"They call it fantasy because that's what it basically is. The "science" part is missing except as a plot element so divorced with reality it may as well be "magical artifacts" instead. Doesn't make it inherently better or worse but just different. All semantics in the end. You're trying to force your own definition on them as much as they are trying to force it on you."
I agree, there is nothing inherently wrong with hard sci-fi at all, a lot of it is in fact quite good, but it isn't the only thing that can be called sci-fi. I suppose that if you want to call the definition in use by the vast majority of literary scholars, librarians, critics, writers and readers "my" definition, you may, and I suppose that in a sense I am shoving it down other people's throats... but the whole thing comes off a little silly, now doesn't it?
"Quality is subjective and you can judge a work in many different ways. That you cannot apparently comprehend this means there's no point in me trying to explain it to you since you're either too ignorant or self-centered. Likewise, that you cannot understand why authors write certain books in a certain way shows your ignorance of writing."
What are you talking about? What have I said to imply that quality is universally agreed upon? You've certainly oversimplified it a bit, but people form their own opinions on things all the time. My point is simply that sci-fi, as a genre, includes both hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi; it is, in many ways, a descriptor of tone and setting far more than a guarantee of scientific relevance.
I'm terribly sorry if my snarking over the aggressive and poorly conceived idea to arbitrarily redefine a long established literary genre term to meet a minority of readers' preference regarding the amount and detail of fictional science included in a story threw you off, or struck a raw nerve. Perhaps you missed the joke?
Again, your projection raises some interesting questions... would you like to talk about it?
They're an enormous manufacturing conglomerate that focuses on making high-tech hardware. Their most prominent work is with the US military building weapons systems (though I don't believe they make actual munitions, and I'm nearly certain they don't make actual firearms), though they are not exclusively a military contractor.
They are also one of the last big players doing a lot of fundamental research, which is both a credit to them as a company and a rather depressing fact given the nature of their business.
No, I like quality literature. I couldn't care less about soft sci-fi vs. hard sci-fi, except where one is actually better written than the other.
I also refuse to adjust the standard definition of "sci-fi" to appease intellectual elitists more interested in reading things that nobody else even wants to than in having a meaningful definition for the genre. Differentiating between hard and soft sci-fi is fine, if people really want to make the effort... insisting that some sci-fi is "fantasy" because it doesn't go into sufficient depth on the subject of how their anti-gravity field generator works is snobbery, and enforcement of personal preference onto others.
I would feel much the same way if people who read romance novels tried to exclude things from that genre based on whether or not the love scenes were appropriately graphic to suit their tastes.
Interesting projection though, would you like to talk about it?
My guess is that if you aren't terribly familiar with statistics, you won't be entirely comfortable writing in a language designed to process complex statistical calculations.
If the book is good enough that it can teach you stats, this guy deserves a Pulitzer, not a 9/10 from Slashdot.
I believe it has to be a mind-numbing bore, with focus placed first on scientific explanations for how everything works (bonus points if you noticed the irony inherent to explaining FICTIONAL devices with real science), second on how it has changed the human race, third on the grave implications this has on modern society, and lastly (because other things might come up that also trump this) telling an interesting and compelling story.
At least, that's the idea I've seen most often floated by the pseudo-literati here on Slashdot.
Scientology is pretty much a red herring here, but there IS a war of interests between people who want to be healthy and between people who want them to consume medication. To the extent that sick people will consume medications that make them healthy, both sides win... to the extent that they consume medications that will have no/negative effects only the latter wins.
One doesn't need to be a Scientologist to be concerned that many medications, psychiatric or otherwise, are wildly over-prescribed and that this actually creates a serious health problem in its own right. Nor does one need to be a Scientologist to doubt the efficacy and necessity of many drugs currently on the market (hey there, Requip, how is life as a drug to cure a fake disease? better than life as a mediocre and unpopular anti-depressent, I would imagine).
They already have to a large extent. The government didn't buy it, but if you check out the list of corporate names involved with Deepwater Horizon, you'll see a lot of corporations which are basically just fronts for BP.
"In most cases people only get "frauded" if they let themselves. For example I recently was charged $35 late fee for a credit bill I never got. The phone operator refused to do anything, so I got ahold of the supervisor and told him point blank, "Remove the fee or close the card. Your choice." He decided he's rather not lose my ~15,000 a year business and refunded the money.'
The former is standard practice, and was almost certainly disclosed to you at the opening of the account. The latter was basic customer service. At no point was anyone trying to "defraud" you, unless you mean to imply that they never sent the bill in order to charge a late fee (which is, let's be honest, somewhat doubtful).
"In another case I was denied a mail-in rebate on a DVD player because I missed the filing deadline - 15 days. I called - they refused to help. I complained to the FTC and they said it was a violation of law - it must be at least 30 days. I called the rebate company again, told them I had talked to the US Government and I'm prepared to file charges if that's what it takes. The supervisor caved and sent me a $25 check."
At the point where you need to contact law enforcement... that most certainly IS fraud. Kudos to you for catching it and refusing to be defrauded, but to say anybody who failed to catch it as well "defrauded themselves" is a bit silly. Under that definition, fraud would be impossible, because by definition it relies on using deceit to illegally obtain money.
Isn't that basically true of everything else in coding too? You wouldn't code something in C++ for Linux the same way that you would code it in Java for Windows, even though a lot of it might be similar.
"Hentai manga that is low-bitrate and crisp at any resolution?"
Extremely niche market in these terms. The demand for drawn porn, when compared to the demand for live-action porn, is negligible. Besides that, most people doing elaborate line art do it on paper then scan it to digitize; that trend is just recently starting to change with the advent of decent touch interfaces. In the grand sceme of things, the porn industry just doesn't care about this.
"And think video. Fancy some animated vertical SMIL?'
They had streaming porn on the internet well before SMIL was really ready to serve it up (I know, because i was looking at it), and with MS reluctant to support it the path of least resistance was to use other technologies. Had SVG been the only, or even best, way to do video, porn would have picked it up... but it is neither.
"There needs to be a foolproof application that allows you to scan and convert (from raster sources) direct to SVG."
Oh god yes. Even if it's not very good, that would be the tool to bring SVG into the use it deserves.
Your reason is a better moral reason for a person to do so, which means it's pretty much pointless to argue for. Societies do not, for the most part, adopt new things for noble reasons, especially when adoption carries pain. Arguments based on money and power are always preferable when the goal is convincing everyone to do something they won't particularly like.
To put it another way, if profit so routinely trumps morality... why would any sane person expect morality to trump profit?
There is an idiomatic usage here implying "to date". It's a rather common usage, and given that humans lack the ability to perfectly predict the future, one that is entirely reasonable. Furthermore, your assertion that "ever" has a clear and unambiguous definition is demonstrably false: it is heavily dependent up context, and can take on several distinct meanings in standard usage.
TL;DR: quit being such a pedantic bitch, especially if you're wrong.
I'm pretty sure the real explanation is that porn has no use for SVG.
I'm serious. If the porn industry had any desire to deal in line art, SVG would be all over the place. But they don't, so they only really got on board with JPEG, and that's the only image type most people are even aware exists.
I actually had to argue with other members of a group I'm in about not making our logo a JPEG, and using SVG instead. It was line art and basic text, with a potential need to make it either very small or very big, yet people actually wanted it to be a raster because they had no idea an alternative exists.
"Yeah but what they want and what they'll get are two different things. I'm sure the money elites didn't want the economy to melt down but it has. Now all their plans are ruined. It's simply impossible to continue with business as usual, something will change or we will sink into a global depression and we wont get out of that until something changes."
I don't see many of them out on the street. From where I'm standing, the wealthy elite are doing just fine right now, even with the crap economy. Of course, from where I'm standing, the reason our crap economy is crap is that the wealthy elite drained the rest of us dry... we gave them everything they asked for, on the premise that it would all "trickle down", only to find that money ignores gravity.
What the hell kind of hitman charges 2-3 million? Maybe if you were going for a paranoid military dictator or something, but most of these guys don't even have a real security detail.
I'm not qualified to say if his code does, in fact, violate Landmark's patents, but I'm quite sure that US patents are enforced in most foreign nations, and vice versa.
IQ is not the same as intelligence or knowledge, and certainly not the same thing as common sense. It is primarily a measure of how quickly one can process data to acquire discreet solutions. It's certainly a valuable trait, but absolutely not the be-all and end-all of quantifying what we call intelligence.
Also, this may not seem like common sense to you 9as evidenced by your apparently not knowing it...), but bragging about your high IQ and insinuating that it is hard for you too deal with lesser beings because they "just don't get" obvious things is a thoroughly unlikable habit to be. It makes you sound like somebody who, early on in lafe, started going to special schools where everybody told you how gifted and smart you were, that other children would hold back your accelerated development, and that you should be patient and understanding with people who were not fortunate to have your level of genius. In layman's terms, a condescending twat.
I suggest you work on developing the social skills to avoid fostering such negative perceptions.
I suppose the implementing regulation to the effect that anyone purporting to recycle waste must actually do so or face criminal fraud charges might be a decent start. We enforce it as we do any other law, and with vigor relative to how much "we" really care... just like we do everything else.
I think people are going about this contrary to the way things actually work. First you create the requirements, in this case that e-waste be appropriately recycled, and THEN the industry which services the need will develop the technologies to do it cheaply and efficiently so that they can better compete with one another.
I am constantly baffled by the number of purported free market/private industry people out there who apparently have no faith in its ability to solve problems or understanding of the mechanisms by which it does.
Of course, I also don't get the infatuation with deregulation. The solution to rules which exist for a reason, but turn out to be ineffective or counter productive is not to simply do away with all rules... it's to look at why the old ones don't work and fix them. If the objective is still valid and achievable, then it's still worth having a regulation that achieves it.
Debit card processing systems require real-time access to the full network for every single transaction. PIN numbers cannot be cached locally, and must be validated before completing the transaction.
Slashdot Mirror
"They call it fantasy because that's what it basically is. The "science" part is missing except as a plot element so divorced with reality it may as well be "magical artifacts" instead. Doesn't make it inherently better or worse but just different. All semantics in the end. You're trying to force your own definition on them as much as they are trying to force it on you."
I agree, there is nothing inherently wrong with hard sci-fi at all, a lot of it is in fact quite good, but it isn't the only thing that can be called sci-fi. I suppose that if you want to call the definition in use by the vast majority of literary scholars, librarians, critics, writers and readers "my" definition, you may, and I suppose that in a sense I am shoving it down other people's throats... but the whole thing comes off a little silly, now doesn't it?
"Quality is subjective and you can judge a work in many different ways. That you cannot apparently comprehend this means there's no point in me trying to explain it to you since you're either too ignorant or self-centered. Likewise, that you cannot understand why authors write certain books in a certain way shows your ignorance of writing."
What are you talking about? What have I said to imply that quality is universally agreed upon? You've certainly oversimplified it a bit, but people form their own opinions on things all the time. My point is simply that sci-fi, as a genre, includes both hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi; it is, in many ways, a descriptor of tone and setting far more than a guarantee of scientific relevance.
I'm terribly sorry if my snarking over the aggressive and poorly conceived idea to arbitrarily redefine a long established literary genre term to meet a minority of readers' preference regarding the amount and detail of fictional science included in a story threw you off, or struck a raw nerve. Perhaps you missed the joke?
Again, your projection raises some interesting questions... would you like to talk about it?
They're an enormous manufacturing conglomerate that focuses on making high-tech hardware. Their most prominent work is with the US military building weapons systems (though I don't believe they make actual munitions, and I'm nearly certain they don't make actual firearms), though they are not exclusively a military contractor.
They are also one of the last big players doing a lot of fundamental research, which is both a credit to them as a company and a rather depressing fact given the nature of their business.
That's really cool though.
Sucks to be out the bottle of Jack though.
I guess you could pick up the frozen chunks though.
They might have chunks of glass in them though.
T thought something was weird with your post, though I can't seem to figure out what it is... though.
No, I like quality literature. I couldn't care less about soft sci-fi vs. hard sci-fi, except where one is actually better written than the other.
I also refuse to adjust the standard definition of "sci-fi" to appease intellectual elitists more interested in reading things that nobody else even wants to than in having a meaningful definition for the genre. Differentiating between hard and soft sci-fi is fine, if people really want to make the effort... insisting that some sci-fi is "fantasy" because it doesn't go into sufficient depth on the subject of how their anti-gravity field generator works is snobbery, and enforcement of personal preference onto others.
I would feel much the same way if people who read romance novels tried to exclude things from that genre based on whether or not the love scenes were appropriately graphic to suit their tastes.
Interesting projection though, would you like to talk about it?
My guess is that if you aren't terribly familiar with statistics, you won't be entirely comfortable writing in a language designed to process complex statistical calculations.
If the book is good enough that it can teach you stats, this guy deserves a Pulitzer, not a 9/10 from Slashdot.
I believe it has to be a mind-numbing bore, with focus placed first on scientific explanations for how everything works (bonus points if you noticed the irony inherent to explaining FICTIONAL devices with real science), second on how it has changed the human race, third on the grave implications this has on modern society, and lastly (because other things might come up that also trump this) telling an interesting and compelling story.
At least, that's the idea I've seen most often floated by the pseudo-literati here on Slashdot.
I'll bite: to some extent, it is precisely that.
Scientology is pretty much a red herring here, but there IS a war of interests between people who want to be healthy and between people who want them to consume medication. To the extent that sick people will consume medications that make them healthy, both sides win... to the extent that they consume medications that will have no/negative effects only the latter wins.
One doesn't need to be a Scientologist to be concerned that many medications, psychiatric or otherwise, are wildly over-prescribed and that this actually creates a serious health problem in its own right. Nor does one need to be a Scientologist to doubt the efficacy and necessity of many drugs currently on the market (hey there, Requip, how is life as a drug to cure a fake disease? better than life as a mediocre and unpopular anti-depressent, I would imagine).
Yeah, maybe he should make the code available to the whole world and invite people to change the graphics and sounds.
Come to think of it, I think I remember seeing a story not too long ago about something like that...
They already have to a large extent. The government didn't buy it, but if you check out the list of corporate names involved with Deepwater Horizon, you'll see a lot of corporations which are basically just fronts for BP.
"In most cases people only get "frauded" if they let themselves. For example I recently was charged $35 late fee for a credit bill I never got. The phone operator refused to do anything, so I got ahold of the supervisor and told him point blank, "Remove the fee or close the card. Your choice." He decided he's rather not lose my ~15,000 a year business and refunded the money.'
The former is standard practice, and was almost certainly disclosed to you at the opening of the account. The latter was basic customer service. At no point was anyone trying to "defraud" you, unless you mean to imply that they never sent the bill in order to charge a late fee (which is, let's be honest, somewhat doubtful).
"In another case I was denied a mail-in rebate on a DVD player because I missed the filing deadline - 15 days. I called - they refused to help. I complained to the FTC and they said it was a violation of law - it must be at least 30 days. I called the rebate company again, told them I had talked to the US Government and I'm prepared to file charges if that's what it takes. The supervisor caved and sent me a $25 check."
At the point where you need to contact law enforcement... that most certainly IS fraud. Kudos to you for catching it and refusing to be defrauded, but to say anybody who failed to catch it as well "defrauded themselves" is a bit silly. Under that definition, fraud would be impossible, because by definition it relies on using deceit to illegally obtain money.
Isn't that basically true of everything else in coding too? You wouldn't code something in C++ for Linux the same way that you would code it in Java for Windows, even though a lot of it might be similar.
Is parallelization supposed to be different?
"Hentai manga that is low-bitrate and crisp at any resolution?"
Extremely niche market in these terms. The demand for drawn porn, when compared to the demand for live-action porn, is negligible. Besides that, most people doing elaborate line art do it on paper then scan it to digitize; that trend is just recently starting to change with the advent of decent touch interfaces. In the grand sceme of things, the porn industry just doesn't care about this.
"And think video. Fancy some animated vertical SMIL?'
They had streaming porn on the internet well before SMIL was really ready to serve it up (I know, because i was looking at it), and with MS reluctant to support it the path of least resistance was to use other technologies. Had SVG been the only, or even best, way to do video, porn would have picked it up... but it is neither.
"There needs to be a foolproof application that allows you to scan and convert (from raster sources) direct to SVG."
Oh god yes. Even if it's not very good, that would be the tool to bring SVG into the use it deserves.
Your reason is a better moral reason for a person to do so, which means it's pretty much pointless to argue for. Societies do not, for the most part, adopt new things for noble reasons, especially when adoption carries pain. Arguments based on money and power are always preferable when the goal is convincing everyone to do something they won't particularly like.
To put it another way, if profit so routinely trumps morality... why would any sane person expect morality to trump profit?
There is an idiomatic usage here implying "to date". It's a rather common usage, and given that humans lack the ability to perfectly predict the future, one that is entirely reasonable. Furthermore, your assertion that "ever" has a clear and unambiguous definition is demonstrably false: it is heavily dependent up context, and can take on several distinct meanings in standard usage.
TL;DR: quit being such a pedantic bitch, especially if you're wrong.
I'm pretty sure the real explanation is that porn has no use for SVG.
I'm serious. If the porn industry had any desire to deal in line art, SVG would be all over the place. But they don't, so they only really got on board with JPEG, and that's the only image type most people are even aware exists.
I actually had to argue with other members of a group I'm in about not making our logo a JPEG, and using SVG instead. It was line art and basic text, with a potential need to make it either very small or very big, yet people actually wanted it to be a raster because they had no idea an alternative exists.
"Yeah but what they want and what they'll get are two different things. I'm sure the money elites didn't want the economy to melt down but it has. Now all their plans are ruined. It's simply impossible to continue with business as usual, something will change or we will sink into a global depression and we wont get out of that until something changes."
I don't see many of them out on the street. From where I'm standing, the wealthy elite are doing just fine right now, even with the crap economy. Of course, from where I'm standing, the reason our crap economy is crap is that the wealthy elite drained the rest of us dry... we gave them everything they asked for, on the premise that it would all "trickle down", only to find that money ignores gravity.
What the hell kind of hitman charges 2-3 million? Maybe if you were going for a paranoid military dictator or something, but most of these guys don't even have a real security detail.
-1, Wrong About International Patent Law.
I'm not qualified to say if his code does, in fact, violate Landmark's patents, but I'm quite sure that US patents are enforced in most foreign nations, and vice versa.
The "people" he is referencing includes, most notably CmdrTaco.
Of course, you could just read the Wikipedia entry for yourself, it would inform you AND quench your clear lust for the Wikipedo way.
Suck it Blue!
IQ is not the same as intelligence or knowledge, and certainly not the same thing as common sense. It is primarily a measure of how quickly one can process data to acquire discreet solutions. It's certainly a valuable trait, but absolutely not the be-all and end-all of quantifying what we call intelligence.
Also, this may not seem like common sense to you 9as evidenced by your apparently not knowing it...), but bragging about your high IQ and insinuating that it is hard for you too deal with lesser beings because they "just don't get" obvious things is a thoroughly unlikable habit to be. It makes you sound like somebody who, early on in lafe, started going to special schools where everybody told you how gifted and smart you were, that other children would hold back your accelerated development, and that you should be patient and understanding with people who were not fortunate to have your level of genius. In layman's terms, a condescending twat.
I suggest you work on developing the social skills to avoid fostering such negative perceptions.
I suppose the implementing regulation to the effect that anyone purporting to recycle waste must actually do so or face criminal fraud charges might be a decent start. We enforce it as we do any other law, and with vigor relative to how much "we" really care... just like we do everything else.
I think people are going about this contrary to the way things actually work. First you create the requirements, in this case that e-waste be appropriately recycled, and THEN the industry which services the need will develop the technologies to do it cheaply and efficiently so that they can better compete with one another.
I am constantly baffled by the number of purported free market/private industry people out there who apparently have no faith in its ability to solve problems or understanding of the mechanisms by which it does.
Of course, I also don't get the infatuation with deregulation. The solution to rules which exist for a reason, but turn out to be ineffective or counter productive is not to simply do away with all rules... it's to look at why the old ones don't work and fix them. If the objective is still valid and achievable, then it's still worth having a regulation that achieves it.
Here you go. I think you'll find the cost quite manageable.
Worse, actually. There was no huge settlement check. In fact, they wouldn't even refund the ticket.
Debit card processing systems require real-time access to the full network for every single transaction. PIN numbers cannot be cached locally, and must be validated before completing the transaction.