"What is predictable is how pompous critics come pouring out of the woodwork (ok, that's a crappy cliche) when a book gets really popular."
Its almost as if the more popular a book is, the more people read it (and thus more people notice how bad it is). I wonder why that could be...
"So they have a valid self-interest in suppressing the story (even though it's impossible)."
So do people who get annoyed when a book (or movie or any other work of art) comes along which dumbs down the population by presenting known hoaxes and made up shit as fact.
"Decption point was good and sits happily in the middle."
You are kidding, right? I almost threw up when I read the part where the chick claimed that the proof that convinced the scientists that the meteorite was real (and thus that all life on Earth evolved out of lice from outer space...) would never cut it in the political world. Because as we all know, while scientists are willing to claim anything to be fact, politicians need absolute evidence before they are willing to act.
"I do think that the mass of publicity hype that surrounded the DaVinci code did propel it forcefully into the domain of masterpieces. Sure he's a competant writer..."
Actually, yeah. There were parts for which I could see what was going to happen next, even though I knew for a fact that such a chain of events would be incredibly dumb.
After reading Digital Fortress and Deception Point, I am not enthusiastic about giving Danny boy another try. Yes, I have heard several people say that his other books are better, which they pretty much would have to be. But considering there are plenty of other books out there written by authors who have not proven themselves to be complete idiots, its going to take a while before I ever get around to reading the Da Vinci Code.
Except that too often his readers believe him as well. I know plenty of people who have, after reading one of these books, thought that they had learned a lot about history, mathematics, science, etc. His writing style (again, only in the two books of his that I read: "Digital Fortress" and "Deception Point", though from what I have heard the others are the same) is such that it sounds like he is stating facts, not that he is making stuff up.
For instance in "Digital Fortress", he describes the 'Bergofsky Principle', which supposedly states that every code can be broken with a brute force algorithm, one just needs a machine powerful enough to do it. After my reading group finshed that section, I noted that there was no such thing as a "Bergofsky Principle", and that in fact what he stated is false. There are indeed codes out there that are (mathmatically at least) unbreakable. When hearing this, many in my group looked confused. "I don't know", one stated, "that seems like a strange thing to make up..." And these were not brain dead college dropouts, these were intelligent honors engineering students (the reading groups were sponsored by my university's honors department and most of the liberal arts students of course ran out to read the more obscure books).
So this is not merely a work of fiction, it is a work of fiction that is dumbing down the world population.
Except he didn't just 'use the word "Columbine"' in a post, nor did he just 'discuss the motivations of the perpetrators'. If your landlord were to inform you that the last guy who didn't pay his rent on time ended up at the bottom of the river, and then reminded you that you were very close to being late on your rent as well, how exactly would you interpret those two statements? As mere commentary on unfortunate things that happen to people?
I doubt that would help all that much. I've never read the book, but I read two of his other books in a reading group a few years back. Damn, he has to be one of the worst writers ever. Neither plot made any sense, the 'science' in them (both were considered intelligent novels by the critics which you could learn a lot from) was complete bull, the stories were predictible, the characters flat, the dialog worse than anything from the first three Star Wars movies... If the Da Vinci Code (shouldn't it be The Leonardo Code anyways? Da Vinci was neither his name nor his surname...) was only half as bad as either of those I fully understand what pissed off the Catholic Church.
Sorry for this completely off topic rant, but I just get like this whenever I hear how great Dan Brown novels are (which has been a lot recently).
First of all, are you implying that Northern California and Western Europe are the only places where clean water is available? I mean, why did you single out Northern California, should you not drink the water from the rest of California (and the rest of the US)?
Second, "economic equality" is impossible outside of complete communism (and even there, the "equality" is only for those not lucky enough to be in power). There will always be people who do better than others in any society that respects at least some degree of economic liberty.
Third, your "let them eat cake" approach really doesn't solve anything either. Fact is, there are places in the world (such as in developing countries) where disease is still common. Yes, they are working to modernize (hence the term 'developing'), but in the meantime something like this could actually save people's lives. And most people consider saving lives a good thing.
Well, as another poster pointed out, this patent was filed back when Clinton was in office, so the iPod would not be considered Prior Art. When people say the patent office is slow, they don't mean it can takes a few months for them to give a patent a rubber stamp of approval. It has to take just long enough so that if an independent inventor (you know, like the ones the patent system was designed to help) were to try to patent something, they would have long been run out of business and starved to death before they get the ability to safely sell their idea.
"...but at least on/. let's keep the facts straight."
I had to laugh at that. Lets see, an accurate portrayal of the facts could be presented (from which we would be forced to conclude that this is an old story brocken months ago by the New York Times in which the goverment is making a database using information almost anyone has access to), or the conspiracy theorists could run up and down screaming "Bush is tapping our phone lines". Which do you think is going to happen?
You would have gotten pretty much the same response had you cited your high school "Rocks for Jocks" textbook. It was the content of your post and your cocky attitude while writing it, the wikipedia just gave me an easy way to make fun of you (incidentally, so would a "Rocks for Jocks" textbook).
Yes, I know what form of life existed back then, but good job looking them up. You've shown yourself to be very skilled at typing in a search phrase in for the wikipedia (though if you read the little blurb that references our ancestors of the period, you would find they probably did not include Proterospongia, so you might want to brush up on your reading skills). But most theories of evolution involve complex forms of life (such as us) evolving from simple forms of life (such as sponge-like creatures). So yes, our ancestors do probably include some form of simple animals very much like sponges, which were able to survive magnetic field reversals. If that disturbs you, go have fun reading "Of Pandas and People".
And neither I nor the origional poster claimed you could compare the survival rates of our ancestors (be they primates or simple animals), in fact he argued the exact opposite. So yes he was correct, even though (as I stated before) sponge-like animals are probably not what he meant when he mentioned "our ancestors".
Please excuse any typos as it is late, and excuse any mean-spirted sarcastic remarks as I am too tired to take crap from people who think that because they have the wikipedia as their homepage, they know everything there is to know about the world.
I think what the gp was saying wasn't that such a technology doesn't exist, but that there is not yet a standard "application browser" that is ubiquitous enough that it can be relied on.
"No. Neither of those will tell you which way you're pointing. Both of those tell you where you are (actually, the cellestial version will only tell you where you are with the aid of an accurate clock)."
Seriously, do you think they call it the "North Star" because it tells you if you north of something? GPS devices may or may not tell you which direction you are pointing (its possible they can by keying off of the direction to the satellite, but I don't own such a device so I can't tell for sure), but I can assure you that our ancestors have used the stars to tell which way is North, South, East, and West for years. Hell I do it all the time when I'm driving and I don't know where I am. If it is in the evening (I don't need the exact time, just a general idea will work), the direction of the sun is West. If it is in the morning, the direction of the sun is East. Midday is a bit harder, but since I am north of the equator, the sun will be slightly South of me.
Actually I'm pretty sure there weren't any human beings alive 780,000 years ago when this last occured. The 'ancestors' that were mentioned were something more along the lines of Homo erectus.
"That will be interesting to see. They probably have a mechanism for handling it since it happens periodically."
Well sure, if by "peridically" you mean completely at random, with the length of time averaging a couple hundred thousand years. But that alone won't be often enough to prompt the natural selection needed to evolve a mechanism for handling magnetic field reversals. Its possible that something very simple could evolve over the thousand years or so in which the field is shrinking, but that would likely be lost over the next few hundred thousand years in which it wouldn't be used. A lot has happened since the last time one of these occured, including the evolution of a bunch of monkeys throwing crap around to human beings (ok, maybe not that much has changed after all).
That being said, you are not going to see birds flying into buildings like in that stupid movie "The Core", anymore than it would cause boy scouts to walk into lakes because their compasses are off. Birds don't just blindly fly by the magnetic field alone, their main tool for navigation is their eyes.
No, our monkey ancestors were not around. But some form of our ancestors were. And I'm sure there were magnetic field reversals then as well. So he is right (even if that wasn't what he meant).
Did you miss the part that said "...in most federally funded schools and libraries"? You are also not allowed to stand up and start screaming the lyrics to "Uncle Fucka" as loud as you can in a public library. Is your right to free speech violated then?
Freedom of speech means that you have the freedom to express your opinions freely, not that the taxpayers have to supply you with the means to post your life story for every pedophile with a hard-on to read.
Thats how its spelled in the/. summary. The problem isn't that he misread it, its that he assumed the editors knew how to spell (or at least copy and past correctly).
So you are saying you think people in Samoa still could have seen the trial run of the space suits (in North Dakota) when this story came out? I don't think you fully understand how timezones work...
"The world DID NOT CHANGE after 9/11 because of 9/11. It changed because of people claiming it changed, and said people "protecting" us from boogeymen. First it was communists- now it is terrorists. "
First of all... what do you mean by "first it was communists"? Are you trying to argue that the American people feared nothing before the USSR? The quote you were replying to mentioned Pearl Harbor, which alone seems enough to contradict that claim. Unless you were under the impression Japan was a communist nation...
Anyways, the first major successful attack on American soil by a foreign terrorist group in recent memory dramatically changes the psyche of the citizens of any country. And unless your life consists of sitting in your mama's basement isolated from people, such a change is tantamount to the world changing. Yes, there were terrorists out there on September 10th 2001, and yes they had made attacks elsewhere in the world, but seeing planes crash into building in New York and Virginia (no, not Washington DC for those of you who don't know where the Pentagon is located) is much different than hearing about a suicide bombing in Israel. Yes, both are tragic, but the former brings the whole thing home to people for whom Isreal and Palestine are nothing more than scenes in the television show we call "The News".
"3,000 people died in the WTC attacks; twice as many Americans die from heart attacks in a month, and preventing their deaths doesn't require stripping people's civil liberties."
Tell that to the assholes who sue fast food restaurants for making them fat.
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Its almost as if the more popular a book is, the more people read it (and thus more people notice how bad it is). I wonder why that could be...
"So they have a valid self-interest in suppressing the story (even though it's impossible)."
So do people who get annoyed when a book (or movie or any other work of art) comes along which dumbs down the population by presenting known hoaxes and made up shit as fact.
You are kidding, right? I almost threw up when I read the part where the chick claimed that the proof that convinced the scientists that the meteorite was real (and thus that all life on Earth evolved out of lice from outer space...) would never cut it in the political world. Because as we all know, while scientists are willing to claim anything to be fact, politicians need absolute evidence before they are willing to act.
"I do think that the mass of publicity hype that surrounded the DaVinci code did propel it forcefully into the domain of masterpieces. Sure he's a competant writer..."
Ok, now I know you are kidding.
Actually, yeah. There were parts for which I could see what was going to happen next, even though I knew for a fact that such a chain of events would be incredibly dumb.
After reading Digital Fortress and Deception Point, I am not enthusiastic about giving Danny boy another try. Yes, I have heard several people say that his other books are better, which they pretty much would have to be. But considering there are plenty of other books out there written by authors who have not proven themselves to be complete idiots, its going to take a while before I ever get around to reading the Da Vinci Code.
For instance in "Digital Fortress", he describes the 'Bergofsky Principle', which supposedly states that every code can be broken with a brute force algorithm, one just needs a machine powerful enough to do it. After my reading group finshed that section, I noted that there was no such thing as a "Bergofsky Principle", and that in fact what he stated is false. There are indeed codes out there that are (mathmatically at least) unbreakable. When hearing this, many in my group looked confused. "I don't know", one stated, "that seems like a strange thing to make up..." And these were not brain dead college dropouts, these were intelligent honors engineering students (the reading groups were sponsored by my university's honors department and most of the liberal arts students of course ran out to read the more obscure books).
So this is not merely a work of fiction, it is a work of fiction that is dumbing down the world population.
Except he didn't just 'use the word "Columbine"' in a post, nor did he just 'discuss the motivations of the perpetrators'. If your landlord were to inform you that the last guy who didn't pay his rent on time ended up at the bottom of the river, and then reminded you that you were very close to being late on your rent as well, how exactly would you interpret those two statements? As mere commentary on unfortunate things that happen to people?
Sorry for this completely off topic rant, but I just get like this whenever I hear how great Dan Brown novels are (which has been a lot recently).
Anyways, considering he is facing expulsion (as opposed to actually being expelled), I think your claim is a bit premature.
Second, "economic equality" is impossible outside of complete communism (and even there, the "equality" is only for those not lucky enough to be in power). There will always be people who do better than others in any society that respects at least some degree of economic liberty.
Third, your "let them eat cake" approach really doesn't solve anything either. Fact is, there are places in the world (such as in developing countries) where disease is still common. Yes, they are working to modernize (hence the term 'developing'), but in the meantime something like this could actually save people's lives. And most people consider saving lives a good thing.
Well, as another poster pointed out, this patent was filed back when Clinton was in office, so the iPod would not be considered Prior Art. When people say the patent office is slow, they don't mean it can takes a few months for them to give a patent a rubber stamp of approval. It has to take just long enough so that if an independent inventor (you know, like the ones the patent system was designed to help) were to try to patent something, they would have long been run out of business and starved to death before they get the ability to safely sell their idea.
Jokes aside, they want his blood, not just his DNA. If you RTFA, he was willing to provide DNA, only using methods that don't require him to bleed.
I had to laugh at that. Lets see, an accurate portrayal of the facts could be presented (from which we would be forced to conclude that this is an old story brocken months ago by the New York Times in which the goverment is making a database using information almost anyone has access to), or the conspiracy theorists could run up and down screaming "Bush is tapping our phone lines". Which do you think is going to happen?
You would have gotten pretty much the same response had you cited your high school "Rocks for Jocks" textbook. It was the content of your post and your cocky attitude while writing it, the wikipedia just gave me an easy way to make fun of you (incidentally, so would a "Rocks for Jocks" textbook).
And neither I nor the origional poster claimed you could compare the survival rates of our ancestors (be they primates or simple animals), in fact he argued the exact opposite. So yes he was correct, even though (as I stated before) sponge-like animals are probably not what he meant when he mentioned "our ancestors".
Please excuse any typos as it is late, and excuse any mean-spirted sarcastic remarks as I am too tired to take crap from people who think that because they have the wikipedia as their homepage, they know everything there is to know about the world.
I think what the gp was saying wasn't that such a technology doesn't exist, but that there is not yet a standard "application browser" that is ubiquitous enough that it can be relied on.
Seriously, do you think they call it the "North Star" because it tells you if you north of something? GPS devices may or may not tell you which direction you are pointing (its possible they can by keying off of the direction to the satellite, but I don't own such a device so I can't tell for sure), but I can assure you that our ancestors have used the stars to tell which way is North, South, East, and West for years. Hell I do it all the time when I'm driving and I don't know where I am. If it is in the evening (I don't need the exact time, just a general idea will work), the direction of the sun is West. If it is in the morning, the direction of the sun is East. Midday is a bit harder, but since I am north of the equator, the sun will be slightly South of me.
Actually I'm pretty sure there weren't any human beings alive 780,000 years ago when this last occured. The 'ancestors' that were mentioned were something more along the lines of Homo erectus.
Well sure, if by "peridically" you mean completely at random, with the length of time averaging a couple hundred thousand years. But that alone won't be often enough to prompt the natural selection needed to evolve a mechanism for handling magnetic field reversals. Its possible that something very simple could evolve over the thousand years or so in which the field is shrinking, but that would likely be lost over the next few hundred thousand years in which it wouldn't be used. A lot has happened since the last time one of these occured, including the evolution of a bunch of monkeys throwing crap around to human beings (ok, maybe not that much has changed after all).
That being said, you are not going to see birds flying into buildings like in that stupid movie "The Core", anymore than it would cause boy scouts to walk into lakes because their compasses are off. Birds don't just blindly fly by the magnetic field alone, their main tool for navigation is their eyes.
No, our monkey ancestors were not around. But some form of our ancestors were. And I'm sure there were magnetic field reversals then as well. So he is right (even if that wasn't what he meant).
Well if you want to be technical about it, he is a mathematician, not a scientist.
It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
Freedom of speech means that you have the freedom to express your opinions freely, not that the taxpayers have to supply you with the means to post your life story for every pedophile with a hard-on to read.
Thats how its spelled in the /. summary. The problem isn't that he misread it, its that he assumed the editors knew how to spell (or at least copy and past correctly).
So you are saying you think people in Samoa still could have seen the trial run of the space suits (in North Dakota) when this story came out? I don't think you fully understand how timezones work...
First of all... what do you mean by "first it was communists"? Are you trying to argue that the American people feared nothing before the USSR? The quote you were replying to mentioned Pearl Harbor, which alone seems enough to contradict that claim. Unless you were under the impression Japan was a communist nation...
Anyways, the first major successful attack on American soil by a foreign terrorist group in recent memory dramatically changes the psyche of the citizens of any country. And unless your life consists of sitting in your mama's basement isolated from people, such a change is tantamount to the world changing. Yes, there were terrorists out there on September 10th 2001, and yes they had made attacks elsewhere in the world, but seeing planes crash into building in New York and Virginia (no, not Washington DC for those of you who don't know where the Pentagon is located) is much different than hearing about a suicide bombing in Israel. Yes, both are tragic, but the former brings the whole thing home to people for whom Isreal and Palestine are nothing more than scenes in the television show we call "The News".
"3,000 people died in the WTC attacks; twice as many Americans die from heart attacks in a month, and preventing their deaths doesn't require stripping people's civil liberties."
Tell that to the assholes who sue fast food restaurants for making them fat.