Thematically, I prefer science fiction to fantasy. I've read some good fantasy, but it just doesn't inherently grab me the way that SF does. If I had to choose between an unknown fantasy book and an unknown science fiction book, I'd pick the latter. The fantasy genre is very homogenous compared to SF - the worlds and ideas it explores are too similar to remain interesting for long. It's more focused on adventure with magic than exploring interesting concepts, and too much of it consists of poorly executed Tolkien rip-offs. Sometimes I'm in the mood for that, but not all the time.
Within what is commonly defined as the genre of "science fiction", I'm an eclectic. I don't mind if it's not "hard" SF. I don't mind if the "science" is botany or sociology. I don't mind if there's telepathy or race memory. I don't mind if the story is more about people than science, as long as it has something interesting to say. I'd rather read something with minimal human interest than something full of human interaction that reads like Mills & Boon (*cough*peterfhamilton*cough*) (for much the same reason that I prefer my old SF to contain no women and no computers if the alternative is stupid, vacuous women and hilariously inaccurately predicted computers).
The important thing is that I want to feel like I'm reading a story about a real world which works according to logical rules, given a set of assumptions (some of which can be fantastic). If something flagrantly stupid breaks my suspension of disbelief, I enjoy the story less. This is why I don't like cyberpunk very much. I imagine that physicists feel the same way about FTL. I think the definition of "flagrantly stupid" varies according to one's expertise in a particular field.
My specific reading habits have partially been formed by my book purchasing habits. In South Africa, new books (which are not published here) are heinously expensive, so I never buy a new book unless 1) I really like the author and 2) it's a new book, not a new edition of something I could get in second hand for a twentieth of the price (a twentieth, seriously). This isn't as much of a factor now that I have a job, but it was very important when I didn't.
My knowledge of older SF is the broadest and most extensive, because I could get piles and piles of old books without worrying about whether I was really going to like them. I read a lot of the old masters. Then there's a big gap around the eighties, and then a scattering of new writers that I like.
Recently, a local chain of stores which sells remaindered books and magazines imported from the UK has vastly improved its merchandise, and I am often able to find good recent hardcovers - so I'm discovering more recent authors.
The sci-fi channel does the exact opposite. They take a dramatic story about people, and glom some irrelevant spacy/sciency stuff onto the story and call it science fiction. It's forgettable crap, and it completely ignores what makes science fiction great...the science! I'm all for women having an alternative to the lifetime channel and oprah, but it would be nice if they were drawn to actual science fiction...rather than 'Days of Our Lives in space'.
Well, if somebody actually made a TV series like that, I would be drawn to it. Unfortunately, that has yet to happen. The average person, irrespective of gender, isn't very interested in maths or science, and until that changes we are not going to be seeing any hard SF on TV. It's the diluted product, or nothing.
Look, it was either that or the old "How come he's French but speaks with an English accent" one that we've all heard a thousand times before.
For the same reason that Klingons speak English to each other in private, obviously. His normal voice must be so incomprehensible that he's being dubbed into British Newsreader English by the Magical Universal Translator.
My main problem with Star Trek as science fiction is not the specific gimmicks which are so ridiculous that they must be fantastic, but the way they affect (or rather do not affect) the world around them. The existence of any or all of the established Star Trek technology in the real world would logically lead to ripple effects which would turn our society into something completely unrecognisable - yet Star Trek is a fairly ordinary space opera. Human society looks very much like it does today, except that it's in space, and they have all this neat tech which for bizarre reasons has never been taken to its logical conclusion.
It's obvious that the Star Trek writers don't think like science fiction writers. When they come up with some wacky new way to use the transporter beam, they don't consider what implications this discovery would have on the universe - they use it to save the Enterprise, and then never mention it again. There are no ripples; it disappears without a trace.
I just pretend that Star Trek is a scifi-themed superhero comic, and then it doesn't bother me. I can still enjoy the politics and the drama.
This kind of thing also happens in fantasy settings, and there the problem is usually magic - the setting is stubbornly presented as mediaeval Europe with magical bits, when the magical bits would rapidly ensure that the world no longer resembles mediaeval Europe at all.
The new Battlestar Galactica does it a lot, but it's mostly broad social phenomena rather than specific technology. Important events get forgotten at the end of each episode. These people are supposed to be refugees pursued by a dangerous foe, but they act as if it's a normal day back home. Their society appears to be a miniature replica of their normal peacetime society - if you watched the show with the sound off, you'd never guess that these are survivors of a devastating cataclysm.
Well, substitute "tight catsuit" for "short skirt" and append "with plunging neckline which, curiously, isn't part of anyone else's uniform"/"and a cosmetic bit of shiny plastic far less disfiguring than any other borg implants we've seen"/"with high heels" as appropriate. The point is the same.
This didn't stop me from enjoying Star Trek, since it has consistently been a show in which the women can be interesting and sensible characters in spite of their "look, boobs!" costumes (I can't speak for TOS; I haven't seen enough of it), but that doesn't mean there isn't blatant fanservice. I don't find the silly costuming any sillier than various bits of Star Trek "science", which I accept wholesale as a kind of comic-book super-power premise, and knowing the motivations behind it doesn't make me care any more. But it irritates some women enough that it decreases their enjoyment of the show.
I don't think that Xena is any better in this regard, though, so I doubt that this in particular is a major deciding factor for all these women who have started to like the SciFi Channel. The introduction of more fantasy probably has a lot more to do with it, since this genre has traditionally attracted more women. But since there is very little pure science fiction on television anyway, I don't think this will remain much of a factor in the long run. I doubt that there is much of a split in what specific shows people of different genders watch at the moment.
Well, actually, your level 5 elf could defeat a level 10 "goblin king" in DnD, if a) you got lucky and happened to keep rolling twenties and getting to double (or triple) your damage (or rolled twenty three times in a row and decapitated him instantly) and/or he kept missing you, or (more importantly) b) you thought outside the box and outsmarted him in some interesting and worthy way instead of charging into certain death like an idiot.
A crappy DM will make the entire game a boring number-fest, but a good DM will reward player ingenuity. That is the whole point of playing around a table with humans who can potentially think up outrageous and unlikely things, rather than against a computer, which has a limited range of responses.
But that's just DnD. Roleplaying is not DnD, just like computing is not Windows. There are plenty of other games where the system does not stratify the world as rigidly, and which rely less on number-crunching and more on in-character cunning. There are games with much less emphasis on combat.
Alternatively, perhaps we prefer science fiction and fantasy because it presents us with interesting hypothetical situations which do not exist in the real world, and thus encourages us to think more logically about things that really do exist and not simply take them for granted.
I don't avoid mainstream literature because it's too real for comfort; I avoid it because it's uninspiring and dull (Note: I don't mean this as a putdown of all mainstream novels; just most of them). There is no interesting real-world concept that cannot be explored just as well and just as seriously in a science fiction or fantasy book, with the addition of some interesting speculation that goes beyond the narrow limitations of the mundane. Setting a novel in the real world does not, in spite of what you seem to believe, automatically make it say something interesting and worthwhile about our lives.
I like roleplaying because it's fun. I like both the problem solving (and problem creating) aspect and the interactive storytelling aspect. Anyone who believes that tabletop roleplaying is not a social activity hasn't done very much of it. It's a thing you do with friends - playing a RPG online is just not the same. It's no less a social activity than sitting around at a party and talking crap, or having drinks in a bar after work. It's certainly no less worthwhile or interesting than either of those activities, or anything else classified as "socialising" by "normal people".
On a tangent, there is no inherent reason why roleplaying games should not be set in the mundane real world. Although there aren't any published tabletop game settings like this (that I am familiar with; I'm sure someone will correct me), there are plenty of LARPs which are completely free of fantastic elements. So even someone who dislikes the entire SF genre could enjoy roleplaying games - one could run a campaign about private investigators, international superspies, petty thieves or chartered accountants.
I doubt this was the case with the space-environment-suits - as far as I know, they didn't use anything more advanced than diving suit material. Of course, I'm sure that if anything better exists today, that's what's going to be used.
Pournelle's theory, as I recall, was mismanagement at NASA - but I don't have the book here and I read it a long time ago.
Arguably, one could make a space suit that was simply a skin tight layer + helmet.
NASA was experimenting with a suit like this during the sixties or seventies, according to Jerry Pournelle's science articles from the eighties. The results were apparently quite promising, but then they inexplicably dropped the project. A few months, ago, though, there was news that they were trying something similar again.
Introducing widespread use of suits like this would definitely be a major breakthrough in space exploration - the current suits are heavy, cumbersome, uncomfortable, difficult to manoeuvre in, and as far as I know really expensive to make and maintain.
The idea is to make the body out of a kind of diving suit material. I imagine that you could eliminate certain kinds of problems with gas pockets forming by having problem areas partially reinforced with something rigid and springy. Tiny holes are apparently not much of an issue, but you could probably also add protective plates to flat areas that you really don't want a tiny meteorite to penetrate.
Without lungs to collapse is the pressure really an issue?
You mean like how humans would do just fine in outer space wearing nothing but a face mask?
Actually, a human would last for quite a while in outer space wearing nothing but a face mask, and the human's eventual illness and demise, were he not to be rescued, would be unlikely to be the result of pressure*. People don't explode in hard vacuum; they asphyxiate. If for some reason they don't asphyxiate, they may freeze to death (very slowly, because they only lose heat by radiation, since there is no medium for convection), and they may be severely sunburnt if they are exposed to sunlight, because they are exposed to the dangerous radiation directly. Soft tissues can experience swelling, but it's not necessarily fatal. If someone breathes in too deeply before being exposed to vacuum, they might rupture their lungs.
*I don't know if you can get the right amount of oxygen by breathing shallowly enough through a face mask not to rupture your lungs if you have the same air mix you normally use. But a different air mix should fix that problem.
The pressure difference between sea level and hard vacuum is only one atmosphere. All the spectacular explosive decompression accidents happen to divers, who can potentially undergo an abrupt change in pressure which is much higher than that. And the problem is abrupt changes in pressure. If a squid travels to the surface of the water very slowly, gradually acclimatising itself to the change in pressure, there's no inherent reason for it to experience any ill effects.
I usually prefer subtitles - I can read quickly, so I don't find them a hassle to keep up with* - but it really depends on who did the dub or sub and how much effort and skill was involved. I thought that the dubbed British version of Hellsing was enormously better than the incoherent fansub that I had previously seen (I thought it was completely arbitrary when I watched a few episodes of the sub, but I really enjoyed the dub and watched the whole thing).
On the other hand, I saw the subbed DVD of Brotherhood of the Wolf (a live action French movie), and thought it was pretty cool. Some time later, my parents rented the dubbed video - and it was horrible. Apparently the producers thought it would be really cool if the actual actors did their own English voice-overs - and it didn't occur to them that they would sound really stitled and artificial belting out lines in a foreign language that they don't speak very well (if at all).
I think it's a lot easier to produce a good sub than a good dub, because it is much easier to find one or two excellent bilingual writers than to assemble a cast of talented voice actors.
* Hilariously, the GITS 2: Innocence fansub I saw alternates between leaving out half the dialogue (so you have no idea what is actually happening in the movie a lot of the time) and providing kilometres of exposition to explain literary references (because people who watch anime are illiterate plebes, or something). Usually, however, the subtitles are easy to follow.
I definitely wouldn't trade places with you for "the world"!
She should be fired just for that misuse of quotation marks.
Urgh, yes. That's a shooting offence. Not to mention the god-awful spelling and grammar they're both guilty of, the multiple exclamation marks, the top-posting and the reply-all. And the immense stupidity of not investigating the eerily similar lunch in the neighbouring floor's refrigerator (which presumably wasn't a long walk away) before spouting off further. You're fired!
And "It is just a silly girl thing that got out of control."? *gag*. No, it's not a "girl thing", it's a "juvenile asshat" thing.
How about fixing the patent system instead, and getting rid of the brain-dead software patent examiners who have no clue what's "obvious to someone in the field" or not?
Well, the problem is that while I'm sure many proponents of this scheme would like to do that instead, and get rid of the core problem, they can't. It is not in their power.
I would very much like to see copyright reduced to something reasonable, and the public domain restored to what it used to be. I can rant about how much I would like this to happen until I'm blue in the face, but I don't have the power to directly influence anyone who could make it happen.
In the meantime, copyleft licences are a way for me and people and like me to actually do something which makes a difference and at least reduce the problem, because they have created a body of information which is a sort of public domain, but which is protected from poaching by the same laws which are currently screwing over the actual public domain.
This new licence would give us a similar opportunity to actually do something to try to retaliate against DRM and software patents. It may not work as well, and it may have unfortunate repercussions, but saying that it's a bad idea because we should be looking at the root cause of the problem isn't a very good counter-argument. How are we supposed to do that? Write to politicians? Get elected to office? Stage a coup? The first option is ineffectual, and the other two require dedicated effort and a complete career change.
The problem with criticising bad laws is that it isn't enough to recognise that they're bad, or to come up with an ingenious hypothetical set of alternative laws which would be just great. In order to actually achieve a change, you need a plan for getting from here to there - and I have yet to hear a better plan for getting rid of software patents or DRM than encouraging the use of retaliatory licences.
...throwing in things like roots, shells, and crappy application installs are only going to confuse them more.
[...]
Make applications easy to install...maybe even make them install dependecies automatically.
My god, what a brilliant and novel concept! You mean like what almost every mainstream Linux distro available today does? I keep hearing about these "difficult installations" and this "dependency hell" of which you speak, and I have to wonder - have you actually looked at Linux since 1995?*
* Yes, the installation/upgrade systems even have graphical interfaces! You can just click a button to upgrade everything installed on your computer! Amazing!
There are reasonably idiot-proof distros which give you a default install with one WM picked out for you, and one of each kind of application picked out for you, and all the apps renamed to things like "mail", "browser", "text editor".
All the tools required to create a really, really, really dumbed down distro for the really, really computer-illiterate already exist. A very minimalist WM with big buttons for "mail", "browser", "text-writer" and "music-player" would keep 75% of grandmothers happy. But nobody has made such a distro, as far as I know, probably because nobody is sufficiently interested. But it's definitely do-able.
The problem with your approach (hiding the real application names, removing choice and otherwise treating the user like an idiot) is that it gives the user no opportunity to learn how to use the computer better.
There's a whole other rant in here, but I have to run, so I'll have to truncate this abrup
I think a better question one might ask of this research, to be honest, is "What is wrong with the IQ test that it reveals a gender difference where there ought not to be one?"
I don't think it's necessarily the case that there "ought not to be" trends based on gender in IQ test results, or the results of any other metric which attempts to measure intelligence.
It's entirely possible that within the current world population women are on average "more stupid" than men, where "stupidity" can mean a variety of things - ignorance of basic facts about the world, lack of mathematical aptitude, lack of language skills, lack of the ability to reason and construct chains of logic, or all of the above.
What I have a problem with is all the people leaping to claim that this is necessarily and obviously a "natural", "genetic" or "evolutionary" difference. Bullshit. It may be a nice story, and it may make you feel warm and fuzzy inside and validate your brilliant personal theories based on a sample space consisting of your mum and your two ex-girlfriends, but that doesn't make it true.
While I don't deny that there are genetic factors to intelligence, what you do with your brain in life matters a great deal. If you go to university, read a lot, solve problems for fun, and otherwise stimulate yourself by engaging in activities which require thought, you will be "smarter" than someone who drops out of school and spends the remainder of his or her life performing dull, repetitive tasks which make brains turn into jelly. If your parents were too poor to buy you interesting toys when you were small, or if they came from homes where people don't read books, you were probably slightly disadvantaged from the start.
So, how are women disadvantaged in their intellectual development?
In spite of some loud, noticeable examples of feminism in our society - the existence of very vocal and prominent feminists, the existence of policies which ostensibly promote egalitarian principles (but seldom actually do), the hysterical complaints of people who think we're being overrun because the gender situation has changed slightly - men and women are still clearly not equal. They do not, in general, behave in the same way or do the same kinds of things. Enforcing political correctness doesn't magically make people think differently or rewrite centuries of hard-wired cultural attitudes.
(Feminism, in fact, does not preach egalitarianism - it teaches that women are special and different, and that their special differences should be accomodated.)
Most of our society (some parts more than others) is still actually very conservative when it comes to gender roles, and many women, even women who are educated and have jobs, still conform to traditional female roles where it matters - and this situation is perpetuating itself. In spite of our pretence of being an egalitarian society, we treat boys and girls differently. Boys are encouraged to be smart and successful. Girls don't really have to be, and they may in fact be considered undesirable if they are.
So I wouldn't be surprised to discover that fewer women than men, on average, habitually perform tasks which stimulate their brains - and thus that men are smarter than women, on average.
The knowledge itself wouldn't make me particularly upset - just the way in which it would probably be misused by people who don't understand what it means, and what it doesn't mean. If it leads to people saying that it's OK to only have 30% female managers at a company, because there aren't enough women qualified to be managers for it to be 50%, that's fine. If it leads to employers not bothering to interview a woman for a position, because they believe that she is less likely to be qualified for the job than a man with the exact same CV, that's bad. And also makes no logical sense, but that's never stopped anyone before.
This isn't a flashing thing. I don't have pop-ups or other intrusive notification mechanisms to tell me that the feed reader has a new update. It just does its stuff silently, and I have a look whenever I'm feeling bored. It's kind of like email.
Actually, RSS has made me slightly more productive at work. Before, when I was feeling lazy, I would often take a break by refreshing a folder full of news sites and waiting for them to load. And then, ten minutes later, I might do it again - just in case something terribly exciting had happened while I wasn't looking. Now that I have feeds, I am notified when updates happen, and I can't keep reloading all the feeds I'm watching before the refresh interval is up because then I might get my IP banned from Slashdot again. So I no longer have this excuse for wasting time.
Now I can spend much more time posting my ramblings on assorted internet forums.
RSS is not primarily intended for offline browsing[1]. It's a mechanism for notifying you when a page has changed.
I don't want to have to reload the huge group of news sites, blogs and other periodically updated pages that I find interesting in my browser every hour to see if anything has changed. It's a waste of time and a waste of bandwidth, since there's a good chance that half of them haven't been updated at any given time.
I recently set up a feed reader. Every now and then I go past the workspace which has the feed reader open, and I flip through the headlines. If I see something interesting, I follow the link to the full text on the website. Since I only find a small percentage of news headlines interesting enough to follow up, I don't mind not receiving the full text in my feed reader. It would be a waste of bandwidth.
I subscribe to about forty feeds - that's many more sites than I was manageably able to follow using the refresh-a-bunch-of-pages-occasionally method. I can also actually keep up with very infrequently updated sites now - I just add the feed, and if there's some activity a month later, I'll know about it. Before, I would inevitably lose track of pages like this, because it really wasn't worthwhile to add them to my regular refresh list.
The bandwidth that feeds use up can indeed be a problem if people refresh their feeds every five minutes. This is a practical limitation of the technology, but I don't think that the workaround (discouraging too-frequent refreshing) makes it less useful. It makes no difference to me in practice whether my feed reader refreshes every five minutes or every hour, because I don't check on my feeds every five minutes anyway, so I use the global hourly interval, except for feeds which suggest a shorter one.[2]
RSS has certainly been very useful to me. If it's not useful to you, then you possibly just don't have the problems to which it is a solution.
1. Some feeds, like those generated for most blogs, include the full body text - so you can quite successully use feeds for browsing some pages offline.
2. Most modern feed readers set a long refresh interval for you by default, and inform you that making the interval too short is frowned upon.
Dude, in developing countries, books which have to be imported from overseas are more expensive than they are in the countries where they are printed. So take the most horrendously overpriced textbook you can think of which was printed in your country. In an African country, it probably costs twice as much.
Book prices are ludicrous in South Africa, which is considerably better off than other Sub-Saharan African countries - even the prices of mass-produced popular novels, which are probably imported in huge numbers. Take anything more obscure, like a textbook, and it's more expensive. Also, textbooks are much larger, and many are only available in hardcover.
There's a range of textbooks (made by Oxford University Press, I think) printed in softcover on lower quality paper, which are cheaper and can only legally be distributed in the developing world. It's a nice idea, but unfortunately I don't think anyone else is doing it.
My university textbooks were heinously expensive. They are totally outside the price range of very poor families here. Without financial assistance from universities and scholarship funds, many students would be unable to get them.
A person who can afford to have a computer here generally doesn't care about the cost of a couple of CDs. People burn stuff for themselves and their friends all the time; it's like buying paper. Next to what I believe is the original toaster, there's a vending machine with extremely cheap (and thus probably extremely crappy) CDs. Better CDs cost more, but given the disposable nature of linux distros I've never felt the need to get them for this.
We have atrocious internet access here. I think if you worked out the costs of downloading a huge distro over dial-up, it would work out to more than the cost of petrol and a couple of CDs - even if you have the special which puts a cap on the charge for a single phonecall during off-peak hours. I don't know if it's actually possible to download something as big as Fedora over one weekend.
It's a bit less dire for people with broadband, but broadband is heinously expensive, and there's a nasty bandwidth cap on the only available ADSL package, which is what most people with broadband have.
All in all, driving down to the shopping centre and burning some CDs is a hell of a lot more convenient. Which demonstrates how crappy our connectivity is, really. At least we have good cellphones.:)
What kind of system you use should depend on how much system-detail you want in your game, and what kind of feel you would like the game to have. There possibly isn't any system which is perfect for what you want to do, but you could just nick the mechanic from somewhere and ignore the rest, since you seem to want to use the setting from the sourcebook you have.
Have you ever looked at the Unknown Armies system? It has nice, simple mechanics and some good ideas which I think can be used in any setting.
It's based on a percentile roll. Under special circumstances, you can flip your dice to get a different result (for example, change 93 to 39). Doubles are extraordinary failures or successes (since they can't be flipped). There's a botch and an amazing success. Damage is calculated from the attack roll (something I really like). There is a list of skills, but you can make up your own skills as well. There is a psychological well-being gauge which is more complex than Cthulhu's sanity system, and which may or may not be appropriate for you depending on what your setting is like.
The advantages: it's dead simple. There is no adding of millions on numbers together, and no flipping through the book to find Obscure Rule no. 349, clause A: "Fighting with your off-hand uphill in the rain while under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs". The system is designed for character-based games - special abilities that characters have are based directly on important parts of their personality. This means that a character's history and personality are actually important to the game, and not just a veneer of flavour painted over combat stats.
Disadvantages: because it's so simple and freeform, it can be broken and abused by power gamers and rules lawyers. People who like having well-defined boundaries and rules for what can happen will probably not like the vagueness. The DM cannot rely on an encyclopaedic reference of cases to fall back on in the case of a dispute, and will have to wing it. The players have to trust the DM's judgement in situations where no rule exists and a decision has to be made (that bit, mind you, is true of any similar freeform gaming system). The combat system is very simple (although I'm sure you can add various weapon bonuses and things to make it more complex), which may not please people who like complex combat systems.
I think the system is great for once-off adventures with pre-generated characters. I've never played in a campaign (although I know of several successful campaigns), so I don't know if the vagueness becomes a problem over time. I imagine it depends on the GM and the players.
Most of the UA sourcebooks deal with the UA setting; I don't think the section with the rules themselves is very long. If you want to check them out I suggest *cough* borrowing the book from a friend *cough*.
The redundancy is still there. It would probably be best if you removed "business-wise" from the beginning of the sentence. Also, "Kick" is still capitalised. And "to kick", while technically correct, sounds somewhat odd in its current position in the sentence; changing it to "kicking" may make it scan better. And there should be a comma after "more". And I shouldn't start sentences with "and"; bad me.
So I suggest:
"In publishing, kicking out as many thick books as one can with the promise of teaching people how to do something they don't understand, while basically confusing or intimidating them more, is great for business."
Well, "is great for business" is redundant, since you've already said that it's a great idea business-wise at the start of the sentence. It also makes the sentence not make sense anymore, since you're saying "A great idea is to do something is something else". Also, why is "Kick" capitalised?
It's much better, though.:) Using third person plural pronouns as gender-insensitive third person singular pronouns isn't really correct, but I do it all the time when I speak, so I can't be too much of a grammar nazi about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Thematically, I prefer science fiction to fantasy. I've read some good fantasy, but it just doesn't inherently grab me the way that SF does. If I had to choose between an unknown fantasy book and an unknown science fiction book, I'd pick the latter. The fantasy genre is very homogenous compared to SF - the worlds and ideas it explores are too similar to remain interesting for long. It's more focused on adventure with magic than exploring interesting concepts, and too much of it consists of poorly executed Tolkien rip-offs. Sometimes I'm in the mood for that, but not all the time.
Within what is commonly defined as the genre of "science fiction", I'm an eclectic. I don't mind if it's not "hard" SF. I don't mind if the "science" is botany or sociology. I don't mind if there's telepathy or race memory. I don't mind if the story is more about people than science, as long as it has something interesting to say. I'd rather read something with minimal human interest than something full of human interaction that reads like Mills & Boon (*cough*peterfhamilton*cough*) (for much the same reason that I prefer my old SF to contain no women and no computers if the alternative is stupid, vacuous women and hilariously inaccurately predicted computers).
The important thing is that I want to feel like I'm reading a story about a real world which works according to logical rules, given a set of assumptions (some of which can be fantastic). If something flagrantly stupid breaks my suspension of disbelief, I enjoy the story less. This is why I don't like cyberpunk very much. I imagine that physicists feel the same way about FTL. I think the definition of "flagrantly stupid" varies according to one's expertise in a particular field.
My specific reading habits have partially been formed by my book purchasing habits. In South Africa, new books (which are not published here) are heinously expensive, so I never buy a new book unless 1) I really like the author and 2) it's a new book, not a new edition of something I could get in second hand for a twentieth of the price (a twentieth, seriously). This isn't as much of a factor now that I have a job, but it was very important when I didn't.
My knowledge of older SF is the broadest and most extensive, because I could get piles and piles of old books without worrying about whether I was really going to like them. I read a lot of the old masters. Then there's a big gap around the eighties, and then a scattering of new writers that I like.
Recently, a local chain of stores which sells remaindered books and magazines imported from the UK has vastly improved its merchandise, and I am often able to find good recent hardcovers - so I'm discovering more recent authors.
The sci-fi channel does the exact opposite. They take a dramatic story about people, and glom some irrelevant spacy/sciency stuff onto the story and call it science fiction. It's forgettable crap, and it completely ignores what makes science fiction great...the science! I'm all for women having an alternative to the lifetime channel and oprah, but it would be nice if they were drawn to actual science fiction...rather than 'Days of Our Lives in space'.
Well, if somebody actually made a TV series like that, I would be drawn to it. Unfortunately, that has yet to happen. The average person, irrespective of gender, isn't very interested in maths or science, and until that changes we are not going to be seeing any hard SF on TV. It's the diluted product, or nothing.
Look, it was either that or the old "How come he's French but speaks with an English accent" one that we've all heard a thousand times before.
For the same reason that Klingons speak English to each other in private, obviously. His normal voice must be so incomprehensible that he's being dubbed into British Newsreader English by the Magical Universal Translator.
My main problem with Star Trek as science fiction is not the specific gimmicks which are so ridiculous that they must be fantastic, but the way they affect (or rather do not affect) the world around them. The existence of any or all of the established Star Trek technology in the real world would logically lead to ripple effects which would turn our society into something completely unrecognisable - yet Star Trek is a fairly ordinary space opera. Human society looks very much like it does today, except that it's in space, and they have all this neat tech which for bizarre reasons has never been taken to its logical conclusion.
It's obvious that the Star Trek writers don't think like science fiction writers. When they come up with some wacky new way to use the transporter beam, they don't consider what implications this discovery would have on the universe - they use it to save the Enterprise, and then never mention it again. There are no ripples; it disappears without a trace.
I just pretend that Star Trek is a scifi-themed superhero comic, and then it doesn't bother me. I can still enjoy the politics and the drama.
This kind of thing also happens in fantasy settings, and there the problem is usually magic - the setting is stubbornly presented as mediaeval Europe with magical bits, when the magical bits would rapidly ensure that the world no longer resembles mediaeval Europe at all.
The new Battlestar Galactica does it a lot, but it's mostly broad social phenomena rather than specific technology. Important events get forgotten at the end of each episode. These people are supposed to be refugees pursued by a dangerous foe, but they act as if it's a normal day back home. Their society appears to be a miniature replica of their normal peacetime society - if you watched the show with the sound off, you'd never guess that these are survivors of a devastating cataclysm.
Well, substitute "tight catsuit" for "short skirt" and append "with plunging neckline which, curiously, isn't part of anyone else's uniform"/"and a cosmetic bit of shiny plastic far less disfiguring than any other borg implants we've seen"/"with high heels" as appropriate. The point is the same.
This didn't stop me from enjoying Star Trek, since it has consistently been a show in which the women can be interesting and sensible characters in spite of their "look, boobs!" costumes (I can't speak for TOS; I haven't seen enough of it), but that doesn't mean there isn't blatant fanservice. I don't find the silly costuming any sillier than various bits of Star Trek "science", which I accept wholesale as a kind of comic-book super-power premise, and knowing the motivations behind it doesn't make me care any more. But it irritates some women enough that it decreases their enjoyment of the show.
I don't think that Xena is any better in this regard, though, so I doubt that this in particular is a major deciding factor for all these women who have started to like the SciFi Channel. The introduction of more fantasy probably has a lot more to do with it, since this genre has traditionally attracted more women. But since there is very little pure science fiction on television anyway, I don't think this will remain much of a factor in the long run. I doubt that there is much of a split in what specific shows people of different genders watch at the moment.
Well, actually, your level 5 elf could defeat a level 10 "goblin king" in DnD, if a) you got lucky and happened to keep rolling twenties and getting to double (or triple) your damage (or rolled twenty three times in a row and decapitated him instantly) and/or he kept missing you, or (more importantly) b) you thought outside the box and outsmarted him in some interesting and worthy way instead of charging into certain death like an idiot.
A crappy DM will make the entire game a boring number-fest, but a good DM will reward player ingenuity. That is the whole point of playing around a table with humans who can potentially think up outrageous and unlikely things, rather than against a computer, which has a limited range of responses.
But that's just DnD. Roleplaying is not DnD, just like computing is not Windows. There are plenty of other games where the system does not stratify the world as rigidly, and which rely less on number-crunching and more on in-character cunning. There are games with much less emphasis on combat.
Alternatively, perhaps we prefer science fiction and fantasy because it presents us with interesting hypothetical situations which do not exist in the real world, and thus encourages us to think more logically about things that really do exist and not simply take them for granted.
I don't avoid mainstream literature because it's too real for comfort; I avoid it because it's uninspiring and dull (Note: I don't mean this as a putdown of all mainstream novels; just most of them). There is no interesting real-world concept that cannot be explored just as well and just as seriously in a science fiction or fantasy book, with the addition of some interesting speculation that goes beyond the narrow limitations of the mundane. Setting a novel in the real world does not, in spite of what you seem to believe, automatically make it say something interesting and worthwhile about our lives.
I like roleplaying because it's fun. I like both the problem solving (and problem creating) aspect and the interactive storytelling aspect. Anyone who believes that tabletop roleplaying is not a social activity hasn't done very much of it. It's a thing you do with friends - playing a RPG online is just not the same. It's no less a social activity than sitting around at a party and talking crap, or having drinks in a bar after work. It's certainly no less worthwhile or interesting than either of those activities, or anything else classified as "socialising" by "normal people".
On a tangent, there is no inherent reason why roleplaying games should not be set in the mundane real world. Although there aren't any published tabletop game settings like this (that I am familiar with; I'm sure someone will correct me), there are plenty of LARPs which are completely free of fantastic elements. So even someone who dislikes the entire SF genre could enjoy roleplaying games - one could run a campaign about private investigators, international superspies, petty thieves or chartered accountants.
I doubt this was the case with the space-environment-suits - as far as I know, they didn't use anything more advanced than diving suit material. Of course, I'm sure that if anything better exists today, that's what's going to be used.
Pournelle's theory, as I recall, was mismanagement at NASA - but I don't have the book here and I read it a long time ago.
Arguably, one could make a space suit that was simply a skin tight layer + helmet.
NASA was experimenting with a suit like this during the sixties or seventies, according to Jerry Pournelle's science articles from the eighties. The results were apparently quite promising, but then they inexplicably dropped the project. A few months, ago, though, there was news that they were trying something similar again.
Introducing widespread use of suits like this would definitely be a major breakthrough in space exploration - the current suits are heavy, cumbersome, uncomfortable, difficult to manoeuvre in, and as far as I know really expensive to make and maintain.
The idea is to make the body out of a kind of diving suit material. I imagine that you could eliminate certain kinds of problems with gas pockets forming by having problem areas partially reinforced with something rigid and springy. Tiny holes are apparently not much of an issue, but you could probably also add protective plates to flat areas that you really don't want a tiny meteorite to penetrate.
Actually, a human would last for quite a while in outer space wearing nothing but a face mask, and the human's eventual illness and demise, were he not to be rescued, would be unlikely to be the result of pressure*. People don't explode in hard vacuum; they asphyxiate. If for some reason they don't asphyxiate, they may freeze to death (very slowly, because they only lose heat by radiation, since there is no medium for convection), and they may be severely sunburnt if they are exposed to sunlight, because they are exposed to the dangerous radiation directly. Soft tissues can experience swelling, but it's not necessarily fatal. If someone breathes in too deeply before being exposed to vacuum, they might rupture their lungs.
*I don't know if you can get the right amount of oxygen by breathing shallowly enough through a face mask not to rupture your lungs if you have the same air mix you normally use. But a different air mix should fix that problem.
The pressure difference between sea level and hard vacuum is only one atmosphere. All the spectacular explosive decompression accidents happen to divers, who can potentially undergo an abrupt change in pressure which is much higher than that. And the problem is abrupt changes in pressure. If a squid travels to the surface of the water very slowly, gradually acclimatising itself to the change in pressure, there's no inherent reason for it to experience any ill effects.
I usually prefer subtitles - I can read quickly, so I don't find them a hassle to keep up with* - but it really depends on who did the dub or sub and how much effort and skill was involved. I thought that the dubbed British version of Hellsing was enormously better than the incoherent fansub that I had previously seen (I thought it was completely arbitrary when I watched a few episodes of the sub, but I really enjoyed the dub and watched the whole thing).
On the other hand, I saw the subbed DVD of Brotherhood of the Wolf (a live action French movie), and thought it was pretty cool. Some time later, my parents rented the dubbed video - and it was horrible. Apparently the producers thought it would be really cool if the actual actors did their own English voice-overs - and it didn't occur to them that they would sound really stitled and artificial belting out lines in a foreign language that they don't speak very well (if at all).
I think it's a lot easier to produce a good sub than a good dub, because it is much easier to find one or two excellent bilingual writers than to assemble a cast of talented voice actors.
* Hilariously, the GITS 2: Innocence fansub I saw alternates between leaving out half the dialogue (so you have no idea what is actually happening in the movie a lot of the time) and providing kilometres of exposition to explain literary references (because people who watch anime are illiterate plebes, or something). Usually, however, the subtitles are easy to follow.
I thought it looked slightly different!
I posted this arbitrary comment just so I could see the pretty new comment posting page that someone else mentioned. It is indeed very pretty.
Some boxes in the new design don't seem to have enough padding (especially vertically), and look slightly off - I hope that gets tweaked.
How long until the first 733+ w3bd321gn0r with too much time on his hands makes a funky custom stylesheet?
When I read this, I had a curious sense of deja-vu, as if I had responded to this retarded argument once before. And looky here:
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF8&q=User%3A+%2Come on. It wasn't even insightful the first time.
She should be fired just for that misuse of quotation marks.
Urgh, yes. That's a shooting offence. Not to mention the god-awful spelling and grammar they're both guilty of, the multiple exclamation marks, the top-posting and the reply-all. And the immense stupidity of not investigating the eerily similar lunch in the neighbouring floor's refrigerator (which presumably wasn't a long walk away) before spouting off further. You're fired!
And "It is just a silly girl thing that got out of control."? *gag*. No, it's not a "girl thing", it's a "juvenile asshat" thing.
How about fixing the patent system instead, and getting rid of the brain-dead software patent examiners who have no clue what's "obvious to someone in the field" or not?
Well, the problem is that while I'm sure many proponents of this scheme would like to do that instead, and get rid of the core problem, they can't. It is not in their power.
I would very much like to see copyright reduced to something reasonable, and the public domain restored to what it used to be. I can rant about how much I would like this to happen until I'm blue in the face, but I don't have the power to directly influence anyone who could make it happen.
In the meantime, copyleft licences are a way for me and people and like me to actually do something which makes a difference and at least reduce the problem, because they have created a body of information which is a sort of public domain, but which is protected from poaching by the same laws which are currently screwing over the actual public domain.
This new licence would give us a similar opportunity to actually do something to try to retaliate against DRM and software patents. It may not work as well, and it may have unfortunate repercussions, but saying that it's a bad idea because we should be looking at the root cause of the problem isn't a very good counter-argument. How are we supposed to do that? Write to politicians? Get elected to office? Stage a coup? The first option is ineffectual, and the other two require dedicated effort and a complete career change.
The problem with criticising bad laws is that it isn't enough to recognise that they're bad, or to come up with an ingenious hypothetical set of alternative laws which would be just great. In order to actually achieve a change, you need a plan for getting from here to there - and I have yet to hear a better plan for getting rid of software patents or DRM than encouraging the use of retaliatory licences.
[...]
Make applications easy to install...maybe even make them install dependecies automatically.
My god, what a brilliant and novel concept! You mean like what almost every mainstream Linux distro available today does? I keep hearing about these "difficult installations" and this "dependency hell" of which you speak, and I have to wonder - have you actually looked at Linux since 1995?*
* Yes, the installation/upgrade systems even have graphical interfaces! You can just click a button to upgrade everything installed on your computer! Amazing!
There are reasonably idiot-proof distros which give you a default install with one WM picked out for you, and one of each kind of application picked out for you, and all the apps renamed to things like "mail", "browser", "text editor".
All the tools required to create a really, really, really dumbed down distro for the really, really computer-illiterate already exist. A very minimalist WM with big buttons for "mail", "browser", "text-writer" and "music-player" would keep 75% of grandmothers happy. But nobody has made such a distro, as far as I know, probably because nobody is sufficiently interested. But it's definitely do-able.
The problem with your approach (hiding the real application names, removing choice and otherwise treating the user like an idiot) is that it gives the user no opportunity to learn how to use the computer better.
There's a whole other rant in here, but I have to run, so I'll have to truncate this abrup
I think a better question one might ask of this research, to be honest, is "What is wrong with the IQ test that it reveals a gender difference where there ought not to be one?"
I don't think it's necessarily the case that there "ought not to be" trends based on gender in IQ test results, or the results of any other metric which attempts to measure intelligence.
It's entirely possible that within the current world population women are on average "more stupid" than men, where "stupidity" can mean a variety of things - ignorance of basic facts about the world, lack of mathematical aptitude, lack of language skills, lack of the ability to reason and construct chains of logic, or all of the above.
What I have a problem with is all the people leaping to claim that this is necessarily and obviously a "natural", "genetic" or "evolutionary" difference. Bullshit. It may be a nice story, and it may make you feel warm and fuzzy inside and validate your brilliant personal theories based on a sample space consisting of your mum and your two ex-girlfriends, but that doesn't make it true.
While I don't deny that there are genetic factors to intelligence, what you do with your brain in life matters a great deal. If you go to university, read a lot, solve problems for fun, and otherwise stimulate yourself by engaging in activities which require thought, you will be "smarter" than someone who drops out of school and spends the remainder of his or her life performing dull, repetitive tasks which make brains turn into jelly. If your parents were too poor to buy you interesting toys when you were small, or if they came from homes where people don't read books, you were probably slightly disadvantaged from the start.
So, how are women disadvantaged in their intellectual development?
In spite of some loud, noticeable examples of feminism in our society - the existence of very vocal and prominent feminists, the existence of policies which ostensibly promote egalitarian principles (but seldom actually do), the hysterical complaints of people who think we're being overrun because the gender situation has changed slightly - men and women are still clearly not equal. They do not, in general, behave in the same way or do the same kinds of things. Enforcing political correctness doesn't magically make people think differently or rewrite centuries of hard-wired cultural attitudes.
(Feminism, in fact, does not preach egalitarianism - it teaches that women are special and different, and that their special differences should be accomodated.)
Most of our society (some parts more than others) is still actually very conservative when it comes to gender roles, and many women, even women who are educated and have jobs, still conform to traditional female roles where it matters - and this situation is perpetuating itself. In spite of our pretence of being an egalitarian society, we treat boys and girls differently. Boys are encouraged to be smart and successful. Girls don't really have to be, and they may in fact be considered undesirable if they are.
So I wouldn't be surprised to discover that fewer women than men, on average, habitually perform tasks which stimulate their brains - and thus that men are smarter than women, on average.
The knowledge itself wouldn't make me particularly upset - just the way in which it would probably be misused by people who don't understand what it means, and what it doesn't mean. If it leads to people saying that it's OK to only have 30% female managers at a company, because there aren't enough women qualified to be managers for it to be 50%, that's fine. If it leads to employers not bothering to interview a woman for a position, because they believe that she is less likely to be qualified for the job than a man with the exact same CV, that's bad. And also makes no logical sense, but that's never stopped anyone before.
This isn't a flashing thing. I don't have pop-ups or other intrusive notification mechanisms to tell me that the feed reader has a new update. It just does its stuff silently, and I have a look whenever I'm feeling bored. It's kind of like email.
Actually, RSS has made me slightly more productive at work. Before, when I was feeling lazy, I would often take a break by refreshing a folder full of news sites and waiting for them to load. And then, ten minutes later, I might do it again - just in case something terribly exciting had happened while I wasn't looking. Now that I have feeds, I am notified when updates happen, and I can't keep reloading all the feeds I'm watching before the refresh interval is up because then I might get my IP banned from Slashdot again. So I no longer have this excuse for wasting time.
Now I can spend much more time posting my ramblings on assorted internet forums.
RSS is not primarily intended for offline browsing[1]. It's a mechanism for notifying you when a page has changed.
I don't want to have to reload the huge group of news sites, blogs and other periodically updated pages that I find interesting in my browser every hour to see if anything has changed. It's a waste of time and a waste of bandwidth, since there's a good chance that half of them haven't been updated at any given time.
I recently set up a feed reader. Every now and then I go past the workspace which has the feed reader open, and I flip through the headlines. If I see something interesting, I follow the link to the full text on the website. Since I only find a small percentage of news headlines interesting enough to follow up, I don't mind not receiving the full text in my feed reader. It would be a waste of bandwidth.
I subscribe to about forty feeds - that's many more sites than I was manageably able to follow using the refresh-a-bunch-of-pages-occasionally method. I can also actually keep up with very infrequently updated sites now - I just add the feed, and if there's some activity a month later, I'll know about it. Before, I would inevitably lose track of pages like this, because it really wasn't worthwhile to add them to my regular refresh list.
The bandwidth that feeds use up can indeed be a problem if people refresh their feeds every five minutes. This is a practical limitation of the technology, but I don't think that the workaround (discouraging too-frequent refreshing) makes it less useful. It makes no difference to me in practice whether my feed reader refreshes every five minutes or every hour, because I don't check on my feeds every five minutes anyway, so I use the global hourly interval, except for feeds which suggest a shorter one.[2]
RSS has certainly been very useful to me. If it's not useful to you, then you possibly just don't have the problems to which it is a solution.
1. Some feeds, like those generated for most blogs, include the full body text - so you can quite successully use feeds for browsing some pages offline.
2. Most modern feed readers set a long refresh interval for you by default, and inform you that making the interval too short is frowned upon.
Dude, in developing countries, books which have to be imported from overseas are more expensive than they are in the countries where they are printed. So take the most horrendously overpriced textbook you can think of which was printed in your country. In an African country, it probably costs twice as much.
Book prices are ludicrous in South Africa, which is considerably better off than other Sub-Saharan African countries - even the prices of mass-produced popular novels, which are probably imported in huge numbers. Take anything more obscure, like a textbook, and it's more expensive. Also, textbooks are much larger, and many are only available in hardcover.
There's a range of textbooks (made by Oxford University Press, I think) printed in softcover on lower quality paper, which are cheaper and can only legally be distributed in the developing world. It's a nice idea, but unfortunately I don't think anyone else is doing it.
My university textbooks were heinously expensive. They are totally outside the price range of very poor families here. Without financial assistance from universities and scholarship funds, many students would be unable to get them.
A person who can afford to have a computer here generally doesn't care about the cost of a couple of CDs. People burn stuff for themselves and their friends all the time; it's like buying paper. Next to what I believe is the original toaster, there's a vending machine with extremely cheap (and thus probably extremely crappy) CDs. Better CDs cost more, but given the disposable nature of linux distros I've never felt the need to get them for this.
We have atrocious internet access here. I think if you worked out the costs of downloading a huge distro over dial-up, it would work out to more than the cost of petrol and a couple of CDs - even if you have the special which puts a cap on the charge for a single phonecall during off-peak hours. I don't know if it's actually possible to download something as big as Fedora over one weekend.
It's a bit less dire for people with broadband, but broadband is heinously expensive, and there's a nasty bandwidth cap on the only available ADSL package, which is what most people with broadband have.
All in all, driving down to the shopping centre and burning some CDs is a hell of a lot more convenient. Which demonstrates how crappy our connectivity is, really. At least we have good cellphones. :)
What kind of system you use should depend on how much system-detail you want in your game, and what kind of feel you would like the game to have. There possibly isn't any system which is perfect for what you want to do, but you could just nick the mechanic from somewhere and ignore the rest, since you seem to want to use the setting from the sourcebook you have.
Have you ever looked at the Unknown Armies system? It has nice, simple mechanics and some good ideas which I think can be used in any setting.
It's based on a percentile roll. Under special circumstances, you can flip your dice to get a different result (for example, change 93 to 39). Doubles are extraordinary failures or successes (since they can't be flipped). There's a botch and an amazing success. Damage is calculated from the attack roll (something I really like). There is a list of skills, but you can make up your own skills as well. There is a psychological well-being gauge which is more complex than Cthulhu's sanity system, and which may or may not be appropriate for you depending on what your setting is like.
The advantages: it's dead simple. There is no adding of millions on numbers together, and no flipping through the book to find Obscure Rule no. 349, clause A: "Fighting with your off-hand uphill in the rain while under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs". The system is designed for character-based games - special abilities that characters have are based directly on important parts of their personality. This means that a character's history and personality are actually important to the game, and not just a veneer of flavour painted over combat stats.
Disadvantages: because it's so simple and freeform, it can be broken and abused by power gamers and rules lawyers. People who like having well-defined boundaries and rules for what can happen will probably not like the vagueness. The DM cannot rely on an encyclopaedic reference of cases to fall back on in the case of a dispute, and will have to wing it. The players have to trust the DM's judgement in situations where no rule exists and a decision has to be made (that bit, mind you, is true of any similar freeform gaming system). The combat system is very simple (although I'm sure you can add various weapon bonuses and things to make it more complex), which may not please people who like complex combat systems.
I think the system is great for once-off adventures with pre-generated characters. I've never played in a campaign (although I know of several successful campaigns), so I don't know if the vagueness becomes a problem over time. I imagine it depends on the GM and the players.
Most of the UA sourcebooks deal with the UA setting; I don't think the section with the rules themselves is very long. If you want to check them out I suggest *cough* borrowing the book from a friend *cough*.
The redundancy is still there. It would probably be best if you removed "business-wise" from the beginning of the sentence. Also, "Kick" is still capitalised. And "to kick", while technically correct, sounds somewhat odd in its current position in the sentence; changing it to "kicking" may make it scan better. And there should be a comma after "more". And I shouldn't start sentences with "and"; bad me.
So I suggest:
"In publishing, kicking out as many thick books as one can with the promise of teaching people how to do something they don't understand, while basically confusing or intimidating them more, is great for business."
Well, "is great for business" is redundant, since you've already said that it's a great idea business-wise at the start of the sentence. It also makes the sentence not make sense anymore, since you're saying "A great idea is to do something is something else". Also, why is "Kick" capitalised?
It's much better, though. :) Using third person plural pronouns as gender-insensitive third person singular pronouns isn't really correct, but I do it all the time when I speak, so I can't be too much of a grammar nazi about it.