Comment Re:But wait... there's more! (Score 1) 115
No. You also need to mod the body to a reptilian pattern. Some of the dinosaurs would make a good model. How about a flame wielding pterosaur?
No. You also need to mod the body to a reptilian pattern. Some of the dinosaurs would make a good model. How about a flame wielding pterosaur?
Actually, I think violet, or a least indigo, eyes are more plausible. All that requires is an additional pigment.
>And then of course, there's the whole matter of your car often being
>on the road or parked somewhere else when other people in the
>house might need it to be parked in your garage.
But this is about California, where the obvious solution is to raise revenue by requiring advance purchase of a permit to remove the car from your garage!
>followed by sci-fi itself which generally revolves around some
>Earth/Solar System/Universe threat which only one man (it's almost
>always a man) can solve.
That would generally be "space opera".
There are notable space opera protagonists who are at least nominally female: Weber's Honor Harrington (probably the most successful modern series in the subgenera), Moone's Kyla Vatta, Shepherd's Kris Longknife.
Of those, the first two could pretty much flip the sex of pretty much every character except Harrington's pregnant mother with no real rewriting, while the latter might be an exhibit for why male author's *shouldn't* try to write actually female characters.
Then again, there bulk of SF male protagonists aren't male in any more than name, so . . .
hawk
note that the pendulum has swung back.
Note, for example, the 2000 Morrison case, in which the USSC choked on the notion that a violent act a woman was inherently intra-state act.
While the overreach of the Commerce Clause still needs to be reined in, it doesn't (over) extend nearly as far as it used to.
hawk, esq.
That was the reason I switched to Linux. Of course, I could have switched to BSD, but Debian potato was easier to install.
The hero tale is one with a long history behind it. I think it's always been the dominant style. So that's not really a legitimate criticism...not unless you are making an encompassing claim, and if you are, then it's false. (I've encountered several books with a heroine.) And the dominant style always reflects the zeitgeist. (In the late 1940's and early 50's there was lots of WWII echoes, often re-staged in different settings.)
FWIW, my tastes have always been quite narrow, and minority, but I think they've narrowed over the years. OTOH, possibly it's just that the net doesn't provide exposure to the tales that I would like. Perhaps they're still out there, but I can no longer easily browse through and tell that they're something I'd be interested in.
Part of the problem is definitely the sales channel. Grocery stores only carry "best sellers". (They may not actually be best sellers, but they're marketed as such.) 20 displays of 10 books, and two or three with only a few...probably left over from last month.) Also a few books that I already have on my shelf, from a decade ago.
Even book stores lean in this direction, sufficiently that I no longer want to browse in them. (OTOH, I always preferred science-fiction and technical books.)
But I really think part of the problem is the zeitgeist. Nobody wants to read it. It's like when the anti-hero became "popular with publishers". People found reading that stuff unpleasant, so they stopped. Except for a few. And some of those will be picked up, eventually, as classics that everyone should read. Just like "Jude the Obscure" was. Nobody that I ever met liked that story, but some academics thought it was important enough to force everyone to read it.
The last technical book I bought used grey ink for the examples. If I'd been able to see it before I bought it, I wouldn't have. I think they probably had a decent book, but the only editing was for the e-book, and that used color, but they printed the book in black and white.
Another turned out not to have any index. The text was decent, but just try to look something up.
The editors of print books are
That's overly specific. How about "can, in principle, be at least as effective as a photon drive". I don't think one can really rule out one that's a bit more effective, even if I've no idea how one would make such a thing. (I believe that a photon drive has theoretic limits on it's efficiency that are a bit more stringent than the more general limits...but there might be some way of generating light that got around those limits...so perhaps "can't be any more efficient that a totally ideally optimal photon drive".)
Even so, I'm not sure. If it's something that can't ever return, most of the arguments about the maximum efficiency fail because there's no way of performing the measurements.
Also there are these cute arguments about drives that essentially require the mass of Jupiter (or more) to distort space-time. Some of those seem to be valid arguments for a drive without a reaction mass. They are just essentially impossible to build.
That said, perhaps these extreme devices...things involving zero point energy, FTL drives, reactionless drives, etc. are really just pointing out a place where the theories are wrong. None of these devices are actually buildable, so nobody can test them, as they all require some form or other of unobtainium. (Constructs with negative mass, portable masses heavier than Jupiter, etc.) I still remember "Rotating cylinders and a global causality violation", even though the plot of the story was a bit
cool link! (at least if you disregard things I remember being cast as ancient history!)
the 8080 had at least one or two undocumented instructions that worked their way into code. IIRC, the Heathkit chess program needed a byte changed from that to a documented instruction on the Z80 to run [a one byte patch!].
And there were a pair (?) of quirks where 8085 instructions took a cycle ore or less than the the same instruction on the 8080.
The Z80 executed some instructions in less cycles than the 8080 (but wasn't there one that took an extra cycle for some reason?
it was slow, but could be extremely low power compared to the others, and was silly-rich with registers. 16 general purpose 16 bit registers, iirc. (or pairs of eight bit). And ISTR that you could use all but one or two for program counter and reference (a pair of four bit registers [P & X ?] that pointed to which 16 bit to use]
Also, significantly more radiation resistant than the others of the time (or was that another version? Even so, its design should have been more resistant).
My first computer was a wire-wrapped 1802 . . .
As long as we're going to reinvent the wheel again, we might as well try making it round this time. - Mike Dennison