Ah yes, I remember when I used to spend whole days at libraries, way back in the 20th century, before the World Wide Web existed.
And they'll still be there in the 22nd century.
Seriously, we have these things called computers, and books are on them now, including works of fiction for your reading pleasure.
And for almost anything written in my six decade lifetime you'll either have to pay to read them or pirate the content. Yeah, I'm reading "A Tale of Two Cities" on mt phone, but if you want to read "All the Lives He Led" (boring book, quit halfway through) you're either going to have to pay, go to TPB (if you can find it there) or visit your public library, which is how I know Pohl's last book wasn't worth paying to read. You can download it for free in 73 years.
Without free Internet access, libraries today would be nothing more than useless repositories of books that no one wants to read.
Well, it is true that 97% of the population doesn't want to read at all, but unlike you I'm not part of the aliterate 97%. To misquote Twain, an aliterate has no advantage over an illiterate.
I heard the same nonsense about manufacturing in space 40 years ago. Impossible alloys! Precious pure medicines! Yeah, right. Grow up you loons, you're being had.
40 years ago cell phones were sci-fi fantasies. Flat screens were sci-fi fantasies. Recording TV shows in your living room was a fantasy. Playing a record album (not a cassette) in you car was my schizophrenic friend's fantasy (I told him he was nuts. He was, but we have CDs in cars now). There were no treatments for schizophrenia, now many schizophrenics lead normal, productive lives from new medicines. You car had no air bag, ABS, fuel injection, electronic ignition. If you took a photo you couldn't see it for a week unless you had a Polaroid or your own darkroom. There was no internet.
You not only have no imagination, you've not been paying attention.
If having different manufacturers use the same OS is a problem, how did DOS/Windows maintain market share? AMD vs Intel, different sound card manufacturers, different video card manufacturers, different BIOSes and motherboards. A far worse deal than with a phone. Same thing, new platform: Apple vs Microsoft, Apple vs Android, same thing.
Traveling to such a satellite orbiting a gas giant would still present problems. Anything getting from or to it alive would be a real bitch, because the radiation belt of the gas giant still must be crossed first.
Most of the westerns I have seen have no trouble getting the science right.
Not much science in a western (well, there's "Wild Wild West" which was a really stupid show) but look at the ones from before 1960. NO BLOOD! All the physics except the bullets are real.
Nor, for that matter, do romantic comedies or crime dramas.
Oh, FFS. You never saw a Dirty Harry movie? Being shot with a.44 magnum will NOT lift you off the ground and throw you through a window. Don't get me started on the Die Hard movies, they're all full of impossibilities.
You got me there. I think the individual mandate was such a horrible trampling on the Constitution that I foresee it being used as precedence for all sorts of nasty future laws. I'm all for public healthcare, but not being forced to make a private purchase.
Agreed. ACA was a gift to the insurance companies, who are the single reason US health care is so expensive.
But parts of it are still pretty funky and everyone still wants to sell you his sister for 30 baht.
When I was there, prostitution was a respected profession seen as offering a needed service. Their culture and mores were completely different from ours.
The third world can't pull itself up by it's own bootstraps, or won't? What made the US an immediate 'first world' nation?
The US was blessed with fantastic amounts of resources. Coal, wood, gold, silver, you need any kind of raw material we have it. Most of the US is prime farmland with great soil and a great climate.
And we did have help. The French helped (we'd have lost the revolution without them), hell if it hadn't been for friendly natives a whole lot more of the earlier settlers would have died. We had all sorts of raw materials that the Europeans needed. And we really weren't developed until after WWI when Europe was pretty much trashed and didn't become a superpower until all of Europe was trashed in WWII.
Look at what countries are in the third world. Not the middle east, they have oil. Look at Africa, not much there except diamonds and rare animals, and DeBeers sewed up the diamonds and the animals have been hunted to extinction ind their habitats destroyed.
If your country has no natural resources, it will remain third world until someone wants to exploit your natives.
I don't have a side, I vote for the candidate (usually 3rd party if there's one on the ballot), not any party. And it isn't "Republicans" holding the economy hostage, it's a small Republican offshoot that I see as batshit insane.
All I've ever had was problems with bluetooth, whether it was something not supporting it, or something only partially supported, bluetooth is just terrible.
How about some specifics? What hardware? What OS? It's worked fine for me on two Motorolas and a Kyocera moving pictures to my W7 notebook and kubuntu tower. What kinds of problems? How did that comment get modded up??
Also, anyone spending that amount of money for a fucking headset should be shot, period.
What amount of money? Some people actually use headsets for more than gaming, you know, like listening to high fidelity music with. It's their money, they earned it (or stole it), why shouldn't they be able to waste it as they see fit? You could say the same thing about high end $800 phones that won't do any more than a $125 phone will. Or high-end cars, big houses... jealous much, son?
B-B-B-BUT MY BRANDS. Surprised it wasn't Skullcandy too. Terrible.
Sorry, I have no idea what that phrase was supposed to convey, is that a young people thing or something?
I wish I had mod points. What dimwit modded that insightful comment "flamebait"? Personally, I'm getting sick of the "first world problems" meme. The parent is accurate, the third world isn't going to pull itself up by its own bootstraps. It can't.
When I was in Thailand in 1974 it was primitive. Dirt roads, no municipal water (everyone had cisterns), no electricity. Thailand is now an industrialized country, thanks to foreign firms setting up manufacturing there.
Well, you got an XCP rootkit. I'm surprised they didn't just put Bluetooth and USB in and take it back out after you paid for it like with OtherOS.
Honestly, why are you people giving the criminal conspiracy named Sony your money? They've been fucking their customers over for a decade and you dweebs just say "spank me harder, Sony."
It is not spending on the "wrong kind of people", it is an attitude that the government is just too damn big for its own good and infringing upon our rights and ignoring the U.S. Constitution as if it didn't even exist in the first place.
So why then didn't they rise up early in the Bush administration when he reversed course and ran up the biggest deficit we had ever seen? The tea party didn't happen until Obama was elected, but before he'd had any impact.
I suppose you happen to like having the NSA snoop into everything you've ever done, and want to see the TSA come in and search every car traveling on Interstate Highways since they obviously aren't molesting enough grandmothers and toddlers?
Well, the tea party was around before the Snowden revelations, and again, Bush started the TSA and DHS and pulled for the PATRIOT act. Where was the tea party then?
It tends to have a very strong Libertarian bent
Then why haven't they been advocating the legalization of marijuana? That would increase liberty and reduce the toll on the taxpayers; we have more prisoners per capita than any other country, and half are there for drugs.
The tea party certainly doesn't look to this outsider as you portray it. I see it as a "I have lots of stock and environmental and safety regulations cost me money, get rid of the damned government... Oh, and I don't want to pay tax, either."
You might be surprised. The last congressional election here had a tea party loonie run against an MD. The MD wanted to give medicare to everyone, IMO that's far preferable to the clusterfuck that is obamacare (which is nowhere near the clusterfuck it was before obamacare, which is what my idiot* teabagger congressman Rodney Davis wanted).
Next election I'm registering as a Republican so I can vote against Davis in the primary. I might wind up voting against him twice, he's one of the dumbfucks who tried to take the government hostage for delaying obamacare.
But in the general election I'll vote Democrat at the congressional level if Davis gets nominated again (the man is for everything I'm against and against everything I'm for). Everyone else I'll vote L or G. It would be utterly retarded to vote for someone who would like to see me in prison.
* He barely squeaked by in the election, in fact there had to be a recount but the idiot can't figure out that half the voters in his district are against his agenda. I'll really be surprised if he wins again.
It's not really fair to describe Social Security as transferring "wealth to the old". By this point in time, almost everyone collecting SS paid into it their entire working life.
Indeed, my uncle died at age 60 after paying in for 40 years and didn't collect a penny. Another uncle collected for 20 after paying in for 40 so probably broke even. This is NOT funded from the general revenue; it's a tax you pay in all your life specifically for SS. Medicare shouldn't be part of the budget, either, since it's also paid for by a separate tax on working people. God damn it, kids, I fucking paid for my retirement. It won't go bankrupt; it might have to borrow to get through my generation but it will be fine.
Because SS is regressive, you could call it "transferring wealth to the wealthy", as the wealthy are more likely to also collect more than they pay in (due to longevity).
How is it regressive? Steve Jobs didn't live long, now did he? However, I posit that it should be progressive -- keep the limits on how much you can collect but end the limit on how much you can pay.
The number of people needed, and the time involved for a typical 15 seconds of video won't be possible in space for another hundred years.
Ron Howard managed to shoot most of Apollo 13 on the Vomit Comet. In ten years if guys like Branson and Carmak keep it up, they'll be filming in space.
In the mean time, why can't people simply enjoy a film, without trying to pick apart ever millisecond?
What makes the same people eat up LOTR or the Hobbit with total suspension of disbelief, but grouse incessantly about flowing hair?
To be fair, few if any movies get any kind of physics at all right. Look at everything that was wrong with every single Die Hard. And people did bitch about LOTR, specifically the shot where the horse was laying on that king.
The thing is, is it believable? AFAICT, Apollo 13 got it right, even the hair... but it was filmed on the Vomit Comet and was non-fiction, unlike Gravity.
I've noticed that science fiction novelists usually (but not always) do their best to get the science right (and sometimes fail), but many science fiction writers were scientists (e.g., Asimov, PhD in biochemistry and did cancer research).
Most people would have no problem with Gravity, the problems with a movie come when you're not sufficiently ignorant.
paper books are recalled too if somebody convinces the authorities or the publisher that something is wrong or illegal about the book.
If a citation was ever needed, that bit of bullshit was it. In my 61 years I've never heard of a single published book being recalled. Where did you hear that nonsense?
Example #1: Proliferation of beastiality content in the UK, where beastiality is illegal.
Star Trek is illegal in the UK, then? After all, there's all kinds of interspecies sex on a starship. Hell, Spock's human mom obviously had sex with a Vulcan.
Example #2: Incest, pedo-bear, and rape stories mixed in with children's books.
I guess if I visit the UK I'd better leave my bible home then.
I used to be that way, these days I've been doing more writing than reading. But I'm lucky, we have an excellent municipal library even though it's a very small city.
I just linked an Asimov short story in another comment, I have a dozen or so of his books on my shelves. Were it not for public libraries I'd probably never bought any at all, which is why Doctorow gives his ebooks away. The internet is for getting seen. Give away the content, sell the container. It got him on the NYT best seller list.
As to Project Gutenberg, I've been reading A Tale of Two Cities on my phone. Crap? Twain, Melville, crap?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, I remember when I used to spend whole days at libraries, way back in the 20th century, before the World Wide Web existed.
And they'll still be there in the 22nd century.
Seriously, we have these things called computers, and books are on them now, including works of fiction for your reading pleasure.
And for almost anything written in my six decade lifetime you'll either have to pay to read them or pirate the content. Yeah, I'm reading "A Tale of Two Cities" on mt phone, but if you want to read "All the Lives He Led" (boring book, quit halfway through) you're either going to have to pay, go to TPB (if you can find it there) or visit your public library, which is how I know Pohl's last book wasn't worth paying to read. You can download it for free in 73 years.
Without free Internet access, libraries today would be nothing more than useless repositories of books that no one wants to read.
Well, it is true that 97% of the population doesn't want to read at all, but unlike you I'm not part of the aliterate 97%. To misquote Twain, an aliterate has no advantage over an illiterate.
I heard the same nonsense about manufacturing in space 40 years ago. Impossible alloys! Precious pure medicines! Yeah, right. Grow up you loons, you're being had.
40 years ago cell phones were sci-fi fantasies. Flat screens were sci-fi fantasies. Recording TV shows in your living room was a fantasy. Playing a record album (not a cassette) in you car was my schizophrenic friend's fantasy (I told him he was nuts. He was, but we have CDs in cars now). There were no treatments for schizophrenia, now many schizophrenics lead normal, productive lives from new medicines. You car had no air bag, ABS, fuel injection, electronic ignition. If you took a photo you couldn't see it for a week unless you had a Polaroid or your own darkroom. There was no internet.
You not only have no imagination, you've not been paying attention.
If having different manufacturers use the same OS is a problem, how did DOS/Windows maintain market share? AMD vs Intel, different sound card manufacturers, different video card manufacturers, different BIOSes and motherboards. A far worse deal than with a phone. Same thing, new platform: Apple vs Microsoft, Apple vs Android, same thing.
Traveling to such a satellite orbiting a gas giant would still present problems. Anything getting from or to it alive would be a real bitch, because the radiation belt of the gas giant still must be crossed first.
One word: Cabbage.
Mightn't a primary of 5x Jovian mass radiate a significant amount of IR on its own?
It's in the galactic bulge, wouldn't any planet or moon around any star in that part of the galaxy have horrible radiation?
Also, how far is MOA-2011-BLG-293Lb from Trantor?
Most of the westerns I have seen have no trouble getting the science right.
Not much science in a western (well, there's "Wild Wild West" which was a really stupid show) but look at the ones from before 1960. NO BLOOD! All the physics except the bullets are real.
Nor, for that matter, do romantic comedies or crime dramas.
Oh, FFS. You never saw a Dirty Harry movie? Being shot with a .44 magnum will NOT lift you off the ground and throw you through a window. Don't get me started on the Die Hard movies, they're all full of impossibilities.
You got me there. I think the individual mandate was such a horrible trampling on the Constitution that I foresee it being used as precedence for all sorts of nasty future laws. I'm all for public healthcare, but not being forced to make a private purchase.
Agreed. ACA was a gift to the insurance companies, who are the single reason US health care is so expensive.
But parts of it are still pretty funky and everyone still wants to sell you his sister for 30 baht.
When I was there, prostitution was a respected profession seen as offering a needed service. Their culture and mores were completely different from ours.
The third world can't pull itself up by it's own bootstraps, or won't? What made the US an immediate 'first world' nation?
The US was blessed with fantastic amounts of resources. Coal, wood, gold, silver, you need any kind of raw material we have it. Most of the US is prime farmland with great soil and a great climate.
And we did have help. The French helped (we'd have lost the revolution without them), hell if it hadn't been for friendly natives a whole lot more of the earlier settlers would have died. We had all sorts of raw materials that the Europeans needed. And we really weren't developed until after WWI when Europe was pretty much trashed and didn't become a superpower until all of Europe was trashed in WWII.
Look at what countries are in the third world. Not the middle east, they have oil. Look at Africa, not much there except diamonds and rare animals, and DeBeers sewed up the diamonds and the animals have been hunted to extinction ind their habitats destroyed.
If your country has no natural resources, it will remain third world until someone wants to exploit your natives.
I don't have a side, I vote for the candidate (usually 3rd party if there's one on the ballot), not any party. And it isn't "Republicans" holding the economy hostage, it's a small Republican offshoot that I see as batshit insane.
All I've ever had was problems with bluetooth, whether it was something not supporting it, or something only partially supported, bluetooth is just terrible.
How about some specifics? What hardware? What OS? It's worked fine for me on two Motorolas and a Kyocera moving pictures to my W7 notebook and kubuntu tower. What kinds of problems? How did that comment get modded up??
Also, anyone spending that amount of money for a fucking headset should be shot, period.
What amount of money? Some people actually use headsets for more than gaming, you know, like listening to high fidelity music with. It's their money, they earned it (or stole it), why shouldn't they be able to waste it as they see fit? You could say the same thing about high end $800 phones that won't do any more than a $125 phone will. Or high-end cars, big houses... jealous much, son?
B-B-B-BUT MY BRANDS. Surprised it wasn't Skullcandy too. Terrible.
Sorry, I have no idea what that phrase was supposed to convey, is that a young people thing or something?
Disclaimer: The above opinion is from an angry owner of a very nice Sony-Ericsson bt headset that the PS3 won't use.
"Spank me some more, Sony." Why do you keep giving those criminals your money?
Are you being sarcastic?
Of course he is, Sheldon.
I wish I had mod points. What dimwit modded that insightful comment "flamebait"? Personally, I'm getting sick of the "first world problems" meme. The parent is accurate, the third world isn't going to pull itself up by its own bootstraps. It can't.
When I was in Thailand in 1974 it was primitive. Dirt roads, no municipal water (everyone had cisterns), no electricity. Thailand is now an industrialized country, thanks to foreign firms setting up manufacturing there.
Well, you got an XCP rootkit. I'm surprised they didn't just put Bluetooth and USB in and take it back out after you paid for it like with OtherOS.
Honestly, why are you people giving the criminal conspiracy named Sony your money? They've been fucking their customers over for a decade and you dweebs just say "spank me harder, Sony."
It is not spending on the "wrong kind of people", it is an attitude that the government is just too damn big for its own good and infringing upon our rights and ignoring the U.S. Constitution as if it didn't even exist in the first place.
So why then didn't they rise up early in the Bush administration when he reversed course and ran up the biggest deficit we had ever seen? The tea party didn't happen until Obama was elected, but before he'd had any impact.
I suppose you happen to like having the NSA snoop into everything you've ever done, and want to see the TSA come in and search every car traveling on Interstate Highways since they obviously aren't molesting enough grandmothers and toddlers?
Well, the tea party was around before the Snowden revelations, and again, Bush started the TSA and DHS and pulled for the PATRIOT act. Where was the tea party then?
It tends to have a very strong Libertarian bent
Then why haven't they been advocating the legalization of marijuana? That would increase liberty and reduce the toll on the taxpayers; we have more prisoners per capita than any other country, and half are there for drugs.
The tea party certainly doesn't look to this outsider as you portray it. I see it as a "I have lots of stock and environmental and safety regulations cost me money, get rid of the damned government... Oh, and I don't want to pay tax, either."
I suppose you could also factor in which days of the week the Cleveland Browns are likely to win on, since that is definitely random.
You think they're losers? let me introduce you to the Chicago Cubs, who haven't won the world series since 1908 (Go, Cardinals!)
You might be surprised. The last congressional election here had a tea party loonie run against an MD. The MD wanted to give medicare to everyone, IMO that's far preferable to the clusterfuck that is obamacare (which is nowhere near the clusterfuck it was before obamacare, which is what my idiot* teabagger congressman Rodney Davis wanted).
Next election I'm registering as a Republican so I can vote against Davis in the primary. I might wind up voting against him twice, he's one of the dumbfucks who tried to take the government hostage for delaying obamacare.
But in the general election I'll vote Democrat at the congressional level if Davis gets nominated again (the man is for everything I'm against and against everything I'm for). Everyone else I'll vote L or G. It would be utterly retarded to vote for someone who would like to see me in prison.
* He barely squeaked by in the election, in fact there had to be a recount but the idiot can't figure out that half the voters in his district are against his agenda. I'll really be surprised if he wins again.
It's not really fair to describe Social Security as transferring "wealth to the old". By this point in time, almost everyone collecting SS paid into it their entire working life.
Indeed, my uncle died at age 60 after paying in for 40 years and didn't collect a penny. Another uncle collected for 20 after paying in for 40 so probably broke even. This is NOT funded from the general revenue; it's a tax you pay in all your life specifically for SS. Medicare shouldn't be part of the budget, either, since it's also paid for by a separate tax on working people. God damn it, kids, I fucking paid for my retirement. It won't go bankrupt; it might have to borrow to get through my generation but it will be fine.
Because SS is regressive, you could call it "transferring wealth to the wealthy", as the wealthy are more likely to also collect more than they pay in (due to longevity).
How is it regressive? Steve Jobs didn't live long, now did he? However, I posit that it should be progressive -- keep the limits on how much you can collect but end the limit on how much you can pay.
The number of people needed, and the time involved for a typical 15 seconds of video won't be possible in space for another hundred years.
Ron Howard managed to shoot most of Apollo 13 on the Vomit Comet. In ten years if guys like Branson and Carmak keep it up, they'll be filming in space.
In the mean time, why can't people simply enjoy a film, without trying to pick apart ever millisecond?
What makes the same people eat up LOTR or the Hobbit with total suspension of disbelief, but grouse incessantly about flowing hair?
To be fair, few if any movies get any kind of physics at all right. Look at everything that was wrong with every single Die Hard. And people did bitch about LOTR, specifically the shot where the horse was laying on that king.
The thing is, is it believable? AFAICT, Apollo 13 got it right, even the hair... but it was filmed on the Vomit Comet and was non-fiction, unlike Gravity.
I've noticed that science fiction novelists usually (but not always) do their best to get the science right (and sometimes fail), but many science fiction writers were scientists (e.g., Asimov, PhD in biochemistry and did cancer research).
Most people would have no problem with Gravity, the problems with a movie come when you're not sufficiently ignorant.
My Kyocera was about $115 after taxes (no contract or subsidy).
paper books are recalled too if somebody convinces the authorities or the publisher that something is wrong or illegal about the book.
If a citation was ever needed, that bit of bullshit was it. In my 61 years I've never heard of a single published book being recalled. Where did you hear that nonsense?
That's one of the nice things about paper.
Example #1: Proliferation of beastiality content in the UK, where beastiality is illegal.
Star Trek is illegal in the UK, then? After all, there's all kinds of interspecies sex on a starship. Hell, Spock's human mom obviously had sex with a Vulcan.
Example #2: Incest, pedo-bear, and rape stories mixed in with children's books.
I guess if I visit the UK I'd better leave my bible home then.
Example #3: RTFA
I read part of the first one. It was rubbish.
I used to be that way, these days I've been doing more writing than reading. But I'm lucky, we have an excellent municipal library even though it's a very small city.
I just linked an Asimov short story in another comment, I have a dozen or so of his books on my shelves. Were it not for public libraries I'd probably never bought any at all, which is why Doctorow gives his ebooks away. The internet is for getting seen. Give away the content, sell the container. It got him on the NYT best seller list.
As to Project Gutenberg, I've been reading A Tale of Two Cities on my phone. Crap? Twain, Melville, crap?