The link in the VA item goes to a piece about universal basic income and reparations for stay-at-home moms.
The last item reminds me of a European study I saw once where they summed murders and suicides by country. The result was that all of Europe was pretty consistent for total violence, but that in the northern countries people tended to kill themselves and in the southern countries they tended to kill someone else.
I very carefully wrote SF rather than SF/F, just for that reason. My bad for not saying that more directly.
Yes on lazy writing. If you need one side or the other to make some stupid strategic blunder, it's easier to write if you can pin it on one character.
In the last 150 years, when we have had much higher tech, there's no question in my mind that democracies and republics have functioned reasonably well overall and won the important fights. Some of that might be biased by the US and Canada being able to hide behind two broad oceans and generate vast resources (even in the US Civil War, most of the North's industrial might was never at serious risk). As more than one historian has argued, the Allies won WWII on the basis of the East Texas oil fields.
I'm less confident that the service will stand up in court when that time comes. With my old "technologist who has to interpret things for the legal dept" hat on... The fundamental question here (from the technology perspective) is: given an activity X that is legal if all of the devices are in one residence, how many of the devices, in real or virtual form, can be moved outside the residence by high-bandwidth networks or high-density storage and still have the activity be legal? The original cable TV cases established that an antenna could be remote. Aereo established that a virtual tuner could not be remote. At this point, in the Dish Network Hopper case, the Ninth Circuit has held that it is legal to remote the display device, both to various devices around the home and to (at least) a single remote device. At this year's CES, Dish announced Hopper GO, a 64 GB storage device that also acts as a wifi hotspot and serves up to five streams. I foresee more lawsuits. All of these court proceedings are enormously frustrating for a technology guy, because the courts have to filter every link in the chain through a "public performance" lens.
The response to Will's "no reason" remark is simple. If the content owner requires the stream to be in a container format that includes a do-not-copy bit and requires that the bit be set, then an app that offers a functional save-to-storage option is an excellent way to get sued out of business. Trust me that the content owners do that, rather than run the risk that some court might eventually decide that they gave up their copyright by not taking such simple steps to protect it.
It's not just Lucas. In SF generally, if the form of government is somewhat important to the story, well-functioning democracies or republics are few and far between.
An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech -- not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary -- six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam -- that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it -- after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb -- merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out -- the writer shovels in "haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein," or words to that effect, and the monument is finished.
As I recall, the decline of full-blown gender in English (ie, different forms for "the") began in the northern parts of the country during the period when many people were bilingual in both Old English and Old Norse. Both were gendered, but there were differences, and over enough time is was just simpler to use "the" in the mash-up of the two languages that emerged.
I seem to recall reading that one of the linguistic myths about that period is that once the vikings had sailed up the river, killed off the lord of the manor, and moved in, the new lord discovered that he had to learn English so he could order the peasants about. But he didn't bother with Old English gender and just used "the". The peasants picked up the habit quickly because no one wants to make the new lord, who got his position by cutting off the old lord's head, look bad.
It is largely an organic construct, with changes flowing from what the current & next generations find useful for communication.
Yes, generations. I heard a radio commercial the other day where the phrase "on accident" was used multiple times. That one made me crazy back when my kids started using it, but now I've just relaxed since it's obviously inevitable. My wife will probably go to her grave trying to correct people who say it.
You live someplace where recycling used motor oil isn't mandatory? I didn't know there were any such places left. My 7.5-year-old Honda Fit monitors all sorts of things and puts up a warning icon when the software decides it's time for an oil change -- for me, every nine or ten months. A chemical engineering friend tells me that the base oil may be okay, but that there's a lot of fancy goop mixed in today's lubricants that break down sooner.
I'm not sure about the absurdity of the requirement. The university may be trying to encourage one specific behavior -- two people drive to campus in one car in the morning and leave in one car in the evening. My experience is years old, but none of the carpooling programs I was eligible for ever matched up well to the needs of small children.
I'm part-way through drafting a post on Colorado's single-payer ballot initiative, where my takeaway is that it's no longer feasible for a state to conduct such an experiment.
Co2: My first e-reader was a nook, so I stuck with B&N for books. For every DRM'ed ebook I bought from them, I made an unencrypted archival copy. In hindsight, that was a good choice. First they discontinued the nook reader application for the Mac. Now they've managed to break "read on the web" to the point that I can't read books I've purchased in a browser on the Mac. Mostly I bought non-fiction, and I want it on my Mac, on the screen where I'm writing. That's apparently impossible now, at least with the legal copy. Fish 'em; I'll buy my ebooks elsewhere.
Exchanging a whole mess of e-mail between NJ and Australia to coordinate a talk that the woman there and I would be co-presenting in San Diego, using uucp and bang path notation, isn't a sign of being old. It's not. Really. Maybe.
Do you have any idea how many fishing intermediate machines it took to pass e-mail from NJ to Australia? Every one of which had to be specified, in the proper order?
Among the complicating factors when the Pac-10 looked at Texas schools was that the legislature in Texas threatened to make it a package deal (ie, UT couldn't go to the Pac-12 without some of the other Texas schools), and that UT flat-out said they had to be exempt from the conference revenue-sharing rules.
I still maintain that the precise timing of Texas A&M's jump to the SEC was so that they would finish their first season of games before the Texas legislature met again.
That's a reasonable list, including the break points. From the perspective of un- or under-served TV markets, the list is probably San Diego, Las Vegas, El Paso, the Colorado Front Range, the Wasatch Front in Utah, and Boise. If I were a betting man, and the expansion were to 16 schools, I'd probably put my money on SDSU, UNLV, CSU and BYU.
(Full disclosure: I went to undergraduate school at Nebraska, and have lived in Colorado for the last 28 years.)
What @autolukos said. Particularly under Bill McCartney, who felt he needed a "circled in red" game on the calendar to work towards every year. Nebraska reserved its hatred for Oklahoma, a rivalry that got broken up when the Big 12 formed.
Listening to sports talk radio when I first moved to Colorado was fascinating. Whether it was a good football year or not didn't depend on how Colorado did. It was a good football year if and only if Nebraska did poorly.
For as long as I've lived here, it was clear that where CU really wanted to be was the Pac-8/10/12/whatever.
Having been a Great Plains kid, I was amused when I found this map. Other than Texas Tech out there in splendid isolation, there's that wonderful GP gap between "eastern" football and "western" football.
Long ago when I would talk to content and marketing people at a big cable company, they explained that it was how many eyeballs could be reliably delivered (and subscriptions bought), and that prestige in the sporting world was only one part of it. Assorted other factors went into the estimates, including things like time zone differences. Eg, one argument put forward back when the rumors were flying that the Pac-12 (or however many there were at the time) would take Texas was that the two-hour difference would actually reduce West Coast viewership when a UCLA or Stanford played at a "funny" time in Austin.
Further expansion of the Pac-12 is somewhat problematic, as they have a presence in almost all of the major population centers in the Mountain and Pacific time zones.
Wimps. Yeah, cats wander down from the hills occasionally, and sometimes take a few pets that careless owners let run outside in the dark. (What do you call a small dog the owner lets run loose in the backyard of their new house in/near the foothills after dark? Hors d'oeuvre.) But they're not a big deal. Here in Colorado, lightning strikes are much more likely to get you.
I suspect Trump is smart enough to know he can’t really win the Presidency.
A reactionary friend, who has accused Obama of being every kind of enemy of the US you can think of, seems to believe that the President has everything necessary to crucify Hillary over the Dept of State e-mails of classified documents, and is simply waiting until the right time to drag her into court. "But wait," I say. "He's a Communist Muslim Kenyan who has destroyed the United States with his socialist health insurance plan and failure to nuke Iran for the Israelis -- to quote you over the last few years -- and now he's going to throw the election to Trump?"
I'm on your side here. After all, I'm the lunatic that thinks this is going to happen in a somewhat more extreme fashion. Regional management and funding make more sense; Montana can't afford a fire-fighting air fleet, but can contribute to a regional fleet.
Respectfully, I disagree. Romney won the nomination by being first choice in Obama country: blue states, and blue cities in red states. Where his executive experience -- Bain Capital, Massachusetts Governor, SLC Olympics -- played well, where social conservatism was less important, where media buys to smear the socon candidate du jour were effective. If Rubio is trying to reproduce that, doing reasonably well in the first three states is important, but he has to win places like Polk County in Iowa; Hillsborough County in NH; Richland and Charleston Counties in SC.
It didn't hurt that Romney was well-funded so that the i's got dotted and t's crossed everywhere. I was really surprised in 2012 by how many Republican candidates screwed up on basic paperwork kinds of things.
As I recall, using the phrase that way came into vogue in the late 70s and early 80s, when it was used to describe the elderly on pensions and social security at a time of very high inflation. Classic wage/price inflation, so workers were getting hefty raises. Unions were, again from memory, getting three-year contracts with guaranteed raises in the 5-8% range. "Priced out of their home" at that time was the code for "have owned their house free and clear for years but can't afford the rapidly escalating property taxes on it." Prop 13 in California and the Gallagher Amendment in Colorado both came out of that situation.
I agree we need something that covers all of the people whose incomes are not increasing with the cost of living.
Who would take it? DoE is doing it's unfortunately common foot dragging on the clean-up. Within the last six months the State of Idaho invoked its 1995 agreement with DoE and the US Navy to block a research project that would have brought 100 pounds of spent nuclear fuel from the East Coast to INL. To paraphrase from the Congressional committee meeting where a political decision was made that only Yucca Mountain could be considered for a commercial waste repository, which western state gets screwed this time?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Morning Ed: United States {2016.01.18.M}”
The link in the VA item goes to a piece about universal basic income and reparations for stay-at-home moms.
The last item reminds me of a European study I saw once where they summed murders and suicides by country. The result was that all of Europe was pretty consistent for total violence, but that in the northern countries people tended to kill themselves and in the southern countries they tended to kill someone else.
On “David Brin: Star Wars’ Dubious Lessons Live On – Nautilus”
I very carefully wrote SF rather than SF/F, just for that reason. My bad for not saying that more directly.
Yes on lazy writing. If you need one side or the other to make some stupid strategic blunder, it's easier to write if you can pin it on one character.
In the last 150 years, when we have had much higher tech, there's no question in my mind that democracies and republics have functioned reasonably well overall and won the important fights. Some of that might be biased by the US and Canada being able to hide behind two broad oceans and generate vast resources (even in the US Civil War, most of the North's industrial might was never at serious risk). As more than one historian has argued, the Allies won WWII on the basis of the East Texas oil fields.
On “Sunday!”
I'm pleased you have TV on the road.
I'm less confident that the service will stand up in court when that time comes. With my old "technologist who has to interpret things for the legal dept" hat on... The fundamental question here (from the technology perspective) is: given an activity X that is legal if all of the devices are in one residence, how many of the devices, in real or virtual form, can be moved outside the residence by high-bandwidth networks or high-density storage and still have the activity be legal? The original cable TV cases established that an antenna could be remote. Aereo established that a virtual tuner could not be remote. At this point, in the Dish Network Hopper case, the Ninth Circuit has held that it is legal to remote the display device, both to various devices around the home and to (at least) a single remote device. At this year's CES, Dish announced Hopper GO, a 64 GB storage device that also acts as a wifi hotspot and serves up to five streams. I foresee more lawsuits. All of these court proceedings are enormously frustrating for a technology guy, because the courts have to filter every link in the chain through a "public performance" lens.
The response to Will's "no reason" remark is simple. If the content owner requires the stream to be in a container format that includes a do-not-copy bit and requires that the bit be set, then an app that offers a functional save-to-storage option is an excellent way to get sued out of business. Trust me that the content owners do that, rather than run the risk that some court might eventually decide that they gave up their copyright by not taking such simple steps to protect it.
On “Saturday!”
Who must still be laughing over the Packers' decision to kick the extra point and take their chances in overtime.
On “David Brin: Star Wars’ Dubious Lessons Live On – Nautilus”
It's not just Lucas. In SF generally, if the form of government is somewhat important to the story, well-functioning democracies or republics are few and far between.
On “The Inevitability of the Singular ‘They’”
No, just channeling his inner Mark Twain:
"
As I recall, the decline of full-blown gender in English (ie, different forms for "the") began in the northern parts of the country during the period when many people were bilingual in both Old English and Old Norse. Both were gendered, but there were differences, and over enough time is was just simpler to use "the" in the mash-up of the two languages that emerged.
I seem to recall reading that one of the linguistic myths about that period is that once the vikings had sailed up the river, killed off the lord of the manor, and moved in, the new lord discovered that he had to learn English so he could order the peasants about. But he didn't bother with Old English gender and just used "the". The peasants picked up the habit quickly because no one wants to make the new lord, who got his position by cutting off the old lord's head, look bad.
"
It is largely an organic construct, with changes flowing from what the current & next generations find useful for communication.
Yes, generations. I heard a radio commercial the other day where the phrase "on accident" was used multiple times. That one made me crazy back when my kids started using it, but now I've just relaxed since it's obviously inevitable. My wife will probably go to her grave trying to correct people who say it.
On “It’s For the Environment”
You live someplace where recycling used motor oil isn't mandatory? I didn't know there were any such places left. My 7.5-year-old Honda Fit monitors all sorts of things and puts up a warning icon when the software decides it's time for an oil change -- for me, every nine or ten months. A chemical engineering friend tells me that the base oil may be okay, but that there's a lot of fancy goop mixed in today's lubricants that break down sooner.
I'm not sure about the absurdity of the requirement. The university may be trying to encourage one specific behavior -- two people drive to campus in one car in the morning and leave in one car in the evening. My experience is years old, but none of the carpooling programs I was eligible for ever matched up well to the needs of small children.
On “Linky Friday #149: Pirates, Poindexters, & Confederados”
I'm part-way through drafting a post on Colorado's single-payer ballot initiative, where my takeaway is that it's no longer feasible for a state to conduct such an experiment.
"
Co2: My first e-reader was a nook, so I stuck with B&N for books. For every DRM'ed ebook I bought from them, I made an unencrypted archival copy. In hindsight, that was a good choice. First they discontinued the nook reader application for the Mac. Now they've managed to break "read on the web" to the point that I can't read books I've purchased in a browser on the Mac. Mostly I bought non-fiction, and I want it on my Mac, on the screen where I'm writing. That's apparently impossible now, at least with the legal copy. Fish 'em; I'll buy my ebooks elsewhere.
"
S3: Isn't snow what the commentariate here brings up every time self-driving cars are the topic?
(Sorry, Richard beat me to it.)
On “Why Discuss Anti-Modernist and Anti-Democratic Literature?”
Exchanging a whole mess of e-mail between NJ and Australia to coordinate a talk that the woman there and I would be co-presenting in San Diego, using uucp and bang path notation, isn't a sign of being old. It's not. Really. Maybe.
Do you have any idea how many fishing intermediate machines it took to pass e-mail from NJ to Australia? Every one of which had to be specified, in the proper order?
On “The Hammer Falling Or The First Domino?”
(4) Gambling.
"
Among the complicating factors when the Pac-10 looked at Texas schools was that the legislature in Texas threatened to make it a package deal (ie, UT couldn't go to the Pac-12 without some of the other Texas schools), and that UT flat-out said they had to be exempt from the conference revenue-sharing rules.
I still maintain that the precise timing of Texas A&M's jump to the SEC was so that they would finish their first season of games before the Texas legislature met again.
"
That's a reasonable list, including the break points. From the perspective of un- or under-served TV markets, the list is probably San Diego, Las Vegas, El Paso, the Colorado Front Range, the Wasatch Front in Utah, and Boise. If I were a betting man, and the expansion were to 16 schools, I'd probably put my money on SDSU, UNLV, CSU and BYU.
"
(Full disclosure: I went to undergraduate school at Nebraska, and have lived in Colorado for the last 28 years.)
What @autolukos said. Particularly under Bill McCartney, who felt he needed a "circled in red" game on the calendar to work towards every year. Nebraska reserved its hatred for Oklahoma, a rivalry that got broken up when the Big 12 formed.
Listening to sports talk radio when I first moved to Colorado was fascinating. Whether it was a good football year or not didn't depend on how Colorado did. It was a good football year if and only if Nebraska did poorly.
For as long as I've lived here, it was clear that where CU really wanted to be was the Pac-8/10/12/whatever.
"
Having been a Great Plains kid, I was amused when I found this map. Other than Texas Tech out there in splendid isolation, there's that wonderful GP gap between "eastern" football and "western" football.
"
Long ago when I would talk to content and marketing people at a big cable company, they explained that it was how many eyeballs could be reliably delivered (and subscriptions bought), and that prestige in the sporting world was only one part of it. Assorted other factors went into the estimates, including things like time zone differences. Eg, one argument put forward back when the rumors were flying that the Pac-12 (or however many there were at the time) would take Texas was that the two-hour difference would actually reduce West Coast viewership when a UCLA or Stanford played at a "funny" time in Austin.
Further expansion of the Pac-12 is somewhat problematic, as they have a presence in almost all of the major population centers in the Mountain and Pacific time zones.
On “Name That Team!”
Wimps. Yeah, cats wander down from the hills occasionally, and sometimes take a few pets that careless owners let run outside in the dark. (What do you call a small dog the owner lets run loose in the backyard of their new house in/near the foothills after dark? Hors d'oeuvre.) But they're not a big deal. Here in Colorado, lightning strikes are much more likely to get you.
On “Most roads lead to Rubio, but…”
I suspect Trump is smart enough to know he can’t really win the Presidency.
A reactionary friend, who has accused Obama of being every kind of enemy of the US you can think of, seems to believe that the President has everything necessary to crucify Hillary over the Dept of State e-mails of classified documents, and is simply waiting until the right time to drag her into court. "But wait," I say. "He's a Communist Muslim Kenyan who has destroyed the United States with his socialist health insurance plan and failure to nuke Iran for the Israelis -- to quote you over the last few years -- and now he's going to throw the election to Trump?"
On “Morning Ed: Oregon {2016.1.11.M}”
I'm on your side here. After all, I'm the lunatic that thinks this is going to happen in a somewhat more extreme fashion. Regional management and funding make more sense; Montana can't afford a fire-fighting air fleet, but can contribute to a regional fleet.
On “Most roads lead to Rubio, but…”
Respectfully, I disagree. Romney won the nomination by being first choice in Obama country: blue states, and blue cities in red states. Where his executive experience -- Bain Capital, Massachusetts Governor, SLC Olympics -- played well, where social conservatism was less important, where media buys to smear the socon candidate du jour were effective. If Rubio is trying to reproduce that, doing reasonably well in the first three states is important, but he has to win places like Polk County in Iowa; Hillsborough County in NH; Richland and Charleston Counties in SC.
It didn't hurt that Romney was well-funded so that the i's got dotted and t's crossed everywhere. I was really surprised in 2012 by how many Republican candidates screwed up on basic paperwork kinds of things.
On “Combating NIMBYism”
As I recall, using the phrase that way came into vogue in the late 70s and early 80s, when it was used to describe the elderly on pensions and social security at a time of very high inflation. Classic wage/price inflation, so workers were getting hefty raises. Unions were, again from memory, getting three-year contracts with guaranteed raises in the 5-8% range. "Priced out of their home" at that time was the code for "have owned their house free and clear for years but can't afford the rapidly escalating property taxes on it." Prop 13 in California and the Gallagher Amendment in Colorado both came out of that situation.
I agree we need something that covers all of the people whose incomes are not increasing with the cost of living.
On “David Bowie as the Right Wing Artist”
Who would take it? DoE is doing it's unfortunately common foot dragging on the clean-up. Within the last six months the State of Idaho invoked its 1995 agreement with DoE and the US Navy to block a research project that would have brought 100 pounds of spent nuclear fuel from the East Coast to INL. To paraphrase from the Congressional committee meeting where a political decision was made that only Yucca Mountain could be considered for a commercial waste repository, which western state gets screwed this time?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.