One of the things that immediately struck me was that the conservative judges seemed to be more conservative than the liberal judges were liberal, based on the vividness of the color. Aha, I thought, I knew the liberals were more moderate!
But actually I think that's an artifact of the way the coloring was done. Look at Rehnquist as an associate and see the vivid red that his first year shows as, which is 3.98. Now look at Thurgood Marshall, below him, and find a -3.95. Those should look pretty similar in terms of intensity, but the blue looks much closer to white than the red does.
What I think is happening is this. They are color coding not on absolutes like that, but based on the distance between 0 and the most conservative or liberal number. But the most liberal justice is at -6, which the most conservative one is only at -5. So if you get a 4, that's 80% of the way to being the most conservative, but someone who is equivalently liberal at -4 is only 66% of the way to being the most liberal. So they get a color that looks like they are 66 points away from moderate as opposed to 80 points for the conservatives.
Well that's misleading. I think the color gradation changes need to be symmetrical across the graph or it's going to be super confusing. Maybe just call -5 the most liberal you can be and don't worry about shading Douglas more? Or make 6 the most conservative you can be and give up the super deep red color for now.
Google and Apple have been fairly chummy for a couple of years now -- look closely and you'll notice that the iPhone ships with only Apple and Google apps, nobody else was even invited to the party.
That's sort of interesting until you actually take the close look you asked for and discover that the iPhone ships with Yahoo mail and search as built-in options. Yahoo mail was even the default option for non-Apple-based mail.
So yeah, they may be allies, but your case seems to be somewhat lacking actual facts. Which is fine, this is slashdot.
Ah, a prototypical/. reaction. Some company does something nice, like offers free licenses to schools, and what's the first post? Criticism for not going far enough.
It would sure be nice if everything were free, source were available, nothing had bugs, and everyone got woken up by a blowjob, but the world just doesn't work that way.
We should be congratulating those companies that look beyond their immediate bottom line to try and make the world a better place, even if it is a loss-leading marketing expense like giving browsers to students.
Anyone else think this is clever, btw? Students like free things, so they'll take Opera up on this, and some of them will like it. Then, when they go to the real world, they'll ber ready to convince their company to drop IE and switch to... well, probably Firefox since it's free.
I took AP computer science in high school back when it was Pascal, based, in 91-92. I mostly remember the exam as being surprisingly easy.
I took 5 AP classes my senior year, and one my junior year. CS was significantly the easiest test, without much competition. In case you care, the others were english, physics, math bc, biology, and music theory. No, music theory wasn't the second easiest, or even the third.
CS was also the only class where by january we had covered all the material on the exam. I hope it's gotten more challenging since then, or it's basically a waste of time in terms of demonstrating much knowledge. I guess it's ok if it's just being used to pass you out of a beginning class, but it's certainly not as challenging as a beginning class at many colleges.
The problem is not that the machine got some things wrong. Missing ballots is bad, not counting the abesntee ballots is bad, but every kind of machine will make mistakes. Is this any worse than the various chad issues we learned about in Florida and elsewhere? No.
The problem is that these issues are so uncatchable. In the older systems, we would know that there was a problem, and have some way to address it. The real problem here is that it's so damn hard to even figure out that there is a problem. One was found serendipitously this time, but how many are out there that nobody noticed?
That's the issue. And it's going to require a fundamental change in the thinking of the people in charge of these machines, both the makers of the machines, but also the consumers of them.
All of which means... contact your politician, and make yourself heard. It's how these things get changed.
Re:In defense of -ist and -ic
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What You Can't Say
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I probably shouldn't reply to this, since I can't see this being a useful conversation, but....
Did it ever occur to you that there might be a reason that it's unacceptable for a white man to call women stupid, but not vice versa, or that there might be a reason to prevent some classes from using racial slurs more heavily than others?
The natural reaction when you feel you are being singled out is to cry, "Unfair!" But you should be careful of your own prejudices.
What I'm talking about is the weight of historical assumptions. It's not ok to call women as a class stupid because women as a class were considered stupid for centuries, and men as a class were not. So when you call women stupid, there's an underlying force to your words that makes it not by just a joke or a flippant comment -- sort of the way that you should never ever call your girlfriend fat. It doesn't matter whether she is or not, but women in this country have such fucked up body images that your words carry much more edge to them than you mean for them to.
Similarly with saying women are bad at math. What's the evidence? Just that they don't do as well as men once they are adults. But there are a ton of other explanations for that than women being "naturally worse" than men at math. In fact, there have been multiple studies showing that boys get preferential treatment in math and science classes starting in junior high, and that girls are discouraged.
So when you call women bad at math, it's not that you are making a statement about math skills -- it's that you are reinforcing centuries of, well, sexism. And the fact that you seem to believe it just shows how dangerous muddled thinking about this sort of thing can be, since there's no real reason to come down on the nature side of the argument that I've heard, while there is a serious set of good arguments to come down on the nurture side. It's just that people don't think about it, since everyone knows that girls are bad at math.
In regards to "the failure of speakers/writers to state in explicit terms exactly what they mean," I would have to say that that is an impossible goal. In fact, I wouldn't even want for it to be a goal -- a huge part of the richness of human communication is the layers of meaning that shroud every sentence we utter, and it would suck to lose all that.
That there are lots of times that people seem distressingly unaware of how what they say will be interpreted or received. "No, honey, I didn't mean that you're fat! I just don't like the way that looks!" Heh.
But I still think that people claim that they are misinterpreted way more often than is really plausible. You hear "I'm not x-ist, I'm just being misinterpreted" all over the place. I think that some large percentage of those times are when someone is being called on exactly what they meant and hoped they would get away with.
But yes, of course words like "sexist" and "racist" can and are routinely misused to stifle or shut down discourse, and yes, that sucks. Just don't throw out the baby with the bathwater and reject the terms and concepts, instead of just excoriating the misuser.
In defense of -ist and -ic
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What You Can't Say
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Calling something x-ist, as the author suggests, is often used to suppress ideas, even true ideas. But that doesn't mean that the concept of racism or sexism is just a form of censorship, as this article seems to imply. In fact, such labels are very useful for discussing implications as well as the truth value of a sentence.
That's pretty vague, so how about an example. If someone says, "Girls are bad at math", it can mean a lot of different things. One of the meanings might be, "Girls tend to do worse on math tests than boys of the same age," which if the age in question is high school, as opposed to elementary school or junior high, would be true. And yet, I can hear the cries, even though it's true, it gets labeled as sexist!
Well, there's a good reason for that. If what our hypothetical speaker really meant to say was, "Girls in high school perform worse on math tests that boys in high school," then why didn't he say that? The main difference in the two sentences, or in the general approach behind the sentences, is twofold: the implications of the sentence; and the assumptions behind it.
Those things need to be addressed, and it's not enough to say, "That's not true!" as the author of this article would have it. Because the sentence *is* true, but at least one implication -- that girls are naturally worse at math than boys, and there's nothing to be done about that -- is *exactly* the kind of idea that the author wants to avoid! It's pervasive, it's hard to get rid of, in most places in this country, people believe it implicitly. But it's also hard to talk about the general phenomenon without bringing up the concept of sexism.
So be careful of just rejecting x-ism and y-ic. They exist because they can be useful tools for uncovering the exact "fashions" which the author claims they hide.
There are a ton of good geek books out there, especially in the scifi realm. Some of my favorites include:
Cryptonomicon. You've read snow crash, so you know all about Stephenson. Diamond Age is also excellent.
Ender's Game is good, as is Speaker for the Dead. A book that feels somewhat similar for some reason, but is more literary, is Hyperion. Quite good.
If you like fantasy, Guy Gavriel Kay writes excellent somewhat historically based fantasy. He got his name by editing the Silmarillion. Tigana is good, Sailing to Serantium is fantastic. Avoid the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy. It's formulaic schlock.
Technology expenses are really high for nonprofits. They need computers and computer systems to do their jobs, but it costs them a fortune in money, time, and effort to build and keep up the systems. They spend generally 1-2% of their money on tech systems, as compared to 6% in the private sector.
This has a couple of effects. The most obvious is that that's money that could be going towards their goals or causes. Money that is in some sense wasted, if there's a way to get technology without having to pay for it.
A second effect is that they are generally using very old and outdated equipment. Why? Because they modernized to a computer system in the 90s, and aren't willing to spend the money to do it again now. This means that as technology improves in ways that would be useful for them, they are in general lagging behind, unable to aquire or use it.
So whatever your feelings for Microsoft, it's clear that this sort of donation is really good for nonprofits. And if you think that nonprofits in general are good for society (which I certainly do), then it's clear that Microsoft is doing something good for society.
It may, of course, benefit them as well. But there's no harm in helping yourself while you help others, is there?
If, on average, a certain even over the course of a long time has some chance of happening, like, say, a plane crash or an asteroid hitting, then it's reasonable to compare them. If an asteroid hits, a ton of people are going to die, but it's unlikely. If a plane crashes, relatively few people are going to die, but it's much more likely.
The thing that isn't being taken into account is variance. Asteroid impacts are low-probability, high-variance events, kind of like winning the lottery in a really bad way. But, like the lottery, when it hits it has a much bigger impact.
So if I bet a dollar, and half the time I lose my dollar, and half the time I get back my dollar plus another 50 cents, I would expect to win as much money on average as if I bought a lottery ticket. The money won, on average, is the same. It's the same concept, except instead of dollars won in this case, you're picking people from the population to die. Grim, I know.
It seems to me that in a world of restricted resources, you should tend to put those resources not necessarily in the place that has the highest number of expected deaths, but rather in the place that will lower the number of expected deaths the most. So I think it's reasonable that we spend more money on airplane safety than on asteroid detection.
This may be posted too late for anyone to read, but....
Most other people are posting what they think are the best books in the genre, which is probably a good idea in that it's of more general interest, but here's a list of books that you personally might like based on the books you listed.
The Vorkosigan saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Excellent, long-running series. It's a space opera deaturing one of the most entertaining characters I've seen in science fiction. In chronological order of the main character's life, the books are: Shards of Honor, Barrayar, The Warrior's Apprentice, The Vor Game, Ceteganda, Borders of Infinity, Brothers in Arms, Mirror Dance, Memory, Komarr, A Civil Campaign, Diplomatic Immunity.
These books are unusual in that you don't really need to read them in order. In fact, the first one is by far the weakest; it might be worth skipping entirely and coming back to if you like the others. Read at least most of the series before you read Memory and after -- those books assume you know the characters already.
For pure fantasy, the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time books might amuse you. The 10th book just came out. This is a pure fantasy series that starts in a sort of vanilla way, but by the third book or so, Jordan has created a wonderfully intricate world full of politics and more schemes than you can count. They start to go downhill after about book 6, though. The first few of the series are: Eye of the World; The Great Hunt; The Dragon Reborn; Shadow Rising; The Fires of Heaven.
Have you read the Steven Brust Vlad Taltos series? I think you would probably like them. The main character is a sardonic assassin with an equally sardonic dragon familiar. He starts as a low-level mobster, and quickly moves up in the world. The books: Jhereg; Yendi; Teckla; Taltos; Phoenix; Athyra; Orca; Dragon. They start to go downhill after Phoenix, during which Vlad loses some of his joi de vivre that so enlivens the books.
Finally, check out Guy Gavriel Kay, anything but the Fionavar Tapestry, and you may like that too. Fantastic pseudo-historical fantasy. He got his start editing the Silmarillion, but his writing is way better than tolkien's. This is the best that fantasy has to offer, in my opinion. His books are for the most part in the same world, but they are all stand-alone novels, with one exception. So order matters not at all. The list: Tigana; Lions of Al Rassan; A Song for Arbonne; Sailing to Sarantium; and Lord of Emperors, sequel to Sarantium.
Other people you might like: George R. R. Martin, Terry Pratchett; Neil Gaimon; RA Salvatore.
- target
Re:The aliens are too mystical/magical for me
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Spielberg's Taken
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· Score: 1
So let's see. You're opposed to the fantastic elements at the expense of good science fiction, then you pick the one thing that our science understands to be impossible and claim that it's believable to you?
To go through them: take any shape. Weird, but I can't think of a physics principle that would prevent this. Liquids do exactly that in real life, though you need a container to do it.
Convert to energy: E=mC^2. If the energy is of a non-visible wavelength, poof, it's vanished.
Telepathy: ok, I don't know of any good science to back this up. I'm sure we can all aome up with plausible arguments, but I'll let you have this one.
Learning English: Oh, for god's sake. This could easily be a technology solution.
"Easier to move faster than light...."
So it's easier to violate laws of physics than do nifty tricks that obey them? Methinks you should rethink "science fiction."
Besides, a guy who's definitely not a fantasy author once said that any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.
At least, I just went to the site, and the lead article among many others is marked "Premium only".
It is true that all the non-premium content has huge interstitials as well as inlined ads for non-subscribers, but that's been true for ages now.
At least they don't have popunders. Actually, I am a subscriber, so it matters little to me what advertising they do if I am not exposed to it. I suppose I should note that banner ads and ads down the sides are still there for me, but the really intrusive ones are gone.
I'm late enough in the discussion that nobody is going to read this, but still.
Your whole take on this is ridiculous.
Take your example of a bricklayer building a house. It is true that he must build the whole house, and sell it to only one buyer. It takes a long time, and at the end, he gets exactly one sale out of it. How much does a house cost?
Do you have any idea how much time and effort and money goes into building a software application, or writing a book? If only one copy can be sold, because copies will be made and nothing can stop that, then each copy will have to be sold for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
And since nobody would buy it, there is no market. Without a market, it won't get made.
I'm a little unclear, actually, on what it is that you are proposing. At the end of your diatribe, you write, "Either they sell the entertainment at its true market value, or they will do under." What is true market value? What the consumer wants to pay?
I want to pay $100 for my house, instead of $500,000. What is the true market value of it?
Like many of the posters, I quite enjoyed many of your books when I was an adolescent. I noticed, though, that I tended to enjoy books late in a series much less than books at the start of one.
For instance, I really enjoyed the first Split Infinity trilogy. I found the third trilogy to be, um, less readable. What's interesting to me is that this is a common theme amongst fantasy and science fiction -- look at the Dune books, the Dragonriders of Pern, David Brin's Uplift novels, the list is really endless.
Why is that? Is there something unusually difficult about continuing a series, or do writers tend to get lazy, since they know that they have a built-in audience? For that matter, do you agree that some of the later books in your own long-running series are weaker than the earlier ones?
So I wonder what the next movies are going to be about. At the end of the matrix, neo is like unto a god, and the agents can't stop him.
Outside the matrix, neo is a wimpy bald guy who eats gruel and has no ability to fight the enemy.
A movie needs conflict to be interesting. There's lots of obvious conflict available in the real world, where neo and company are underdogs in the fight against the machines, but the parts of the matrix that were really cool were *in the matrix*. So the major conflict being outside the matrix is out.[1]
But neo is all powerful inside, right? Well, that pretty much has to change for there to be anything interesting happening. So my prediction is, right at the beginning of the movie, we're going to find out that the machines have changed something about the matrix that takes away some (but not all) of neo and company's power. That way they still get to do their cool slow motion three-d rotating martial arts, but they can't just win outright.[2]
It's an open question, of course, whether this will be done well enough to allow you to sit back and enjoy the movie, rather than internally kvetch about how contrived things are.
Note that the above is not based on any actual knowledge or information.
- target
[1] Of course, as in the first movie, there will certainly be some conflict outside the matrix. Expect that there will be twin threats, inside and outside, just as in the first. Expect also that those threats will be interrelated, so that solving one is necessary to or will solve the other.
[2] This is perhaps supported by the title. If the matrix gets reloaded, will somee of the rules change?
When the snail mail comes, it comes only once a day. You can generally easily identify which ones are spam, and toss them in the recycle bin kept in the garage for that purpose. It takes a few seconds.
So while it's annoying, it's not that hard to deal with.
Compare that to email. Every so often, throughout the day, email shows up. Every time it does, you have to interrupt whatever you're thinking about to look at it, and discard it if it's spam. Filters help a good deal with this, but the very fact that by nature email gets delivered at random times rather than in batch makes it more intrusive.
Now, the major benefit to switching physical spam to email is that physical mail has a bunch of environmental consequences -- use of paper, landfill space or use of chemicals an energy in recycling, use of energy in delivery, and so on. Email takes up many fewer resources per mail.
I just downloaded the media player to take a look at the license agreement. Here are a couple of interesting bits:
* Digital Rights Management (Security). You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ("Secure Content"), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update.
Wow. So they can automatically put stuff on your computer that will disable software they don't like, and potentially take away your ability to play "Secure Content."
This is pretty intrusive, as things go. I, for one, would prefer in general that nothing gets installed on my computer that I don't specifically authorize.
Note that there seems to be a corrolary effect here. If they are sending stuff to your computer, your computer is really reaching out to their systems, and potentially is providing identifying or other information to them. Scary.
But of course the scariest bit is the "use other software" clause. It's not even qualified! By this reading, they can disable any other piece of software on your computer! Fear.
Of course, it is in the digital rights section of the agreement, but I'm not sure if that forces the "any other software" clause to be software relating in some way to digital rights.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the things that immediately struck me was that the conservative judges seemed to be more conservative than the liberal judges were liberal, based on the vividness of the color. Aha, I thought, I knew the liberals were more moderate!
But actually I think that's an artifact of the way the coloring was done. Look at Rehnquist as an associate and see the vivid red that his first year shows as, which is 3.98. Now look at Thurgood Marshall, below him, and find a -3.95. Those should look pretty similar in terms of intensity, but the blue looks much closer to white than the red does.
What I think is happening is this. They are color coding not on absolutes like that, but based on the distance between 0 and the most conservative or liberal number. But the most liberal justice is at -6, which the most conservative one is only at -5. So if you get a 4, that's 80% of the way to being the most conservative, but someone who is equivalently liberal at -4 is only 66% of the way to being the most liberal. So they get a color that looks like they are 66 points away from moderate as opposed to 80 points for the conservatives.
Well that's misleading. I think the color gradation changes need to be symmetrical across the graph or it's going to be super confusing. Maybe just call -5 the most liberal you can be and don't worry about shading Douglas more? Or make 6 the most conservative you can be and give up the super deep red color for now.
Google and Apple have been fairly chummy for a couple of years now -- look closely and you'll notice that the iPhone ships with only Apple and Google apps, nobody else was even invited to the party.
That's sort of interesting until you actually take the close look you asked for and discover that the iPhone ships with Yahoo mail and search as built-in options. Yahoo mail was even the default option for non-Apple-based mail.
So yeah, they may be allies, but your case seems to be somewhat lacking actual facts. Which is fine, this is slashdot.
Ah, a prototypical /. reaction. Some company does something nice, like offers free licenses to schools, and what's the first post? Criticism for not going far enough.
It would sure be nice if everything were free, source were available, nothing had bugs, and everyone got woken up by a blowjob, but the world just doesn't work that way.
We should be congratulating those companies that look beyond their immediate bottom line to try and make the world a better place, even if it is a loss-leading marketing expense like giving browsers to students.
Anyone else think this is clever, btw? Students like free things, so they'll take Opera up on this, and some of them will like it. Then, when they go to the real world, they'll ber ready to convince their company to drop IE and switch to... well, probably Firefox since it's free.
I took AP computer science in high school back when it was Pascal, based, in 91-92. I mostly remember the exam as being surprisingly easy.
I took 5 AP classes my senior year, and one my junior year. CS was significantly the easiest test, without much competition. In case you care, the others were english, physics, math bc, biology, and music theory. No, music theory wasn't the second easiest, or even the third.
CS was also the only class where by january we had covered all the material on the exam. I hope it's gotten more challenging since then, or it's basically a waste of time in terms of demonstrating much knowledge. I guess it's ok if it's just being used to pass you out of a beginning class, but it's certainly not as challenging as a beginning class at many colleges.
The problem is not that the machine got some things wrong. Missing ballots is bad, not counting the abesntee ballots is bad, but every kind of machine will make mistakes. Is this any worse than the various chad issues we learned about in Florida and elsewhere? No.
The problem is that these issues are so uncatchable. In the older systems, we would know that there was a problem, and have some way to address it. The real problem here is that it's so damn hard to even figure out that there is a problem. One was found serendipitously this time, but how many are out there that nobody noticed?
That's the issue. And it's going to require a fundamental change in the thinking of the people in charge of these machines, both the makers of the machines, but also the consumers of them.
All of which means... contact your politician, and make yourself heard. It's how these things get changed.
I probably shouldn't reply to this, since I can't see this being a useful conversation, but....
Did it ever occur to you that there might be a reason that it's unacceptable for a white man to call women stupid, but not vice versa, or that there might be a reason to prevent some classes from using racial slurs more heavily than others?
The natural reaction when you feel you are being singled out is to cry, "Unfair!" But you should be careful of your own prejudices.
What I'm talking about is the weight of historical assumptions. It's not ok to call women as a class stupid because women as a class were considered stupid for centuries, and men as a class were not. So when you call women stupid, there's an underlying force to your words that makes it not by just a joke or a flippant comment -- sort of the way that you should never ever call your girlfriend fat. It doesn't matter whether she is or not, but women in this country have such fucked up body images that your words carry much more edge to them than you mean for them to.
Similarly with saying women are bad at math. What's the evidence? Just that they don't do as well as men once they are adults. But there are a ton of other explanations for that than women being "naturally worse" than men at math. In fact, there have been multiple studies showing that boys get preferential treatment in math and science classes starting in junior high, and that girls are discouraged.
So when you call women bad at math, it's not that you are making a statement about math skills -- it's that you are reinforcing centuries of, well, sexism. And the fact that you seem to believe it just shows how dangerous muddled thinking about this sort of thing can be, since there's no real reason to come down on the nature side of the argument that I've heard, while there is a serious set of good arguments to come down on the nurture side. It's just that people don't think about it, since everyone knows that girls are bad at math.
In regards to "the failure of speakers/writers to state in explicit terms exactly what they mean," I would have to say that that is an impossible goal. In fact, I wouldn't even want for it to be a goal -- a huge part of the richness of human communication is the layers of meaning that shroud every sentence we utter, and it would suck to lose all that.
That there are lots of times that people seem distressingly unaware of how what they say will be interpreted or received. "No, honey, I didn't mean that you're fat! I just don't like the way that looks!" Heh.
But I still think that people claim that they are misinterpreted way more often than is really plausible. You hear "I'm not x-ist, I'm just being misinterpreted" all over the place. I think that some large percentage of those times are when someone is being called on exactly what they meant and hoped they would get away with.
But yes, of course words like "sexist" and "racist" can and are routinely misused to stifle or shut down discourse, and yes, that sucks. Just don't throw out the baby with the bathwater and reject the terms and concepts, instead of just excoriating the misuser.
Calling something x-ist, as the author suggests, is often used to suppress ideas, even true ideas. But that doesn't mean that the concept of racism or sexism is just a form of censorship, as this article seems to imply. In fact, such labels are very useful for discussing implications as well as the truth value of a sentence.
That's pretty vague, so how about an example. If someone says, "Girls are bad at math", it can mean a lot of different things. One of the meanings might be, "Girls tend to do worse on math tests than boys of the same age," which if the age in question is high school, as opposed to elementary school or junior high, would be true. And yet, I can hear the cries, even though it's true, it gets labeled as sexist!
Well, there's a good reason for that. If what our hypothetical speaker really meant to say was, "Girls in high school perform worse on math tests that boys in high school," then why didn't he say that? The main difference in the two sentences, or in the general approach behind the sentences, is twofold: the implications of the sentence; and the assumptions behind it.
Those things need to be addressed, and it's not enough to say, "That's not true!" as the author of this article would have it. Because the sentence *is* true, but at least one implication -- that girls are naturally worse at math than boys, and there's nothing to be done about that -- is *exactly* the kind of idea that the author wants to avoid! It's pervasive, it's hard to get rid of, in most places in this country, people believe it implicitly. But it's also hard to talk about the general phenomenon without bringing up the concept of sexism.
So be careful of just rejecting x-ism and y-ic. They exist because they can be useful tools for uncovering the exact "fashions" which the author claims they hide.
There are a ton of good geek books out there, especially in the scifi realm. Some of my favorites include:
Cryptonomicon. You've read snow crash, so you know all about Stephenson. Diamond Age is also excellent.
Ender's Game is good, as is Speaker for the Dead. A book that feels somewhat similar for some reason, but is more literary, is Hyperion. Quite good.
If you like fantasy, Guy Gavriel Kay writes excellent somewhat historically based fantasy. He got his name by editing the Silmarillion. Tigana is good, Sailing to Serantium is fantastic. Avoid the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy. It's formulaic schlock.
Well, that should get you started!
Enjoy,
target
Technology expenses are really high for nonprofits. They need computers and computer systems to do their jobs, but it costs them a fortune in money, time, and effort to build and keep up the systems. They spend generally 1-2% of their money on tech systems, as compared to 6% in the private sector.
This has a couple of effects. The most obvious is that that's money that could be going towards their goals or causes. Money that is in some sense wasted, if there's a way to get technology without having to pay for it.
A second effect is that they are generally using very old and outdated equipment. Why? Because they modernized to a computer system in the 90s, and aren't willing to spend the money to do it again now. This means that as technology improves in ways that would be useful for them, they are in general lagging behind, unable to aquire or use it.
So whatever your feelings for Microsoft, it's clear that this sort of donation is really good for nonprofits. And if you think that nonprofits in general are good for society (which I certainly do), then it's clear that Microsoft is doing something good for society.
It may, of course, benefit them as well. But there's no harm in helping yourself while you help others, is there?
- target
Uh, no.
If, on average, a certain even over the course of a long time has some chance of happening, like, say, a plane crash or an asteroid hitting, then it's reasonable to compare them. If an asteroid hits, a ton of people are going to die, but it's unlikely. If a plane crashes, relatively few people are going to die, but it's much more likely.
The thing that isn't being taken into account is variance. Asteroid impacts are low-probability, high-variance events, kind of like winning the lottery in a really bad way. But, like the lottery, when it hits it has a much bigger impact.
So if I bet a dollar, and half the time I lose my dollar, and half the time I get back my dollar plus another 50 cents, I would expect to win as much money on average as if I bought a lottery ticket. The money won, on average, is the same. It's the same concept, except instead of dollars won in this case, you're picking people from the population to die. Grim, I know.
It seems to me that in a world of restricted resources, you should tend to put those resources not necessarily in the place that has the highest number of expected deaths, but rather in the place that will lower the number of expected deaths the most. So I think it's reasonable that we spend more money on airplane safety than on asteroid detection.
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This may be posted too late for anyone to read, but....
Most other people are posting what they think are the best books in the genre, which is probably a good idea in that it's of more general interest, but here's a list of books that you personally might like based on the books you listed.
The Vorkosigan saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Excellent, long-running series. It's a space opera deaturing one of the most entertaining characters I've seen in science fiction. In chronological order of the main character's life, the books are:
Shards of Honor, Barrayar, The Warrior's Apprentice, The Vor Game, Ceteganda, Borders of Infinity, Brothers in Arms, Mirror Dance, Memory, Komarr, A Civil Campaign, Diplomatic Immunity.
These books are unusual in that you don't really need to read them in order. In fact, the first one is by far the weakest; it might be worth skipping entirely and coming back to if you like the others. Read at least most of the series before you read Memory and after -- those books assume you know the characters already.
For pure fantasy, the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time books might amuse you. The 10th book just came out. This is a pure fantasy series that starts in a sort of vanilla way, but by the third book or so, Jordan has created a wonderfully intricate world full of politics and more schemes than you can count. They start to go downhill after about book 6, though. The first few of the series are: Eye of the World; The Great Hunt; The Dragon Reborn; Shadow Rising; The Fires of Heaven.
Have you read the Steven Brust Vlad Taltos series? I think you would probably like them. The main character is a sardonic assassin with an equally sardonic dragon familiar. He starts as a low-level mobster, and quickly moves up in the world. The books: Jhereg; Yendi; Teckla; Taltos; Phoenix; Athyra; Orca; Dragon. They start to go downhill after Phoenix, during which Vlad loses some of his joi de vivre that so enlivens the books.
Finally, check out Guy Gavriel Kay, anything but the Fionavar Tapestry, and you may like that too. Fantastic pseudo-historical fantasy. He got his start editing the Silmarillion, but his writing is way better than tolkien's. This is the best that fantasy has to offer, in my opinion. His books are for the most part in the same world, but they are all stand-alone novels, with one exception. So order matters not at all. The list: Tigana; Lions of Al Rassan; A Song for Arbonne; Sailing to Sarantium; and Lord of Emperors, sequel to Sarantium.
Other people you might like: George R. R. Martin, Terry Pratchett; Neil Gaimon; RA Salvatore.
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So let's see. You're opposed to the fantastic elements at the expense of good science fiction, then you pick the one thing that our science understands to be impossible and claim that it's believable to you?
To go through them: take any shape. Weird, but I can't think of a physics principle that would prevent this. Liquids do exactly that in real life, though you need a container to do it.
Convert to energy: E=mC^2. If the energy is of a non-visible wavelength, poof, it's vanished.
Telepathy: ok, I don't know of any good science to back this up. I'm sure we can all aome up with plausible arguments, but I'll let you have this one.
Learning English: Oh, for god's sake. This could easily be a technology solution.
"Easier to move faster than light...."
So it's easier to violate laws of physics than do nifty tricks that obey them? Methinks you should rethink "science fiction."
Besides, a guy who's definitely not a fantasy author once said that any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.
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I really enjoyed this wasjr article. Great stuff.
Though, actually, I have to say I enjoyed it a bit more the FIRST time it got posted, which was only TWO days ago.
Don't you guys read the articles?
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At least, I just went to the site, and the lead article among many others is marked "Premium only".
It is true that all the non-premium content has huge interstitials as well as inlined ads for non-subscribers, but that's been true for ages now.
At least they don't have popunders. Actually, I am a subscriber, so it matters little to me what advertising they do if I am not exposed to it. I suppose I should note that banner ads and ads down the sides are still there for me, but the really intrusive ones are gone.
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I'm late enough in the discussion that nobody is going to read this, but still.
Your whole take on this is ridiculous.
Take your example of a bricklayer building a house. It is true that he must build the whole house, and sell it to only one buyer. It takes a long time, and at the end, he gets exactly one sale out of it. How much does a house cost?
Do you have any idea how much time and effort and money goes into building a software application, or writing a book? If only one copy can be sold, because copies will be made and nothing can stop that, then each copy will have to be sold for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
And since nobody would buy it, there is no market. Without a market, it won't get made.
I'm a little unclear, actually, on what it is that you are proposing. At the end of your diatribe, you write, "Either they sell the entertainment at its true market value, or they will do under." What is true market value? What the consumer wants to pay?
I want to pay $100 for my house, instead of $500,000. What is the true market value of it?
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Like many of the posters, I quite enjoyed many of your books when I was an adolescent. I noticed, though, that I tended to enjoy books late in a series much less than books at the start of one.
For instance, I really enjoyed the first Split Infinity trilogy. I found the third trilogy to be, um, less readable. What's interesting to me is that this is a common theme amongst fantasy and science fiction -- look at the Dune books, the Dragonriders of Pern, David Brin's Uplift novels, the list is really endless.
Why is that? Is there something unusually difficult about continuing a series, or do writers tend to get lazy, since they know that they have a built-in audience? For that matter, do you agree that some of the later books in your own long-running series are weaker than the earlier ones?
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So I wonder what the next movies are going to be about. At the end of the matrix, neo is like unto a god, and the agents can't stop him.
Outside the matrix, neo is a wimpy bald guy who eats gruel and has no ability to fight the enemy.
A movie needs conflict to be interesting. There's lots of obvious conflict available in the real world, where neo and company are underdogs in the fight against the machines, but the parts of the matrix that were really cool were *in the matrix*. So the major conflict being outside the matrix is out.[1]
But neo is all powerful inside, right? Well, that pretty much has to change for there to be anything interesting happening. So my prediction is, right at the beginning of the movie, we're going to find out that the machines have changed something about the matrix that takes away some (but not all) of neo and company's power. That way they still get to do their cool slow motion three-d rotating martial arts, but they can't just win outright.[2]
It's an open question, of course, whether this will be done well enough to allow you to sit back and enjoy the movie, rather than internally kvetch about how contrived things are.
Note that the above is not based on any actual knowledge or information.
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[1] Of course, as in the first movie, there will certainly be some conflict outside the matrix. Expect that there will be twin threats, inside and outside, just as in the first. Expect also that those threats will be interrelated, so that solving one is necessary to or will solve the other.
[2] This is perhaps supported by the title. If the matrix gets reloaded, will somee of the rules change?
Actually, I don't think that's true.
When the snail mail comes, it comes only once a day. You can generally easily identify which ones are spam, and toss them in the recycle bin kept in the garage for that purpose. It takes a few seconds.
So while it's annoying, it's not that hard to deal with.
Compare that to email. Every so often, throughout the day, email shows up. Every time it does, you have to interrupt whatever you're thinking about to look at it, and discard it if it's spam. Filters help a good deal with this, but the very fact that by nature email gets delivered at random times rather than in batch makes it more intrusive.
Now, the major benefit to switching physical spam to email is that physical mail has a bunch of environmental consequences -- use of paper, landfill space or use of chemicals an energy in recycling, use of energy in delivery, and so on. Email takes up many fewer resources per mail.
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Wow. So they can automatically put stuff on your computer that will disable software they don't like, and potentially take away your ability to play "Secure Content."
This is pretty intrusive, as things go. I, for one, would prefer in general that nothing gets installed on my computer that I don't specifically authorize.
Note that there seems to be a corrolary effect here. If they are sending stuff to your computer, your computer is really reaching out to their systems, and potentially is providing identifying or other information to them. Scary.
But of course the scariest bit is the "use other software" clause. It's not even qualified! By this reading, they can disable any other piece of software on your computer! Fear.
Of course, it is in the digital rights section of the agreement, but I'm not sure if that forces the "any other software" clause to be software relating in some way to digital rights.
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