, figuring out the vectors for the next WoW move, then plugging them in to realtime in the four we live in.
Information exists in so many states at once. Von Neumann liked to talk about Hilbert space.... I think that's where my data lives.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried to connote my tastes.
What I found was Stephenson's demonstration of his own obvious intelligence in recreating a parallel world whose development too closely paralleled this one. Even if I suspended belief, his invention of a parallel vocabulary to meet the timeline of his story was flawed.
His 'close your eyes and imagine....' descriptions were like slogging through a seemingly endless journey predicated in two feet deep mud. My mental legs tired of it, and was unrewarded by its relentlessness. If you can't get my attention in the first 250 pages, the 750 remaining aren't going to be worth it. The gymnastics remind me of the same D&D- induced madness that is fantasy sci fi, a genre that I find wholly unsatisfying.
I recognize some find such a tome invigorating. I do not. _Anathem_ was overly 'clever' to me. The fact that it was a "#1 New York Times Bestseller" shows its market relevance, and I'm not that market.
I just put down Anathem from Neal Stephenson. I got through 250+ pages of this nearly 1000 page tome, and it's just plainly awful. It's Stephenson boorishly showing off his obvious intelligence in yet another fantasy parallel universe world. His seemingly brilliant descriptions may fit the needs of a very small audience, but for a fan of 'hard' sci fi, it's waterboarding.
And it's not the first, but perhaps the 100th time this has happened. The D&D world has altered sci fi forever. I wish it would fork..... and solidly. I don't mind the fantasy world for other consumers. But it's not my diet at all.
The sad thing is that when you look on a bookstore's shelf, there's hardly anything left of 'hard' science fiction.
Apparently, to sell a book in the 'sci fi genre', it needs to have a touch of orc death, or perhaps an alternate universe where there's a some sort of hierarchical plot involving robes, old truths, and perhaps incantations.
I long for Azimov, Heinlein, Dickson, Ellison, Sheckley, etc. Even Pournelle and Niven have seemingly hung up their stirrups.
Movies from these guys' works? Unlikely to work. The CGI of the mind is not the CGI of the screen.
Obligatory: Yeah, that's the Microsoft approach.
Your point #1 seems to be different than history is portrayed.
Your point #2 also seems to lack evidence, as well.
Your point #3 flies in the face of 28 people being killed in the citation article. It also betrays upthread QA problems also noted. If this is a realtime system, then it's realtime in a parallel universe. The only saving grace is that as mentioned, there've been some 17 years to fix it. It ought to be able to be run by your average mobile phone. Who knows..... maybe google maps + a side button.
And so you drive by several antenna towers, each pumping out several megawatts at freqs ranging from the 540khz range through FM around 100mhz to TV starting under 100mhz to say 600mhz+. You add in cells starting in at 450mhz and various VHF/UHF transmitters-- yes, at a lower power.
But as you travel by the non-microwave towers, and their 20-30megawatts comes into close proximity to you, you might recall the days of St Elmo's fire, when there was enough EMF being broadcast to make fences literally glow and dance with little electrons.
Now, you carry a cell/mobile on your body, somewhere. In your ear might be a microwatt bluetooth device at 2.4ghz, and your laptop is using similar or 5ghz spectra at several milliwatts.
The aggregate amount of EMF exposure is pretty high compared to say, 1900 when there was effectively on the amount generated by lightning. Are DNA immune to electrons and various state charges? If so, at what freqs and with what kinds of modulation?
Lack of research! Yes-- now you get the point.
We agree. I'm not trying to go all tin-foil hat, but there are gigawatts in major cities floating around, nudging things in your body. You tell me which ones are ok [add your own citations, and I'll add mine] and everything will be fine. They'll stop the ones that have a higher statistical possibility of blowing apart DNA, RNA, or otherwise wreaking havoc, right? And everyone will follow the rule, right?
My citation is admittedly anecdotal. But her surgeries weren't. They were damn painful.
Already, a friend of mine that's a cell phone addict (and has been since they were 'perfected') has had numerous benign growths removed from her face.
EMI apparently has, at various freqs, the ability to rattle our anatomy. To what extent-- we need to know, and know soon.
When I go through the airport scanners and get stripped by UUHF waves, I wonder just what's getting blown around inside me. Maybe low and vhf weren't as nasty. Maybe they were. The problem is: we don't know and we oughta find out in finality.
Uh, hello? Tech support?
You want me to do what with ldd?
Are you the same guy that told me to rm *? That wasn't funny....
No, leaks are spin control, pimping products, and controling the 'conversation'.
They're like the proverbial flags run up the pole to see who salutes. If they were serious, like Apple, they'd jump right down the throat of the leak and drop a grenade.
Leaks done by a few are designed to make them look good somehow, as though they're kewl or trying to assert some 'creds'. Mostly it's random BS.
Otherwise, it's a marketing department decision, and they know exactly what they're doing. It's calulcated and it works. Disinformation can also be useful to see who and what gets more traction. It's a game. Some play it for keeps, some play it like it's a game.
Spanning tree. My AP to your cable modem. We're back up in a coupla days.
Consider an alternate solution that's a comparatively cheap: broadband via mobiles/cellphone technology is perhaps easier to implement. The backhaul costs are lower, oversubscription is a potential problem, but it's been shown that the leap from no phones to mobiles is easier than supporting landlines investments. As people can start to afford shared PCs, netbooks, etc., speeds like EDGE, UMTS, even GPRS aren't untennable. Although oversubscription can slow things down, by that point others are seeking (and paying for) faster alternatives, like DSL, cable, and T's and D's.
Yes, food and water and clothing and medical are certainly necessary, but developing nations can get a lot of wireless bandwidth that's commercially driven by demand with less capex through wireless "broadband" deployments.
Ah, your wit.
etc.
It's always important to follow the money. Once found, most explanations become clear. Yet the telcos aren't taking stimulus money, as it comes with strings. So complaining loudly will have to do for them.
Sadly, this is what it's come to. I long for the entrepreneurial days when someone would take a long, jaundiced look at something like a telco, and figure out how to lay several hundred thousand miles of dark fiber.
Oh, wait......
Thanks for the help, but this is a closed mind you're dealing with. Sadly, there is no cure for that; it's terminally entropic. But thanks for trying.
Yeah, they're for-profit, built on the scam of "municipal utilities" where the infrastructure was stolen outright on the lie of developing communications infrastructures. In fact, the communities own the easements, right of ways, in favor of property owners.
As regards peace, no one argues the basis for WW2. The Soviets were dogs because we were. Violence can be overcome, just like hunger. You have to work at it. So I do.
Your otherwise black and white world is devoid of wisdom, only reacting in a binary way. Too bad. There are other dimensions to humanity.
The US Consitutional right to free assembly also embues a right to anonymity.
Kapersky is just looking for a new revenue stream. Indeed there ought to be a way to partition out obvious malware sites and even those that are infected because their management didn't patch them.
But you'll not get rid of anonymity. It's the human condition.
These are utilities and common carriers. They're supposed to work for US. Instead, the propaganda pushes have become obtuse. They threaten to slow down expenditure-- slowing down broadband speed and reach. In fact, what happens is that the vacuum breeds ISP investment in areas the current crop of jerks don't want to reach. The BPL initiative starts. Sat from Hughes gets cheaper. Even gas companies figure out how to get into the broadband business.
The group of Democrats that have been suckered in by the propaganda become their stooges, once again. They won't learn. But why should they as long as their own campaign finances are good.... filled and lined by the telcos?
Good grief: "professional coders"?????
Where do you think they got the code from in the FIRST PLACE????
And citing Stallman isn't a God-Win in a FOSS argument. Get real.
In the end, there is a real price and value paid. It's possible to shave pennies, but the long term ownership cost is skewed when the sales guy on the golf course low-balls the competition. Stuff costs money; good stuff costs good money.
As various searches reveal that in 2007 he was using Ubuntu, the "long time now" must mean gosh, what, using Windows 7 a couple of years? Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "early release".
Seem disingenuous.
Dell needs a good quarter, folks. Those nasty guys on Wall Street will be all over them if they don't squeeze out a good quarter to make Dell look good against Acer. Or not.
And computer companies wonder why their credibility is so dubious.
I disagree with your last sentence, as time bomb after time bomb goes off, even with the non-aggressive types. I've seen the victims of emotional abuse (non-physical aggression) and the walking wounded that have been victimized.
Leaving it 'like it is' is a mollification of the condition, rather than a remediation. The strategies require 1) self-identification, which isn't common 2) cogent strategy providers-- with reasonable cost and 3) civil/societal feedback mechanisms. Lacking any of these, the ability to successfully integrate individuals seems lost.
Education of young people to understand psyco/sociopathy outside of religious mythos/dogma would be a first step, but we don't even do that. Instead, we breed a victim culture after the fact. Not good enough.
As I'm not a psych worker, rather an observer, I've heard of objectivism as a civil remediation technique. Yet the value system can be defined in a slippery, even non-linear way that portends uncivil behavior. It's my belief that there's a need to evolve the speciation to deal with what's otherwise an enormous divide in humanity, more palpable and difficult than perhaps any other division we have.
The Office characterizations are full of symptoms of pathologies, some of which border or jump in to sociopathy/psychopathy. I suppose it's real world... but it's more onerous to me than entertaining.
Conditional Behavioral Therapy works wonders. Other meanings of the three letters aren't implied.
Sociopathy may look like a 'disease' but it's really a condition, and it's not 'curable'. Only the behavior can be modified, often with conditional behavioral therapy/CBT. But the sociopath usually doesn't see the errors and is unmotivated to want to modify their behavior.
These individuals are, IMHO, a separate and distinct species as while they may have homo sapiens bodies, their minds do not think like the vast majority.
I have autistic relatives, and the same can be said of them.
Add a sociopath to management, and you're screwed, generally. It usually ends badly for them, thus intensifying their resolve, too. Best of luck to those working 'under' the PHBs.
Planck Time lives in just four dimensions. Imagine opening up, say the sixth dimension, figuring out the vectors for the next WoW move, then plugging them in to realtime in the four we live in.
Information exists in so many states at once. Von Neumann liked to talk about Hilbert space.... I think that's where my data lives.