>I saw those as a wrap-up, not necessarily a cash-in.

Perhaps more a monument to his ego, with the bizarre attempt to tie in everything he ever wrote.

>They are still good to read.

I forced myself through a couple, and just couldn't do it any more.

hawk

That's not as challenging as you seem to think. For Nightfall, you could start with the assumption that there's at least one particularly massive star, not so big as a typical A or O that won't stay on the main sequence long enough for life to evolve, but bigger than our G 2 sun, say a G 4 or 5 or even something in the F series. The other five suns can be much lighter, all the way down to red dwarfs in some cases (and the story seems to describe at least one that is). Those small stars don't have nearly the light output of the bigger one - with the right options, The planet can orbit the main star at a distance quite a bit greater than Earth orbits our sun, and be close to the exact optimum of its "Goldylocks" zone or somewhere on the cool side. Then smaller stars could exist in various configurations, and their output is low enough that if they are at, say 5 x what that planet would call an AU, they would essentially just move the planet's climate a bit towards the inner edge of the "goldylocks" range. So long as they don't nudge it completely into the hot zone, why wouldn't life cope? (Note that we are talking about their light ouput raising the planet's temperature, not them gravitationally nudgeing the planet about - gravity and how stable the planet's orbit can be if the orbits of the suns themselves are changing, that's a seperate question) Fictional Kalgash would have to orbit the biggest sun of the group and it would have to count as being near the cooler edge of the life bearing zone before you figure in the other stars, but even before the lesser suns temporarily shift into a quasi-stable configuration that prevents night from occuring except once every several thousand years or whatever, there would be various configurations that would make night a very short lived or rare and irregular thing, and life would be used to that. There are other issues, such as how do plants dispose of waste products on Nightfall world, but those issues don't vary much if there's a short night every few months or only in a thousand years - plants would have to adapt for situations much less prolonged than the current one. If we call the Nightfall orbits "perfect", then even very imperfect multi-star systems would find life constantly facing this problem.I'm thinking that by your argument, it's all too easy to say things such as "Life in Binary systems? Impossible!," and even "Life when the day lasts more than 24 hours 17 minutes? Absurd!", and things like that. I'll refrain from quiting Jeff Goldblum at this point, but hope you will consider this.
        Then there's the question of how sensitive to light the natives eyes are. If nights have always been at least short and irregular for much longer than the perfect situation has existed, we should expect the natives to not have very good night vision, as there's less demand to evolve it, so talking about relative optical wavelength outputs and such is very hard to do meaningfully.I'm not sure how we could criticise the work as SF on that basis.

Custom hardware gives it the ability to communicate using body language.

Whether that's worth the extra cost, I don't know; probably not. But it does make it more interesting than "just another app".

HHGTTG was a manual.

Knowing that someone has a very warped perception of reality - at least from your point of view - pretty much destroys all their credibility to make arguments about the real world. If the argument had any merit then "normal people" would use it too, it's not worth the effort to track every argument back to the underlying root causes. Very often it boils down to "that's not the way real people act or the real world works" because so many get caught up in an ideology and forget to ground their beliefs in reality. They're immune to normal feedback mechanisms, it's like watching people cut themselves and if it hurts the solution is to cut more. I suppose if you cut yourself enough the pain may stop permanently, but it still seems a rather bad idea.

I guess you missed the "cash-in, conglomerate it all!" volumes of his lat career. Foundation XXIV, and so forth . . .

hawk

The reason to use [sic] is to indicate that you didn't introduce a typo, it made sense for scribes, typewriters and citing dead tree sources but when you're copy-pasting another electronic source perfect reproduction is the norm and pointing out spelling mistakes is typically mocking, like you're making a point that the one you're quoting can't even spell properly. So I wouldn't use it and if people complain, well then they don't understand the concept of quoting. You don't change someone else's words and it's obvious from context who made the typo so the [sic] is completely redundant.

No, you'd have the key. If you wanted to share the file publicly, then there's no point in keeping it encrypted, so you'd provide the server with the key and it would decrypt, saving you the cost of downloading and reencrypting.

The client just needs one key, the RSA (or equivalent) public key. You'd need to copy this between devices, but it's relatively small (under 1KB). It's small enough to fit in a version 40 QR code quite easily, so you could set up mobile devices by displaying the QR code on your laptop screen and point the mobile device's camera at it, if you don't have any sensible way of transferring files between devices. The client then has to download the file and the associated key, decrypt the key with the locally-stored key, and then decrypt the file, but that's not something that's exposed to the user.

No need; I'll just park out in this handy Montana hailstorm. Free dimples!

Actually, that happened to my old truck -- got hailed on pretty good and had small dimples pretty uniformly over its entire upper surface. Didn't do shit for its MPG. And after a few years the dimples went away (let's hear it for Ford steel!) and you couldn't tell it had ever happened.

It helps considerably when that state legislature is a part-time avocation, not a full-time career. Frex, here in Montana it's 90 days every other year -- not enough time to pass bullshit and certainly not enough income to make a living. So the nimrods who are unhireable except as politicians don't thrive here; you can't live off being a politician in MT. (And a lot of local positions, like some county commissioners, are volunteer.)

Conversely, look at California where the legislature is a fulltime job, and observe what a crowd of Peter Principles it's attracted...

And yes, I have considered it, because common sense has to start somewhere. Hell, there's a opening on the local mosquito abatement board... not every job has to be ruling the world. Fixing your little corner is most of it.

I don't know about other stuff or what's current, but back in the 1980s Southern California had basically two telcos: Pacific Bell (good service and reasonable rates), and GTE (horrible service and much higher rates). GTE, being the poor little put-upon underdog company, was given protected monopoly areas where PacBell was not *allowed* to offer telco service.

Fast-forward to the massive restructuring that eventually turned GTE into Verizon, and now Verizon enjoys the legacy of GTE's protected monopoly areas.... which they remained even tho Verizon was now the 800 pound gorilla.

Okay, since the effect is apparently speed-related -- your thought about channels underneath made me wonder if an air intake feeding a channel system could be designed to regulate that airflow according to forward speed, and therefore regulate dimpling, without the tedium and moving parts of yet another pump.

So you do it on the sides (which naturally drain), but not on the roof (which doesn't), and possibly on the undersurface (if practical). The sides are about 2/3rds of the surface area of a big truck box anyway. But per this interesting comment from an AC:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
the benefit is speed-related, and "always drives at the same speed" is an absurd assumption for a car, let alone for a big truck.

Occurs to me to wonder, tho, what happens with drag if you reverse the dimples (as one would to prevent water accumulating). Someone who actually knows, pipe up!

I'm wondering if it's more efficient only in limited speed ranges, and at other ranges actually increases drag.

But nominally-identical vehicles often get different MPG (my truck gets almost double what other supposedly identical trucks get!), and that MPG can change over time as well, so given how small the differences reported are, in this case it may be individual vehicle variance.

It should also be noted that this same military, which integrated early, is also one of the most conservative elements of society. Which should inform some folks, but probably won't.