TFA pointed out that to execute commands under the olds system an operator needed to flawlessly key in a string with no spaces or deletes. In combat. I play a MMORPG where death is just a matter of awaiting resurrection, and I don't type long strings to give commands. That is what hot buttons are for...
You forgot to mention that the article says "shore-to-ship" not "ship-to-shore." Shore-to-ship, I suppose, has some (extremely) remote chance of passing infection to the sub, ship-to-shore would be a different risk profile.
I'm not sure I coined the term, but as I understood it to be being used, it would encompass science-oriented, spaceflight oriented fiction (as opposed to space opera, which is what I would call most of the items on the parent list). Popular examples might be Heinlein juveniles such as 'Have Spacesuit, Will Travel' and most of his work up to the last half dozen or so books he wrote, or Niven & Pournelle - the Motie series or 'Footfall.'
Space opera includes most TV space oriented science fiction (I would actually exempt the final series of Star Treck) and movies like Star Wars, where basically you have cowboys and indians on spaceships.
I've read most of that list, and am sorry to report that I don't think they are supportive of your point. Other than Forward (and possbily WJW whom I have not read), I would not put them in the category of 'space science fiction' as the parent poster seemed to be using that term. Ben Bova's stuff - the juvenile series in particular - is probably a better counter-example. Mike Resnick also comes to mind.
On the other had, there is plenty of SF being published that is enteraining and thought provoking, just ploughing new ground. I've been reading John Scalzi, Charles Stross, and Kage Baker quite a bit lately, and am very much satisfied that SF is not yet dead. So on that basis, I don't think the parent post has made a particularly important point.
I have mod points, but alas, you are at max already. I RTFA and thought
"Think of it as evolution in action," which I first saw in a Niven/Pournelle novel. Spot on.
Additionally, I never trust a doctor that uses the excuse of unreasonably high insurance as an excuse to gouge his customers; a doctor is charged high insurance for either being too 'inexperienced' (in which case he should still be working at a hospital), or having a propensity for lawsuits (in which case trust, while not explicitly undeserved, is questionable). Sorry, but not true. Insurance works by spreading cost over 'homogenous exposure units.' Doctors, as a class, have high insurance rates, particularly in high risk practices like anasthesia and obstetrics, in large part because the nature of the work is that it is risky and the consequences for individuals can be very harsh. When things go wrong in this country, the recourse is litigation, and juries, here, love their lotteries.
Some premium variation reflects individual performance, just like your personal auto policy does, but the bulk of the cost is the result of averages, not the individual doctor. If you want lower health care cost one thing that can be done is to stop suing needlessly, and exhibit restraint if ever on a jury.
As I read your post I thought about the bus I took to work today. Fully electric, runs off overhead powerlines. Makes me wonder if the same approach could work for electric trucks on interstate highways.
Turn your point around. Assume that evolution of intelligent life is, if not routine, at least reasonably possible. No other intelligent lifeform has, to the best of our knowledge found us, and we have been detectable for several decades (say 30 to put it into the detection context of the article). Doesn't that suggest that the other explanation is not that intelligent life is not out there, but that detection technology is hard?
Let me add this thought. In addition to the points raised earlier (two good pieces, two weak pieces, for example), and assuming that your taste is sufficiently different from mine that you just wont' appreciate RAH, one big difference between you and most of the other posters is that you started with works at the late middle and end of his writing career.
I started reading RAH in the 50's, and when I read Stranger in a Strange Land (for the first of well over 20 times)it was just published, I was in college, and it was so totally different from the SF of the day, and from RAH's prior work (except for the Jubal character. He's in every book somewhere) that had elements of epithany.
I am hard pressed to think of things that I have read in my life that I can to this day recall so vividly - possibly the scene in Catch-22 where the nurse swtiches bottles on the Soldier in White comes close.
It is almost certainly too late for you to start where I did, but that is, I think, the explanation.
"...but not nearly as reliably inspired or executed."
Get both versions of Stranger in a Strange Land, put them next to each other, and read the first paragraphs in parallel.
"Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michal Smith" (quoted from memory).
It is a pretty dramatic line, one that grabs the reader's attention. Read the start of the "Authors Edition" that came out a few years ago. Wait a minute and try and recall the first paragraph. Nothing memorable at all.
This comparison shows the value of good editing even for a serious author like Heinlein. My thesis is that when an author becomes more and more popular, he or she starts to feel above the editing process. That is when bloat creeps (or stomps as the case may be) in.
I found bloat to be the case in the last several books that Heinlein wrote. Another place to see the effect is in the later works of Tom Clancy (His stuff, not the group projects).
As for Spider, I am in the minority. I had to force myself to finish Variable Star. The fundamental characteristic of Heinlein juveniles, to me, is a compentent, optimistic hero who perseveres though force of character. Spider's hero was a disappointment in that regard.
Also, if it were me 'collaborating' with RAH, I would have lost the puns. Love'em in the Callahan series and elsewhere, but they were out of place in this work.
False dichotomy. There is more than one reason to 'pick up on these same strategies.' Incompentence is one of the less likely explanations, since were that the case you would see the behavrior attempted, albeit poorly, which is not the case.
Suppose the paper ballots were collected, and then some randomly selected proportion of them manually counted in arrears. This would reveal massive fraud, although it might miss 'lucky' instances of very localized fraud.
Mine was the first model with a 5MB HD. Lugged that sucker all over Europe one trip. That was back in the day when airport scanners were first being put into practice. I vividly recall some tense moments with a secruity guard in Zurich who was very uncooperative about scanning my 'luggable.'
KFOG 104.5 (San Francisco) broadcasts in HD, and is employee owned. It is also available for streaming at kfog.com. KFOG progrsms ClassincRock/best of modern rock. There are commercials for sure, but not to an onerous extent.
Do you have any idea how long it takes a reasonably competent pratitioner with Internet access to unlock even a password protected Excel spreadsheet. I have seen it done, start to finish in under a minute.
If you want it to be auditable and dependable, find another medium than a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are about doing stuff quickly; apps written in spreadsheets have too much opportunity to run wild.
My firm began a Lotus Notes client service related system that included project managment, contact managment, correspondence management, and document storage for worldwide clients (we are an insurance broker) with our first accounts going live in 1996. Some of those accounts have been on the system ever since, with files easily in the gigabyte range by now.
I still use the system (or its current incarnation) every day for the projects that I manage, and I have to say it has been extremely reliable (effectively no down time I can ever recall) and few if any crashes of any kind.
Since I was the business sponsor in 1996 I may be biased, but for sercurity and durability this system beats the hell out of any of the other approaches we have taken including web based apps & LAN based document storage (don't get me started on that!).
Jason gets my vote, too. Here are a couple of issues I noted using IE from work machine (6.0.2800.1106):
The top bar on the page is split in half vertically in the center. The two sections do not quite align.
The "L" connectors for the box arround articles are off for both the top and bottom left side corners.
The next to last article "Linux: Awesome..." showed up only as a text section for the headline; no formatted as the others, no article.
The cookie at the end of the article could use a font size increase
I'm with you on this one. Enjoyed most everthing Haldeman has done; forgot my copy of Strange et al on a plane 3/4 of the way through it and have not regretted that loss since.
Who's modding this insightful? His response to the first of the three points misread the point completely. The example was of the property owner shouting fire which not only would be illegal, it SHOULD be illegal.
His other responses are, frankly, gibberish.
Someones' moderator privileges need to be reconsidered.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA pointed out that to execute commands under the olds system an operator needed to flawlessly key in a string with no spaces or deletes. In combat. I play a MMORPG where death is just a matter of awaiting resurrection, and I don't type long strings to give commands. That is what hot buttons are for...
You forgot to mention that the article says "shore-to-ship" not "ship-to-shore." Shore-to-ship, I suppose, has some (extremely) remote chance of passing infection to the sub, ship-to-shore would be a different risk profile.
I'm not sure I coined the term, but as I understood it to be being used, it would encompass science-oriented, spaceflight oriented fiction (as opposed to space opera, which is what I would call most of the items on the parent list). Popular examples might be Heinlein juveniles such as 'Have Spacesuit, Will Travel' and most of his work up to the last half dozen or so books he wrote, or Niven & Pournelle - the Motie series or 'Footfall.' Space opera includes most TV space oriented science fiction (I would actually exempt the final series of Star Treck) and movies like Star Wars, where basically you have cowboys and indians on spaceships.
I've read most of that list, and am sorry to report that I don't think they are supportive of your point. Other than Forward (and possbily WJW whom I have not read), I would not put them in the category of 'space science fiction' as the parent poster seemed to be using that term. Ben Bova's stuff - the juvenile series in particular - is probably a better counter-example. Mike Resnick also comes to mind. On the other had, there is plenty of SF being published that is enteraining and thought provoking, just ploughing new ground. I've been reading John Scalzi, Charles Stross, and Kage Baker quite a bit lately, and am very much satisfied that SF is not yet dead. So on that basis, I don't think the parent post has made a particularly important point.
I have mod points, but alas, you are at max already. I RTFA and thought "Think of it as evolution in action," which I first saw in a Niven/Pournelle novel. Spot on.
As I read your post I thought about the bus I took to work today. Fully electric, runs off overhead powerlines. Makes me wonder if the same approach could work for electric trucks on interstate highways.
Game, Set, Match. Time to move on.
Turn your point around. Assume that evolution of intelligent life is, if not routine, at least reasonably possible. No other intelligent lifeform has, to the best of our knowledge found us, and we have been detectable for several decades (say 30 to put it into the detection context of the article). Doesn't that suggest that the other explanation is not that intelligent life is not out there, but that detection technology is hard?
Let me add this thought. In addition to the points raised earlier (two good pieces, two weak pieces, for example), and assuming that your taste is sufficiently different from mine that you just wont' appreciate RAH, one big difference between you and most of the other posters is that you started with works at the late middle and end of his writing career.
I started reading RAH in the 50's, and when I read Stranger in a Strange Land (for the first of well over 20 times)it was just published, I was in college, and it was so totally different from the SF of the day, and from RAH's prior work (except for the Jubal character. He's in every book somewhere) that had elements of epithany.
I am hard pressed to think of things that I have read in my life that I can to this day recall so vividly - possibly the scene in Catch-22 where the nurse swtiches bottles on the Soldier in White comes close.
It is almost certainly too late for you to start where I did, but that is, I think, the explanation.
It is a pretty dramatic line, one that grabs the reader's attention. Read the start of the "Authors Edition" that came out a few years ago. Wait a minute and try and recall the first paragraph. Nothing memorable at all.
This comparison shows the value of good editing even for a serious author like Heinlein. My thesis is that when an author becomes more and more popular, he or she starts to feel above the editing process. That is when bloat creeps (or stomps as the case may be) in.
I found bloat to be the case in the last several books that Heinlein wrote. Another place to see the effect is in the later works of Tom Clancy (His stuff, not the group projects).
As for Spider, I am in the minority. I had to force myself to finish Variable Star. The fundamental characteristic of Heinlein juveniles, to me, is a compentent, optimistic hero who perseveres though force of character. Spider's hero was a disappointment in that regard.
Also, if it were me 'collaborating' with RAH, I would have lost the puns. Love'em in the Callahan series and elsewhere, but they were out of place in this work.
False dichotomy. There is more than one reason to 'pick up on these same strategies.' Incompentence is one of the less likely explanations, since were that the case you would see the behavrior attempted, albeit poorly, which is not the case.
Suppose the paper ballots were collected, and then some randomly selected proportion of them manually counted in arrears. This would reveal massive fraud, although it might miss 'lucky' instances of very localized fraud.
Mine was the first model with a 5MB HD. Lugged that sucker all over Europe one trip. That was back in the day when airport scanners were first being put into practice. I vividly recall some tense moments with a secruity guard in Zurich who was very uncooperative about scanning my 'luggable.'
KFOG 104.5 (San Francisco) broadcasts in HD, and is employee owned. It is also available for streaming at kfog.com. KFOG progrsms ClassincRock/best of modern rock. There are commercials for sure, but not to an onerous extent.
Do you have any idea how long it takes a reasonably competent pratitioner with Internet access to unlock even a password protected Excel spreadsheet. I have seen it done, start to finish in under a minute. If you want it to be auditable and dependable, find another medium than a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are about doing stuff quickly; apps written in spreadsheets have too much opportunity to run wild.
My firm began a Lotus Notes client service related system that included project managment, contact managment, correspondence management, and document storage for worldwide clients (we are an insurance broker) with our first accounts going live in 1996. Some of those accounts have been on the system ever since, with files easily in the gigabyte range by now. I still use the system (or its current incarnation) every day for the projects that I manage, and I have to say it has been extremely reliable (effectively no down time I can ever recall) and few if any crashes of any kind. Since I was the business sponsor in 1996 I may be biased, but for sercurity and durability this system beats the hell out of any of the other approaches we have taken including web based apps & LAN based document storage (don't get me started on that!).
Just a guess, but perhaps Skype has a role in this?
Hmmm. Probably not gonna happen. Lotus Notes anyone?
Jason gets my vote, too. Here are a couple of issues I noted using IE from work machine (6.0.2800.1106): The top bar on the page is split in half vertically in the center. The two sections do not quite align. The "L" connectors for the box arround articles are off for both the top and bottom left side corners. The next to last article "Linux: Awesome..." showed up only as a text section for the headline; no formatted as the others, no article. The cookie at the end of the article could use a font size increase
I'm with you on this one. Enjoyed most everthing Haldeman has done; forgot my copy of Strange et al on a plane 3/4 of the way through it and have not regretted that loss since.
Why the mod down? Obligatory reference to Brave New World, not so?
Don't you mean "All your bays are belong to us?"
Sounds like the acceptance speech for a Darwin, if you ask me.
Who's modding this insightful? His response to the first of the three points misread the point completely. The example was of the property owner shouting fire which not only would be illegal, it SHOULD be illegal. His other responses are, frankly, gibberish. Someones' moderator privileges need to be reconsidered.