Perhaps, for those who can't wait, you should read his Letters From The Earth, published 30 years after his death....
A paraphrase, Lucifer writing to St. Pete: these folks think that there's no sex in heaven... and those who hate utterly boring sermons and harp music are really looking forward to an eternity of that"
How 'bout for anyone texting, and is pulled over, they're required to put their device in a special mount on the driver's seat, and before driving, need to take off their pants or skirt, and SIT ON IT, shoving it where the sun don't shine, while driving. Then maybe they'll pay more attention to the road.
There's sites that have been around for years. One I like, I *think* the URL is - it's blocked here at work, of course - for a ton of old arcade games. I *think* PacMan's among them, but I can't look, and wasn't interested. I rather like Time Pilot....
"Frankly, I was a bit surprised to see LON come out and suggest people should not commit crimes when they are desperate for money. I think this would be obvious to any rational person."
So, the author of the review implies that you should only commit crimes when you're *not* desperate for money? Then only rich people would, oh, right, Goldman Sach, Enron, the S&L debacle (33% of that was white collar crime)... I guess he's right. Get rich, *then* steal.
Thus we see the results of not reading actual books, thinking video that jumps around rather than giving you actual viewpoints is "edgy", and that anything intelligible can be written in the 140 chars that were intended for a ball and chain (aka a pager).
I've had plenty of projects and jobs over my career where I was wotking 30-40 hours a day, no meetings, for weeks or months, straight development cycles - making flow charts or reading Revealed Specs, code, test, debug....
The real question about "are you stealing" is whether you're actually getting your work done, or falling behind.
is the one I've been offering for well over thirty years: 1) how many planets sustain life? 2) how many such planets evolve what we would recognize as technologically-bent intelligent life? (remember the hundreds of thousands of years we had only stone technology?) 3) how many of *them* are within 300 years of our technology level - too soon, no radio or spaceships or...; later, and why would they be using such a low-tech and wasteful technology as broadcast radio? 4) How many of the above are within 40 ly of Earth?
5) For good measure, how many cut their budgets for space exploration, it being a wasteful government program, and, after all, private companies can do everything?
I've now been in the field for 30 years, of which about 2/3rds was as a programmer, and the rest as a sysadmin, and the highest-level math I ever used was when I wrote a database system, back in the mid-eighties... and that was logs.
Article 1, section 8, clause 8, reads, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
It does NOT read "to make money for the creators for themselves and their families in perpertua".
Furthermore, esp. in software, where something may easily be obsolescent in five years, to grant a patent that lasts 17 is to *not* promote the progress of science", but rather to restrict it.
But we've seen plenty of folks (gee, boyos and grllls, can you say 'SCO'? Or 'RIAA'?) who think it means the latter.
I'm *really* tired of a dozen or 15 or so pieces of plastic in my wallet, and digging through to find the one for each store. How about one unified card, that any store can add their info to (presumably encrypted), so I only need *one* card for all the supermarkets, and drug stores, and book stores I go to...?
LED flashlights are great. But for indoor lighting? Have any of you tried reading a book (you remember them, on dead trees) under them? I've used a commuter bus that's put in LEDs, and it's *dreadful*, bluish, eyestrain city.
And none of the compact fluorescents I've seen have the warm color of incandescent. *bleah* Time to stock up on bulbs....
Children, I see no reason to disbelieve that the US "Intelligence community" would look into doing this to wikileaks. Look up COINTELPRO. Look up the CIA using the Mafia to try to get an exploding cigar to Castro. These are all documented *FACTS*. Why on earth would I *not* think they'd try to trash wikileaks?
First, why should I read past the first paragraph of the article, when it's clearly written and edited by folks with no clue or interest in actual news.
NASA IS NOT A "FIRM", IT IS AN AGENCY OF THE US GOVERNMENT. Government IS NOT A BUSINESS.
Second, NASA's management structure should be flattened, preferably with a sledge hammer. Get rid of everyone there who does *not* have a scientific or engineering degree (I know, from someone who worked at KSC for 17 years, that there are some fairly high-up managers who have *neither*).
Third, fill *all* the tech slots - many are empty, and many of the experienced folks are retiring, or have left in disgust. We've had two Republican presidents who claimed to want to move on..., and supplied neither funding nor direction. Expect NASA to provide that? Really? How many of you reading this provide direction for your company?
mark, still waiting for his ticket on PanAm to the Wheel....
As someone who's spent too much of the last decade out of work, everything you hear is true - like in Florida, over 13 mos between the end of '03 and the end of '04, when I ran out COBRA and got rolled into an "individual" plan, and the Republicans in charge of the state allowed, in two jumps, a ->ONE HUNDRED PERCENT- increase in premiums.
Consider finding a group to join that offers it - anyone know if either the IEEE or ACM offer plans?
mark "until we techno-peasants finally wake up, pull out the torches and
pitchforks, and ride the Republicans out of town on a rail, tarred and
feathered, and tell the remaining folks in Congress to pass single payer"
Definition:
sff = science fiction and fantasy, 99.999% of which is written, and has *nothing* to do with anything ever filmed/video'd/gamed
This is nothing new. Too bad it'll be a one-day wonder on slashdot, and ignored thereafter.
When I first got into fandom (we're talking Real fandom, not media fandom (Trekkie/Who/etc) in the mid-sixties, there was a lot of talk about sff as being the bridge between the two cultures. The two cultures were liberal arts and the sciences. As Snow pointed out, he knew plenty of scientists and engineers who could quote Shakespeare, chapter and verse, but not a single liberal arts person who knew even the simplified version of the Three Laws of Thermodynamics.
It's gotten *WAY* worse as the right, esp., has pushed the dumbing down of the American educational system the last 35 years. ("we value education", but we'll only fund it with property taxes, no income taxes, and we'll put a cap on property taxes). The result is that too many people in the US conflate electricity with magic.
One result of this is that sf is looked down on by the majority of Americans, except for maybe movies, and they're 90% made by producers and directors and scriptwriters who can't figure out how to have a consistent storyline, much less keep the real world in mind (Armageddon being a perfect example, where, on top of every other thing that's wrong with it, has Willis just sort of pushing the button... without paying any attention to whether he was doing it at the right instant).
SF, yeah, that "Buck Rogers stuff", it's all fantastic (the speaker being unable to distinguish between sf & fantasy, since they live in a fantasy world in their heads). Yeah, laser beams, I mean, ray guns, and asteroids hitting the Earth, and designer diseases, yup, all fantasy.
Yeah, it is pro-survival. We get to worry about things 20-30 years before the rest of you do, and come to some kinds of answers (got gray goo? microwave it!) But does the majority care? They think Godzilla movies are sf.
In the meantime, I can point to any number of books with serious literary merit (ranging from Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar, using the style of Dos Passos' USA, to Stephenson's Anathem, and a ton in between), that I'd love to see brought into any English class, and give kids things to think about... but science is hard, as Barbie said.
Nearly thirty years ago, I spoke to someone at a meeting from the Space Sciences Inst, I believe it was. IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES, he told me that the environmental impact study had already been done several years before.
What he also told me was that they were NOT talking about megawatts/meter^2, but *watts*/m^2. That's not enough to cook a buzzard flying over it. They were talking about large arrays of receivers.
But that's too complicated, and you can't make movies with laser beams flashing through vacuum with it, so I guess some of the turkeys who post here can't deal with it....
mark "where do I sign up to go to orbit as a mechanic?"
I see one idiot babbles in the comments to this article about "heavily regulated industry needing tort reform".
The reality is that the medical industry needs more regulation, since their mission statement isn't providing goods and/or services, and making a reasonable profit, it's 1. ROI, 2. ROI, 3. See #1, sell something that the customers will buy, and that we can get a deal with the health insurance companies so that we both make out like bandits, and Did I mention ROI?
Another example: why do hearing aids cost $1k and up... and a cellphone well under a hundred, or any music player under? Why can't one be produced with the sound quality of any headphone set, with microphone and one-chip amplifier, and sold at commodity prices for under $100, and cheap ones under $50?
As I said, because the REAL cause of massively rising healthcare costs is how the industry, not even necessarily doctors, can make out like bandits.
Oh, and about tort reform as some sort of answer? Go pay the $36 for the report from that company in PA that's the *ONLY* one who collects such stats. Last time that report made the news, maybe 5-6 years ago, it was a tiny amount of malpractice awards that were over $1M, and something like well under 10% of the doctors who were responsible for 90% of the malpractice awards.
But self-regulation works *so* well... that these incompetent scum stay in business after lawsuit after lawsuit.
About the time that came out, a buddy of mine found a 17-page treatment someone had done. I read all of it, and it *was* the movie we'd been waiting for. The author said he'd tried, numerous times, to contact Lucas, and got brushed off.
Anakin's mom was a *much* stronger character, etc, etc. On and off, the last couple of years, I've tried to find that treatment again, and haven't been able to - anyone here remember it?
mark, also looking for the story of the sysadmin who gets 2 lbs of chocolate-
covered espresso beans for the holidays, and the department self-
destructs....
It's what we wound up using on the team I worked for a couple years ago at AT&T. Uses mysql, is easy to install, lightweight, and I know for a fact it's not hard to write code (php - it's all php) to make certain areas login only.
As long as he can understand them, and they're correct. One of my daughters and her husband were recently coming to meet me, and missed a turn, they were laughing so hard at being directed to turn at Malcolm the Tenth.
For example, show me the documentation for an experienced sysadmin who's never dealt with LDAP before, to configure and fire up openLDAP. The middle of '06, I spent nearly a month googling, asking on mailing lists, and fighting with it. The "documentation" was garbage, and appeared to assume that I had the time to read the code and understand the zillions of lines of it.
If I had, I would have rewritten their tools so that a) they gave correct error messages, and b) they didn't require deeply obscure sets of switches just to do normal things like searches.
mark, author, Egoless Documentation, SysAdmin, June '06
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I know, they'll pay $200M to the Russians to take the actors and cameramen to the ISS.
Too bad we didn't finalize and build a follow on to the Shuttle 15 years ago.
mark
... the same hours they would have spent on solitaire?
mark
Perhaps, for those who can't wait, you should read his Letters From The Earth, published 30 years after his death....
A paraphrase, Lucifer writing to St. Pete: these folks think that there's no sex in heaven... and those who hate utterly boring sermons and harp music are really looking forward to an eternity of that"
mark
How 'bout for anyone texting, and is pulled over, they're required to put their device in a special mount on the driver's seat, and before driving, need to take off their pants or skirt, and SIT ON IT, shoving it where the sun don't shine, while driving. Then maybe they'll pay more attention to the road.
mark
There's sites that have been around for years. One I like, I *think* the URL is - it's blocked here at work, of course - for a ton of old arcade games. I *think* PacMan's among them, but I can't look, and wasn't interested. I rather like Time Pilot....
mark
"Frankly, I was a bit surprised to see LON come out and suggest people should not commit crimes when they are desperate for money. I think this would be obvious to any rational person."
So, the author of the review implies that you should only commit crimes when you're *not* desperate for money? Then only rich people would, oh, right, Goldman Sach, Enron, the S&L debacle (33% of that was white collar crime)... I guess he's right. Get rich, *then* steal.
mark
Thus we see the results of not reading actual books, thinking video that jumps around rather than giving you actual viewpoints is "edgy", and that anything intelligible can be written in the 140 chars that were intended for a ball and chain (aka a pager).
I've had plenty of projects and jobs over my career where I was wotking 30-40 hours a day, no meetings, for weeks or months, straight development cycles - making flow charts or reading Revealed Specs, code, test, debug....
The real question about "are you stealing" is whether you're actually getting your work done, or falling behind.
mark
is the one I've been offering for well over thirty years:
1) how many planets sustain life?
2) how many such planets evolve what we would recognize as technologically-bent intelligent life? (remember the hundreds of thousands of years we had only stone technology?)
3) how many of *them* are within 300 years of our technology level - too soon, no radio or spaceships or...; later, and why would they be using such a low-tech and wasteful technology as broadcast radio?
4) How many of the above are within 40 ly of Earth?
5) For good measure, how many cut their budgets for space exploration, it being a wasteful government program, and, after all, private companies can do everything?
mark
This is the *STUPIDEST* idea I've seen in a long while (other than, say, the idea that the tea baggers live in the real world).
AND I see no way to turn it off.
Did I mention I hate flash? And are you guaranteeing on-site, 24 hr maintenance, when we get infected from an infected flash video?
mark, who has his setting at "old style" slashdot
I got through 2 years of calculus.
I've now been in the field for 30 years, of which about 2/3rds was as a programmer, and the rest as a sysadmin, and the highest-level math I ever used was when I wrote a database system, back in the mid-eighties... and that was logs.
mark
Article 1, section 8, clause 8, reads, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
It does NOT read "to make money for the creators for themselves and their families in perpertua".
Furthermore, esp. in software, where something may easily be obsolescent in five years, to grant a patent that lasts 17 is to *not* promote the progress of science", but rather to restrict it.
But we've seen plenty of folks (gee, boyos and grllls, can you say 'SCO'? Or 'RIAA'?) who think it means the latter.
mark
... a Commodore 256? I mean, 64 bit x 4 cores....
mark
I'm *really* tired of a dozen or 15 or so pieces of plastic in my wallet, and digging through to find the one for each store. How about one unified card, that any store can add their info to (presumably encrypted), so I only need *one* card for all the supermarkets, and drug stores, and book stores I go to...?
mark
LED flashlights are great. But for indoor lighting? Have any of you tried reading a book (you remember them, on dead trees) under them? I've used a commuter bus that's put in LEDs, and it's *dreadful*, bluish, eyestrain city.
And none of the compact fluorescents I've seen have the warm color of incandescent. *bleah* Time to stock up on bulbs....
mark
"conspiracy theory", etc.
Children, I see no reason to disbelieve that the US "Intelligence community" would look into doing this to wikileaks. Look up COINTELPRO. Look up the CIA using the Mafia to try to get an exploding cigar to Castro. These are all documented *FACTS*. Why on earth would I *not* think they'd try to trash wikileaks?
mark
Oh, gee, my breaker's blown in the fusebox in the basement.
Ooops, there's no power to the lock, so my e-key won't open the door so I can't turn the power back on to the door....
mark "don't let your house BSoD..."
First, why should I read past the first paragraph of the article, when it's clearly written and edited by folks with no clue or interest in actual news.
NASA IS NOT A "FIRM", IT IS AN AGENCY OF THE US GOVERNMENT. Government IS NOT A BUSINESS.
Second, NASA's management structure should be flattened, preferably with a sledge hammer. Get rid of everyone there who does *not* have a scientific or engineering degree (I know, from someone who worked at KSC for 17 years, that there are some fairly high-up managers who have *neither*).
Third, fill *all* the tech slots - many are empty, and many of the experienced folks are retiring, or have left in disgust. We've had two Republican presidents who claimed to want to move on..., and supplied neither funding nor direction. Expect NASA to provide that? Really? How many of you reading this provide direction for your company?
mark, still waiting for his ticket on PanAm to the Wheel....
As someone who's spent too much of the last decade out of work, everything you hear is true - like in Florida, over 13 mos between the end of '03 and the end of '04, when I ran out COBRA and got rolled into an "individual" plan, and the Republicans in charge of the state allowed, in two jumps, a ->ONE HUNDRED PERCENT- increase in premiums.
Consider finding a group to join that offers it - anyone know if either the IEEE or ACM offer plans?
mark "until we techno-peasants finally wake up, pull out the torches and
pitchforks, and ride the Republicans out of town on a rail, tarred and
feathered, and tell the remaining folks in Congress to pass single payer"
Definition:
sff = science fiction and fantasy, 99.999% of which is written, and has *nothing* to do with anything ever filmed/video'd/gamed
This is nothing new. Too bad it'll be a one-day wonder on slashdot, and ignored thereafter.
When I first got into fandom (we're talking Real fandom, not media fandom (Trekkie/Who/etc) in the mid-sixties, there was a lot of talk about sff as being the bridge between the two cultures. The two cultures were liberal arts and the sciences. As Snow pointed out, he knew plenty of scientists and engineers who could quote Shakespeare, chapter and verse, but not a single liberal arts person who knew even the simplified version of the Three Laws of Thermodynamics.
It's gotten *WAY* worse as the right, esp., has pushed the dumbing down of the American educational system the last 35 years. ("we value education", but we'll only fund it with property taxes, no income taxes, and we'll put a cap on property taxes). The result is that too many people in the US conflate electricity with magic.
One result of this is that sf is looked down on by the majority of Americans, except for maybe movies, and they're 90% made by producers and directors and scriptwriters who can't figure out how to have a consistent storyline, much less keep the real world in mind (Armageddon being a perfect example, where, on top of every other thing that's wrong with it, has Willis just sort of pushing the button... without paying any attention to whether he was doing it at the right instant).
SF, yeah, that "Buck Rogers stuff", it's all fantastic (the speaker being unable to distinguish between sf & fantasy, since they live in a fantasy world in their heads). Yeah, laser beams, I mean, ray guns, and asteroids hitting the Earth, and designer diseases, yup, all fantasy.
Yeah, it is pro-survival. We get to worry about things 20-30 years before the rest of you do, and come to some kinds of answers (got gray goo? microwave it!) But does the majority care? They think Godzilla movies are sf.
In the meantime, I can point to any number of books with serious literary merit (ranging from Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar, using the style of Dos Passos' USA, to Stephenson's Anathem, and a ton in between), that I'd love to see brought into any English class, and give kids things to think about... but science is hard, as Barbie said.
mark
Nearly thirty years ago, I spoke to someone at a meeting from the Space Sciences Inst, I believe it was. IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES, he told me that the environmental impact study had already been done several years before.
What he also told me was that they were NOT talking about megawatts/meter^2, but *watts*/m^2. That's not enough to cook a buzzard flying over it. They were talking about large arrays of receivers.
But that's too complicated, and you can't make movies with laser beams flashing through vacuum with it, so I guess some of the turkeys who post here can't deal with it....
mark "where do I sign up to go to orbit as a mechanic?"
I see one idiot babbles in the comments to this article about "heavily regulated industry needing tort reform".
The reality is that the medical industry needs more regulation, since their mission statement isn't providing goods and/or services, and making a reasonable profit, it's 1. ROI, 2. ROI, 3. See #1, sell something that the customers will buy, and that we can get a deal with the health insurance companies so that we both make out like bandits, and Did I mention ROI?
Another example: why do hearing aids cost $1k and up... and a cellphone well under a hundred, or any music player under? Why can't one be produced with the sound quality of any headphone set, with microphone and one-chip amplifier, and sold at commodity prices for under $100, and cheap ones under $50?
As I said, because the REAL cause of massively rising healthcare costs is how the industry, not even necessarily doctors, can make out like bandits.
Oh, and about tort reform as some sort of answer? Go pay the $36 for the report from that company in PA that's the *ONLY* one who collects such stats. Last time that report made the news, maybe 5-6 years ago, it was a tiny amount of malpractice awards that were over $1M, and something like well under 10% of the doctors who were responsible for 90% of the malpractice awards.
But self-regulation works *so* well... that these incompetent scum stay in business after lawsuit after lawsuit.
mark
About the time that came out, a buddy of mine found a 17-page treatment someone had done. I read all of it, and it *was* the movie we'd been waiting for. The author said he'd tried, numerous times, to contact Lucas, and got brushed off.
Anakin's mom was a *much* stronger character, etc, etc. On and off, the last couple of years, I've tried to find that treatment again, and haven't been able to - anyone here remember it?
mark, also looking for the story of the sysadmin who gets 2 lbs of chocolate-
covered espresso beans for the holidays, and the department self-
destructs....
It's what we wound up using on the team I worked for a couple years ago at AT&T. Uses mysql, is easy to install, lightweight, and I know for a fact it's not hard to write code (php - it's all php) to make certain areas login only.
mark
As long as he can understand them, and they're correct. One of my daughters and her husband were recently coming to meet me, and missed a turn, they were laughing so hard at being directed to turn at Malcolm the Tenth.
mark "spelled Malcolm X"
For example, show me the documentation for an experienced sysadmin who's never dealt with LDAP before, to configure and fire up openLDAP. The middle of '06, I spent nearly a month googling, asking on mailing lists, and fighting with it. The "documentation" was garbage, and appeared to assume that I had the time to read the code and understand the zillions of lines of it.
If I had, I would have rewritten their tools so that a) they gave correct error messages, and b) they didn't require deeply obscure sets of switches just to do normal things like searches.
mark, author, Egoless Documentation, SysAdmin, June '06