Comment Old News (Score 1) 191
We've known this for years now. Duh!
We've known this for years now. Duh!
That writer is a jerk.. Verbal sparring is not a pleasant way to spend a day, and it's not the best way to get someone to be honest with you. His interviewing skills even as he presents them need work, his writing is short, clipped, and irritating, and lacks rhythm and even a trace of poetry. He is also mildly cruel and says very inappropriate things at inappropriate times. I would never spend a day with someone like that.
Brutal interview. Bravo to William Shatner for dealing with him as he did. It's the only way to do it. He must have spotted him coming a mile away.
That's pretty cool..!
Neonatal jaundice is not a lack of Vit D. And all you need to do is put them in a little blue incubator in the more severe cases, or just feed them more.
Move along. Doctors have known about this for a long time. Real doctors, even.
"Superintelligence" known as the cloud?
There's not even any need to read such tripe. In fact, I hate everyone who read that story after seeing the word "superintelligence" linked with "cloud."
There is no bound to the contempt writers of pieces like this should be shown, nor to all of the idiots who were involved in reposting it here.
Could you post an older webpage to the front page of Slashdot?!
Geez, this thing has been around for frickin ages..
Yes! Exactly!
Ask those guys what consciousness is, and what it means to be conscious. And ask them what our brains' quantum-scale structures' purposes are.
Not a single one of these guys will give you an answer, because humans don't have the answers yet. Once we can actually define these things, then we can start making these sorts of predictions. "Superhuman" intelligence indeed.. we don't even really know what human intelligence is!
Robots running around doing human tasks, flying cars, donut-shaped energy sources that power cities, and intra-solar space travel were all things people in the 1950s predicted, too, and how close to those are we now, now that we have better-defined the problems involved?
No, it's not just you. I see Dagon and I think Shadow Over Innsmouth, or Dagon (2001) every time. It would be cool to have a name like that.. sort of like being Fred Cthulhu, or Samson Yog-sothoth.
Thank you for the pointer. I will indeed check it out: But those two novels I mentioned. Sheesh. Brutal.
And Charles Stross' little diatribe isn't narcissistic projection?
The whole thing is all about his his own writing process is superior!
Charles Stross just figured out what every Trekker has known for a decade or more. The writers depend on someone else to fill in the science-y sounding gaps.
I've read his writing. For all the nerd-dropping[1] I couldn't get through more than 3/4 of it before I had to put it down in disgust.
His rip-off novel Saturn's Children (he should've just called it Friday 2) was readable only because it was borderline erotica.
You don't tear down an infinitely more successful (and therefore relevant)
And Star Trek isn't *SCIENCE FICTION* you turd. It's scifi. The entire genre is borderline space opera--and this is what you're claiming you dislike! So what?
Space Opera
SciFi ] CS stuff is
Science Fiction ] right in between here.
Hard Science Fiction
His "science" isn't science either. There's just as much hand-wavy fucking CRAP in the Atrocity Archives as any ST:TNG episode with Q plagued with techno-babble in the whole friggin' series.
If you're going to so completely rip someone else off (*cough* Lovecraft) that your work is no longer a work of original fiction, but a derivative--and a poor one at that--don't sit back and congratulate yourself on how smart and clever you are.
You want a bad-ass Lovecraftian book with an interesting spin on it? Resume with Monsters. There's a mostly-original piece that doesn't constantly congratulate itself on how COOL it is, on how much the author GETS IT, on how well the author is HIP AND TRENDY. There's an amusing story with an interesting core of an idea!
Nothing HAPPENS in CS's Atrocity Archives. The only reason to read it, by the halfway point, is to find out how the author ENDS it.
[1] Nerd-dropping is the constant dropping of nerdy concepts and marketing-friendly terms that will rapidly make your work irrelevant once people get over the idea that you've managed to--poorly--fuse geekery and Lovecraft into a single work.
You are constructing a meaning for the term which has an etymology of only incorrect uses of the prescriptive meaning.
Would you like to ax me a question? Irregardless of correct grammar and my continuous misuse of said, this "pedantry" of which you speak? Is what keeps meaning meaningful between two isolated geographies that would unerringly, impendingly, inexorably otherwise devolve into inomprehensible, abhorrent dialect, and be nearly completely unable to communicate, upon happening a lone speaker of one on another.
Be thankful that literacy rates (as abysmal as they are) are as fixative for spoken grammar almost as much as they are for literative, or we'd all be speaking and writing in long, irritating puns.
You, sir, are an agent of chaos, with poor excuses for bad, indeliberate behaviour on the grammar offenders. And so it is, that it is safe to ignore your bleatings.
Run along now, Agent Chaos.
Do they? Not where I live..
I wish they did. But.. oh well.
The major difference between bonds and bond traders is that the bonds will eventually mature.