Well, you'd have to have a capture/drawing tool like Chemtool, and then something that could approximate polarity, electrical charge distribution, and bond length/strength. (Those involve things like electron orbitals, hence the subatomic.) Next, you'd have to have something that handles movement of fluids and gases with respect to the temperature, pressure, etc (gas laws and the partial diff. eqns. whose exact solution is one of the Clay instutite Millenium problems). Then, you'd have to have something that will predict what happens, probabilistically, when two or more molecules interact. These interactions would have to modeled in terms of molecular collisions, so that things like titration, stirring, etc, would be accurate.
Finally, you'd have something which would prepare an "answer" to each problem by waiting for a reasonable amount of precipitate to settle, or measuring pH, or simulating a gas chromatograph of the contents of the beaker.
Other helpful things would be crystallization and such. I would think that if you could simulate the physical laws and properties at a sufficiently low level, most things would arise automatically, but IANAC.
I'm still waiting for a simulation engine that models the subatomic and atomic particles' behaviors.
Basically, I want a program that simulates chemical reactions. If I have a bunch of molecules mixed together, and I add another mixture, what will happen, on the atomic level?
We have SPICE for electrical circuits. Why not something for chemical reactions?
Speaking of interfaces, I have oodles of data ganked off of freenet. Who wants to make an interface to searching this?
I'd host it, but, (a) my server would come after my neck, (b) my ISP would come after my neck, and (c) the FBI could come after my neck.
Maybe I should design a special javascript tool that does lots of cross-referencing, or something, and put many overlapping data sets up on a freesite? Drawbacks to that are the sheer amount of data and the lack of persistence for uncommon search terms...
Only changes I would make are maybe splitting the first phase of this into 3-year and 15-year parts (first and second strikes), then the third strike would put someone for literal life into a facility that provided food, water, toilets, security, limitied postal/phone/email service, plenty of reading material, and plenty of pencil and paper, so that, even if some deranged genius kills a bunch of people, his brainpower doesn't go to waste...
I've never seen why jails aren't more like boarding school with therapy centers for the/really/ messed up people.
If someone's parents fail to raise them well, or someone's environment shapes them poorly, or someone suffers through tragic events and doesn't learn to cope, their condition is not their fault (although their actions are), but, the condition can be reversed, and the actions can't.
This whole concept of "adult time-out" is stupid. Turning 18 doesn't(shouldn't) change "getting grounded" from lasting a few days or hours to lasting months to years to decades.
OK, ok, you wanted fruits and vegetables---I would suggest peppers. They grow pretty quickly, aren't hard to grow, and you can use them in your lunches.
Also, you can cultivate morning glories. They're not actually illegal (it's just illegal to consume the seeds), and I'm sure once you have a batch of seeds, a few people will covertly approach you and ask to buy some seeds off of you. It's not illegal to sell seeds (as long as you don't know they're being used illicitly), so you'd be doing nothing wrong, and making money. However, I don't know how much space they take...
Re:IRC analysis fatally flawed
on
Is IRC All Bad?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's a simple fallacy: confusing the largest portion with a greater-than-half portion (it doesn't help that the dictionary definition for simple majority includes both*). This often pisses voters off in politics---ex, some guy gets into office with 45% of votes, because 30% of votes went to someone else, and 25% of votes went to a third person.
* = I'd love to know what "official" definitions of this term exist. Some Googling seemed to show that both *definitions* are used by voting systems.
All too often, I hear someone say that their patent is, "in truth, fairly simple/straightforward." It's the R&D that goes into perfecting a particular implementation.
Patents are generally formatted by first listing the simplest overview of the process, then progressively adding detail until the most intimate details are listed.
Without any patents, everything would become "trade secrets," and, in a different culture, releasing trade secrets to the public or stealing them for another company could simply be labelled as actions intended to cause damage to thousands of people's jobs and punished severely.
I don't think the "general method" of any patent should be enforceable---in fact, the general method ought to be a starting point for anyone interested in implementing something similar (why re-invent the wheel?). Plus, if two companies are not allowed to release their two products which use *completely identical* processes, innovation might disappear. Not being allowed to exactly duplicate someone else's work will encourage people to try alternate solutions, or experiment with variables. However, if some company patents something in OO-language pseudocode, and another company turns around and patents it in Fortran-like pseudocode, the second company hasn't really contributed anything useful, so the second patent should be stricken down.
Patents which are too ambiguous and too general, those having no real use to an overall industry or those too similar to existing patents or existing work, should not be condoned. Companies should not even bother---it makes them seem disrespectful to the industry.
Also, I couldn't find waist in the dictionary. I did discover that waister is a seaman stationed in the mid-section of a ship of war. This could be metaphorical for someone whose ethics yet appreciation of capitalism "station" them in the middle of the spectrum on the software patent issue, like I. Does this mean that a softwaister is someone who holds views like mine? Or is this supposed to be a reference to the common pun of "seaman/seamen" sounding so close to semen? Or, perhaps, this is supposed to have something to do with someone's waist---is "to waist no time" a pun referring to someone who gives up a diet before seeing any results? Please enlighten me;)
I completely agree. In the US, it's illegal to make someone pay for their parent's crimes (which was true in some cultures a very very long time ago)---but, if your parents happen to be low-income immigrants, you have no choice about that, yet the insurance companies will charge you more.
Of course, since insurance companies aren't part of the legal system, they can do mostly what they want. Lawsuits do stop them from going off of the deep end, but they always hover pretty close.
Typical standard definitions are something like: Art is anything exceptional that portrays the struggle of human existence.
Most people don't record their own songs: that's the exceptional part. Also, talking about one crappy relationship after another happens to portray quite well the lives of many people aged 12 through 25.
Art is typically designed to portray something in some way; if it is accidental, the design was for randomness (or the design might be applied retroactively). For example, I can paint a picture of a skyscraper getting struck by an airplane. I might paint a picture of a skyscraper getting struck by a doughnut---that image itself isn't part of the human experience, but it's a twist on an existing image, and the twist is one of humor, or strangeness, or perhaps irony (since doughnuts are usually not destructive objects), which are all part of the human experience. I don't think it's very/good/ art, especially since lots of people come up with songs, but few get them recorded and mass-produced, which seems to be the exceptional part (is it art just because everybody's heard it?)...
Seriously! Why the hell do men think they should have some kind of desk jobs? Men are the stronger ones who don't live as long. Clearly, they're cut out for housework and manual labor.
Honestly, I don't understand why all these universities and school programs try to encourage both women AND men to have careers. Do we honestly need *everybody* in the work force? Who on earth will take care of the children? I don't know if it's true, but people say women are naturally better socializers, in which case, why should they stay home? Also, since women have to suffer through childbirth, isn't it the man's responsibility to take care of the infant after that point? Shouldn't the work be shared?
The only way to know for sure will be to raise boys and girls from all different ethnic backgrounds and all different genetic backgrounds completely apart from society.
Then someone will be able to talk about innate ability.
Until then, you can't really separate anything.
Also, how would we know it had anything to do with the genes for reproduction, and not just some random genes that happen to sit on the X or Y chromosomes? Do you call someone's genetic makeup their "gender?" Their reproductive ability? Their physical appearance?
I hate gender bullshit. I hate ethnic bullshit. I'm waiting for the day that people stop trying to classify humans into groups---for what purpose? Don't people hate it when insurance companies say, "You're a black male, and you have a 200W stereo in your car, so we're charging you double what a white girl with a 20W stereo would pay?"* So why do they, themselves, feel the need to label people that way?
* = I don't know if they can legally separate based on ethnicity, but they do separate based on gender. I think it's sexism. I don't care what statistics say---statistics say that individuals are not humans, just numbers.
Thanks! The first link says a lot of the things I was trying to say, but they obvious understand what they're talking about a lot better... and the second offers some good evidence for large-scale evolution.
Of course, all of this rests on the law of temporal causality. If it could be demonstrated that the natural progression is actually quite artificial (suppose, for example, we're just inside a computer program run by some grad. student named Yhwh Lsokp at XJiwJDop University, and he keeps pausing time, adjusting things (therefore interfering with causality), and then unfreezing time). Our knowledge of the laws of nature suggests that these laws don't change randomly (Although they do seem to change gradually). Who really knows? Go ask a philosopher...;)
Hmm.. that's good evidence. I was someone would be able to pipe up, though, with some examples of speciation we've seen where the organisms were structurally different and couldn't interbreed...
Dogma sucks. Always. Regardless of who is eating or regurgitating it.
Going by from what I have found in my own research...
Evolution by itself *is* just a theory (a hypothesis with support). We have observed evolution: that is a fact. We have observed speciation by evolution: that is also a fact. We have oodles of historical information which suggests evolution occured, and which would allow for speciation to have occured: that is a fact, too. There is not an overwhelming amount of historical evidence that speciation by evolution *was* the dominant means for the creation of new species; in other words, there aren't colossal numbers of near-identical fossils with only very tiny intermediate changes. We have very few direct observations of any kind of rapid, sudden, severe evolutionm, which might explain historical speciation. It is quite likely that many, many fossils are lost; only a scant numbers of fossils will stay preserved this long. It is also quite likely that evolution happens much more quickly from severe natural disasters (if we see a few new species with much better adaptation of water from the recent tsunami, I will not be surprised).
Creationism by itself is *just* a hypothesis (a suggestion which would become a theory with adequate support). There is historical evidence of many things in the bible being true; however, that does not imply that the biblical story of creationism carries any weight. If someone could come up with data that would suggest that the immediate results of such a creation process are clearly present within the history of the early universe, creationism could qualify as a theory.
You have to be careful with calling something a "fact." There are very few general facts about evolution. One is, "We have observed evolution and speciation by evolution in controlled environments." Another is, "There is overwhelming historical evidence to suggest evolution and speciation have occured." Theories are never facts (except in pure mathematics), but facts can support theories, and theories can be used to design new experiments which will create more relevant facts.
I do not know, off of the top of my head, if the formal definition of evolution is worded like, "Small changes in organisms lead to adaptation to their environment" (implying always), or, "Small changes in organisms could lead to adaptation in their environment" (implying that this is a possibility, but not a requirement). The first is a theory stated as a law, the second is a theory stated as a possible explanation. I'm assuming that, when most people refer to evolution, they refer to the suggestion that evolution, as an explanation, ought to be taken as a law, based on the Wikipedia entry for Evolution, which states, 'The word "evolution" is often used as a shorthand for the modern theory of evolution of species based upon Darwin's theory of natural selection. This theory states that all species today are the result of an extensive process of evolution that began over three billion years ago with simple single-celled organisms, and that evolution via natural selection accounts for the great diversity of life, extinct and extant.'
Creationism, as stated in the Bible, is very improbable. An all-powerful God could, of course, spontaneously create a Universe, complete with a history of dinosaurs, and complete with planets shooting away from each other as if there had once been a big bang; this suggests that, if the Universe is really only a few thousand years old, God has a great sense of humor.
However, if the creation story is intended to be a metaphor, then who cares? Comparing known scientific data with a literary metaphor means nothing, because a metaphor is just a literary device used to describe the nature of something else. Of course, some could argue that it is an inaccurate metaphor, because of the way we are interpreting our translation of the original Jewish text.
The real killer app will be taking out hotornot's MeetMe funding (you know, if you want to actually talk to someone you click on, you have to pay money); you just google for their picture, and find them that way:)
Re:Statistical Lies...
on
Newsy Numbers
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Don't forget Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics, also a very good book =)
The movies are pretty much all under the "Movies" category. If you have a useraccount, you can simply choose to filter these out of the frontpage.
You don't have to venture into any stories you don't want to read, either... that's the idea behind having the short little blurbs on the front page. If something doesn't interest you, just keep scrolling:)
I'm not trying to sound like a smart-aleck, but, I agree with the slashdot admins in that I think there should be a lot of different things here, not just science, math, and computer technology articles.
Philip K. Dick is a rather famous sci-fi author responsible for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, upon which the film Bladerunner was based.
While the plots in some of his books don't really come together neatly in the end, he does quite well at creating vivid imagery, fascinating characters, and imagination-sparking ideas.
A Scanner Darkly and Do Androids Dream of Electrip Sheep? are two of his more famous, and some of his best, published works.
[sarcasm] It's quite obvious why the State needs to step in and put restrictions on video games to help parents. I, for one, am an inept parent incapable of taking responsibility for my own child. I'm incapable of policing myself and depend on the State to make sure I behave, and I want to raise my children to be just like me.
Violent videogames shouldn't exist anyway. There's plenty of violence on the evening news, why can't kids just watch that instead? [/sarcasm]
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you'd have to have a capture/drawing tool like Chemtool, and then something that could approximate polarity, electrical charge distribution, and bond length/strength. (Those involve things like electron orbitals, hence the subatomic.) Next, you'd have to have something that handles movement of fluids and gases with respect to the temperature, pressure, etc (gas laws and the partial diff. eqns. whose exact solution is one of the Clay instutite Millenium problems). Then, you'd have to have something that will predict what happens, probabilistically, when two or more molecules interact. These interactions would have to modeled in terms of molecular collisions, so that things like titration, stirring, etc, would be accurate.
Finally, you'd have something which would prepare an "answer" to each problem by waiting for a reasonable amount of precipitate to settle, or measuring pH, or simulating a gas chromatograph of the contents of the beaker.
Other helpful things would be crystallization and such. I would think that if you could simulate the physical laws and properties at a sufficiently low level, most things would arise automatically, but IANAC.
I'm still waiting for a simulation engine that models the subatomic and atomic particles' behaviors.
Basically, I want a program that simulates chemical reactions. If I have a bunch of molecules mixed together, and I add another mixture, what will happen, on the atomic level?
We have SPICE for electrical circuits. Why not something for chemical reactions?
Who still remembers IF comparatives,greaterline,equalline,lessline? :)
/nightmare/...
(I think this was circa Fortran IV...)
Oh man, writing code with nested loops and multiple comparisons was a
Hahaha. Yeah I know... 'we all know conspiracies are dumb' (-b182).
Seriously, I'm waiting for my Spa[ce]ndex suit.
Speaking of interfaces, I have oodles of data ganked off of freenet. Who wants to make an interface to searching this?
I'd host it, but, (a) my server would come after my neck, (b) my ISP would come after my neck, and (c) the FBI could come after my neck.
Maybe I should design a special javascript tool that does lots of cross-referencing, or something, and put many overlapping data sets up on a freesite? Drawbacks to that are the sheer amount of data and the lack of persistence for uncommon search terms...
Only changes I would make are maybe splitting the first phase of this into 3-year and 15-year parts (first and second strikes), then the third strike would put someone for literal life into a facility that provided food, water, toilets, security, limitied postal/phone/email service, plenty of reading material, and plenty of pencil and paper, so that, even if some deranged genius kills a bunch of people, his brainpower doesn't go to waste...
I've never seen why jails aren't more like boarding school with therapy centers for the /really/ messed up people.
If someone's parents fail to raise them well, or someone's environment shapes them poorly, or someone suffers through tragic events and doesn't learn to cope, their condition is not their fault (although their actions are), but, the condition can be reversed, and the actions can't.
This whole concept of "adult time-out" is stupid. Turning 18 doesn't(shouldn't) change "getting grounded" from lasting a few days or hours to lasting months to years to decades.
Try a bonsai kitten. ;)
OK, ok, you wanted fruits and vegetables---I would suggest peppers. They grow pretty quickly, aren't hard to grow, and you can use them in your lunches.
Also, you can cultivate morning glories. They're not actually illegal (it's just illegal to consume the seeds), and I'm sure once you have a batch of seeds, a few people will covertly approach you and ask to buy some seeds off of you. It's not illegal to sell seeds (as long as you don't know they're being used illicitly), so you'd be doing nothing wrong, and making money. However, I don't know how much space they take...
It's a simple fallacy: confusing the largest portion with a greater-than-half portion (it doesn't help that the dictionary definition for simple majority includes both*). This often pisses voters off in politics---ex, some guy gets into office with 45% of votes, because 30% of votes went to someone else, and 25% of votes went to a third person.
* = I'd love to know what "official" definitions of this term exist. Some Googling seemed to show that both *definitions* are used by voting systems.
Who are you to know what makes sense?
;)
All too often, I hear someone say that their patent is, "in truth, fairly simple/straightforward." It's the R&D that goes into perfecting a particular implementation.
Patents are generally formatted by first listing the simplest overview of the process, then progressively adding detail until the most intimate details are listed.
Without any patents, everything would become "trade secrets," and, in a different culture, releasing trade secrets to the public or stealing them for another company could simply be labelled as actions intended to cause damage to thousands of people's jobs and punished severely.
I don't think the "general method" of any patent should be enforceable---in fact, the general method ought to be a starting point for anyone interested in implementing something similar (why re-invent the wheel?). Plus, if two companies are not allowed to release their two products which use *completely identical* processes, innovation might disappear. Not being allowed to exactly duplicate someone else's work will encourage people to try alternate solutions, or experiment with variables. However, if some company patents something in OO-language pseudocode, and another company turns around and patents it in Fortran-like pseudocode, the second company hasn't really contributed anything useful, so the second patent should be stricken down.
Patents which are too ambiguous and too general, those having no real use to an overall industry or those too similar to existing patents or existing work, should not be condoned. Companies should not even bother---it makes them seem disrespectful to the industry.
Also, I couldn't find waist in the dictionary. I did discover that waister is a seaman stationed in the mid-section of a ship of war. This could be metaphorical for someone whose ethics yet appreciation of capitalism "station" them in the middle of the spectrum on the software patent issue, like I. Does this mean that a softwaister is someone who holds views like mine? Or is this supposed to be a reference to the common pun of "seaman/seamen" sounding so close to semen? Or, perhaps, this is supposed to have something to do with someone's waist---is "to waist no time" a pun referring to someone who gives up a diet before seeing any results? Please enlighten me
I don't have a problem with knowing the truth... I just have a problem with treating people like products of statistics and not individuals
I completely agree. In the US, it's illegal to make someone pay for their parent's crimes (which was true in some cultures a very very long time ago)---but, if your parents happen to be low-income immigrants, you have no choice about that, yet the insurance companies will charge you more.
Of course, since insurance companies aren't part of the legal system, they can do mostly what they want. Lawsuits do stop them from going off of the deep end, but they always hover pretty close.
Typical standard definitions are something like: Art is anything exceptional that portrays the struggle of human existence.
/good/ art, especially since lots of people come up with songs, but few get them recorded and mass-produced, which seems to be the exceptional part (is it art just because everybody's heard it?)...
Most people don't record their own songs: that's the exceptional part. Also, talking about one crappy relationship after another happens to portray quite well the lives of many people aged 12 through 25.
Art is typically designed to portray something in some way; if it is accidental, the design was for randomness (or the design might be applied retroactively). For example, I can paint a picture of a skyscraper getting struck by an airplane. I might paint a picture of a skyscraper getting struck by a doughnut---that image itself isn't part of the human experience, but it's a twist on an existing image, and the twist is one of humor, or strangeness, or perhaps irony (since doughnuts are usually not destructive objects), which are all part of the human experience. I don't think it's very
Seriously! Why the hell do men think they should have some kind of desk jobs? Men are the stronger ones who don't live as long. Clearly, they're cut out for housework and manual labor.
Honestly, I don't understand why all these universities and school programs try to encourage both women AND men to have careers. Do we honestly need *everybody* in the work force? Who on earth will take care of the children? I don't know if it's true, but people say women are naturally better socializers, in which case, why should they stay home? Also, since women have to suffer through childbirth, isn't it the man's responsibility to take care of the infant after that point? Shouldn't the work be shared?
The only way to know for sure will be to raise boys and girls from all different ethnic backgrounds and all different genetic backgrounds completely apart from society.
Then someone will be able to talk about innate ability.
Until then, you can't really separate anything.
Also, how would we know it had anything to do with the genes for reproduction, and not just some random genes that happen to sit on the X or Y chromosomes? Do you call someone's genetic makeup their "gender?" Their reproductive ability? Their physical appearance?
I hate gender bullshit. I hate ethnic bullshit. I'm waiting for the day that people stop trying to classify humans into groups---for what purpose? Don't people hate it when insurance companies say, "You're a black male, and you have a 200W stereo in your car, so we're charging you double what a white girl with a 20W stereo would pay?"* So why do they, themselves, feel the need to label people that way?
* = I don't know if they can legally separate based on ethnicity, but they do separate based on gender. I think it's sexism. I don't care what statistics say---statistics say that individuals are not humans, just numbers.
Thanks! The first link says a lot of the things I was trying to say, but they obvious understand what they're talking about a lot better... and the second offers some good evidence for large-scale evolution.
;)
Of course, all of this rests on the law of temporal causality. If it could be demonstrated that the natural progression is actually quite artificial (suppose, for example, we're just inside a computer program run by some grad. student named Yhwh Lsokp at XJiwJDop University, and he keeps pausing time, adjusting things (therefore interfering with causality), and then unfreezing time). Our knowledge of the laws of nature suggests that these laws don't change randomly (Although they do seem to change gradually). Who really knows? Go ask a philosopher...
Hmm.. that's good evidence. I was someone would be able to pipe up, though, with some examples of speciation we've seen where the organisms were structurally different and couldn't interbreed...
Dogma sucks. Always. Regardless of who is eating or regurgitating it.
Going by from what I have found in my own research...
Evolution by itself *is* just a theory (a hypothesis with support). We have observed evolution: that is a fact. We have observed speciation by evolution: that is also a fact. We have oodles of historical information which suggests evolution occured, and which would allow for speciation to have occured: that is a fact, too. There is not an overwhelming amount of historical evidence that speciation by evolution *was* the dominant means for the creation of new species; in other words, there aren't colossal numbers of near-identical fossils with only very tiny intermediate changes. We have very few direct observations of any kind of rapid, sudden, severe evolutionm, which might explain historical speciation. It is quite likely that many, many fossils are lost; only a scant numbers of fossils will stay preserved this long. It is also quite likely that evolution happens much more quickly from severe natural disasters (if we see a few new species with much better adaptation of water from the recent tsunami, I will not be surprised).
Creationism by itself is *just* a hypothesis (a suggestion which would become a theory with adequate support). There is historical evidence of many things in the bible being true; however, that does not imply that the biblical story of creationism carries any weight. If someone could come up with data that would suggest that the immediate results of such a creation process are clearly present within the history of the early universe, creationism could qualify as a theory.
You have to be careful with calling something a "fact." There are very few general facts about evolution. One is, "We have observed evolution and speciation by evolution in controlled environments." Another is, "There is overwhelming historical evidence to suggest evolution and speciation have occured." Theories are never facts (except in pure mathematics), but facts can support theories, and theories can be used to design new experiments which will create more relevant facts.
I do not know, off of the top of my head, if the formal definition of evolution is worded like, "Small changes in organisms lead to adaptation to their environment" (implying always), or, "Small changes in organisms could lead to adaptation in their environment" (implying that this is a possibility, but not a requirement). The first is a theory stated as a law, the second is a theory stated as a possible explanation. I'm assuming that, when most people refer to evolution, they refer to the suggestion that evolution, as an explanation, ought to be taken as a law, based on the Wikipedia entry for Evolution, which states, 'The word "evolution" is often used as a shorthand for the modern theory of evolution of species based upon Darwin's theory of natural selection. This theory states that all species today are the result of an extensive process of evolution that began over three billion years ago with simple single-celled organisms, and that evolution via natural selection accounts for the great diversity of life, extinct and extant.'
Creationism, as stated in the Bible, is very improbable. An all-powerful God could, of course, spontaneously create a Universe, complete with a history of dinosaurs, and complete with planets shooting away from each other as if there had once been a big bang; this suggests that, if the Universe is really only a few thousand years old, God has a great sense of humor.
However, if the creation story is intended to be a metaphor, then who cares? Comparing known scientific data with a literary metaphor means nothing, because a metaphor is just a literary device used to describe the nature of something else. Of course, some could argue that it is an inaccurate metaphor, because of the way we are interpreting our translation of the original Jewish text.
The real killer app will be taking out hotornot's MeetMe funding (you know, if you want to actually talk to someone you click on, you have to pay money); you just google for their picture, and find them that way :)
Don't forget Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics, also a very good book =)
I'm just waiting until the DEAMCA prohibits the transfer or publication of any DNA-code which is capable of producing controlled substances...
The movies are pretty much all under the "Movies" category. If you have a useraccount, you can simply choose to filter these out of the frontpage.
:)
You don't have to venture into any stories you don't want to read, either... that's the idea behind having the short little blurbs on the front page. If something doesn't interest you, just keep scrolling
I'm not trying to sound like a smart-aleck, but, I agree with the slashdot admins in that I think there should be a lot of different things here, not just science, math, and computer technology articles.
*shrug* It doesn't have to.
Most nerds like sci-fi... Most people don't complain when Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, and/or Arthur C. Clarke are mentioned in stories.
Philip K. Dick is a rather famous sci-fi author responsible for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, upon which the film Bladerunner was based.
While the plots in some of his books don't really come together neatly in the end, he does quite well at creating vivid imagery, fascinating characters, and imagination-sparking ideas.
A Scanner Darkly and Do Androids Dream of Electrip Sheep? are two of his more famous, and some of his best, published works.
[sarcasm]
It's quite obvious why the State needs to step in and put restrictions on video games to help parents. I, for one, am an inept parent incapable of taking responsibility for my own child. I'm incapable of policing myself and depend on the State to make sure I behave, and I want to raise my children to be just like me.
Violent videogames shouldn't exist anyway. There's plenty of violence on the evening news, why can't kids just watch that instead?
[/sarcasm]