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Anyone know about the sequel that came out a few years ago?

Well, despite the rather intemperate and ill-informed comments that greeted this, there was indeed a sequel published some years ago, and indeed a sequel to the sequel.

Now it's my turn to be intemperate: what the shitty fuck is a hack author like K.W. Jeter, who mostly churns out second-rate movie and TV tie-ins doing pretending to be Phil Dick? It gets worse: enough people are obviously buying this cheap rip-off shit that he's been let out of daycare to write a fourth. Makes me spit, it does.

Of course, these trashy-flashy-action-and-cool-characters ripoffs gloss over all the profound and significant stuff that made "Do Androids Dream..." and "Blade Runner" so good. They contain nothing original to make up for this loss either.

OT-ish: has no-one outside the UK heard of The Meaning of Liff [sic]? This was a non-Amazon link but BOL's URLs are too long.

Yet again it's time to plug Lawrence Lessig's book "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace".

I've heard this guy speak at HP Labs. Well, he didn't really speak, just beamed Krell rays at us. Probably the smartest person in the room, and that's one very smart roomful of people - He even made me believe that there could be a purpose in having lawyers (although imagine what he might have been as a coder, if he'd not been lured by The Dark Side 8-) )

Back in the beginning, the Net was geeks piping IP traffic to each other. The technology just moved packets, it didn't care what they were, so that's how the "laws" and netiquette operated. Now we have A-T-W and AT&T trying to turn it into glorifed cable TV with programmed content -- If you liked the way it was, then better understand what's going on today.

Amazon have the book. Definitely read this one.

Where did this guy learn ethics?

In fact no known moral law implies that purchase cost should even be related to production cost.

An example: ursury. [My aplogies to ./ readers who are not from a Judaeo - Christian moral background: I am, so forgive the limited range of sources for my examples, and please, PLEASE, add any from other cultures. That's the point of discussion, isn't it?]

I guess the references in the traditional texts are Lev 25:36-27, Deut 23:19-20, Ps 15:5, Ezek 18:8, 13, 17, Ezek 22:12.

The point is that there is a tradition where the moral/religious law implies a relationship between the cost and price.

I guess that this and similar rules are based on a general belief that you should not profit unreasonable at the expense of your fellow-man. It is the tenth commandment.

2535. The sensitive appetite leads us to desire pleasant things we do not have, e.g. the desire to eat when we are hungry, or to warm ourselves when we are cold. These desires are good in themselves; but often they exceed the limits of reaon and drive us to covert unjustly what is not ours and belongs to another or is owed to him.

2537. It is not a violation of this commandment to desire to obtain things that belongs to one's neighbour, provided this is done by just means. Traditional catechesis realistically mentions 'those who have a harder struggle against their criminal desires' and so who 'must be urged the more to keep this commandment':

...merchants who desire scarcity and and rising prices, who cannot bear not to be the only ones buying and selling so that they themselves can sell ore dearly and buy more cheaply; those who hope that their peers will be impoverished, in order to realize a profit either by selling to them or buying from them ... physicans who wish disease to spread; lawyers who are eager for many important cases and trials.

[Catechism of the Catholic Church]

Bertrand may not agree with this ethics, but he should say so instead of claiming that it does not exist.

The last time AI was la mode, which was about 15-20 years ago, one of the computational walls AI hit was in computer vision. So, 10 Moore's Law cycles later, ...

If a Web page knew you had a camera pointed at yourself, could it watch? As in, see what you're looking at, where you point (forget those mouses!), what you spend time reading?

So instead of "Big Brother is watching you!" we'd have Tim Berners-Lee is watching you!"

Clifford Stoll, the hacker and astronomer that wrote "The Cuckoo's Nest" on his adventures chasing crackers, also wrote "Silicon Snake Oil" (1996) and "High Tech Heretic" (1999) on this very subject of "who needs computers". He makes interesting points, that probably you won't share.

(The links are to Amazon, if that's not kosher to you, find better links, I couldn't.)

(To non-+1ers: you can win karma by linking to that Mexican project to bring Linux into schools. You are welcome.)
__

Clifford Stoll, the hacker and astronomer that wrote "The Cuckoo's Nest" on his adventures chasing crackers, also wrote "Silicon Snake Oil" (1996) and "High Tech Heretic" (1999) on this very subject of "who needs computers". He makes interesting points, that probably you won't share.

(The links are to Amazon, if that's not kosher to you, find better links, I couldn't.)

(To non-+1ers: you can win karma by linking to that Mexican project to bring Linux into schools. You are welcome.)
__

Last week I was fortunate to hear Lawrence Lessig, an American law professor, speaking on Internet law (HP Labs, Bristol).
He's a superb speaker, and quite changed my views on lawyers 8-)

One of his central points was that although "Form may not quite follow Function" on the 'Net as yet, Usage quite definitely follows Form. Laws are the way they are, not because they're an arbitrary construct errected in a void, but because they're a codification of behaviour that is almost implicit in how the environment already works. This is good law, at least -- a law that tries to go against reality is sen as a bad law and may not be observed with any respect or dutifulness.

So where does that leave deep-linking ? Well, IMHO, if you technically can deep-link, then it's ridiculous to try and simply ban it. It's not going to happen - deep-linking will continue, despite.

Do I support deep-linking ? No, not at all. I think the argument that providing this content costs money and should only be available to those who play ball with the entire revenue stream model (you don't have to buy from there, but you should at least receive the banner ads).

Can we fix this tehnically ? Of course we can! If you're a potentially linked-to site, then it's far from rocket-science to see where the links are coming from, how they're presented, and to take appropriate action. Making all my pages self-unframing is obvious, but there's a lot more too. If ContentPirate.com want to link traffic to my site, then I'd love them to do that - it's better than buying advertising space. If I was a truly dynamic marketeer, then I'd have a range of special offers in pop-up boxes, all ready to launch when I detected the incoming link. "Hi, you've been redirected to GoodInfo.com from ContentPirate.com - look at the special 10% off deals we've built just to steal your business back from them."

Lawrence Lessig has a book out Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, on this and other topics. I strongly recommend it.

It's not exactly a classic, but is well worth a read.

isn't this just the prisoner's dilemma (or it's extension into a multiplayer situation, the "Common good" problem, as discussed by Mancur Olsen in The Logic of Collective Action)

However, the situation as you describe is only correct on the assumption that it is a one-off game. When the situation you describe is repeated, then things are rather different. This is the situation described by Robert Axelrod in The Evolution of Co-operation

In a repeated situation, whilst free riders can be a problem in the short term, in the long term they are not. Many different scenarios exist, depending on the intelligence of the players and the potential for misunderstanding either the situation or the way that others are playing.

I don't think that your analysis is sound, because the situation is not a one-shot play, but a repeated game. State governments are elected, so there is the potential for laws to be repealed at regular intervals, or for new laws (such as the inapplicability of shrink-wrap contracts) to be passed.

However your point about the applicability of laws in differing states, and the relationship between them is well made. Sounds like there could be a realy nice little BSc or MSc project in examining this sort of thing as a spatially distributed economic game.

Regards

treefrog.

isn't this just the prisoner's dilemma (or it's extension into a multiplayer situation, the "Common good" problem, as discussed by Mancur Olsen in The Logic of Collective Action)

However, the situation as you describe is only correct on the assumption that it is a one-off game. When the situation you describe is repeated, then things are rather different. This is the situation described by Robert Axelrod in The Evolution of Co-operation

In a repeated situation, whilst free riders can be a problem in the short term, in the long term they are not. Many different scenarios exist, depending on the intelligence of the players and the potential for misunderstanding either the situation or the way that others are playing.

I don't think that your analysis is sound, because the situation is not a one-shot play, but a repeated game. State governments are elected, so there is the potential for laws to be repealed at regular intervals, or for new laws (such as the inapplicability of shrink-wrap contracts) to be passed.

However your point about the applicability of laws in differing states, and the relationship between them is well made. Sounds like there could be a realy nice little BSc or MSc project in examining this sort of thing as a spatially distributed economic game.

Regards

treefrog.

If this book had been written by someone other than Iain Banks, it would have been slated as a poor pastiche of Banks on a bad day.

This is Banks writing very poorly, in a manner that has no originality left and all he can do is re-hash threads that he was already in danger of over-using. It has all the old Banks favourites in there; the slightly-suppressed horror, the grimy dungeons, but it's unusually light on polished steel spaceships.

Then right at the end, a piece of the Culture's flying cutlery pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. This is a gratuitous deus ex machina that's below the standards of Jeffrey Archer, let alone E E Smith. Any fool can write space opera if you're allowed to simply save the plot by arbitrary invention of unexpected technology.

I never liked Iain M. Banks as much as Iain ~M. (just not my taste), but even the non space-opera hasn't been so good in his last few books. He always was variable :- compare The Bridge against the similar, but less well executed, themes of Walking on Glass. His best books; Espedair Street or The Crow Road maintain an (often hilarious) dramatic narrative, whereas A Song of Stone or Canal Dreams are frankly dull.

Mind you, if you liked Espedair Street, read Bill Drummond's 45 for the story of what it was really like.

If this book had been written by someone other than Iain Banks, it would have been slated as a poor pastiche of Banks on a bad day.

This is Banks writing very poorly, in a manner that has no originality left and all he can do is re-hash threads that he was already in danger of over-using. It has all the old Banks favourites in there; the slightly-suppressed horror, the grimy dungeons, but it's unusually light on polished steel spaceships.

Then right at the end, a piece of the Culture's flying cutlery pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. This is a gratuitous deus ex machina that's below the standards of Jeffrey Archer, let alone E E Smith. Any fool can write space opera if you're allowed to simply save the plot by arbitrary invention of unexpected technology.

I never liked Iain M. Banks as much as Iain ~M. (just not my taste), but even the non space-opera hasn't been so good in his last few books. He always was variable :- compare The Bridge against the similar, but less well executed, themes of Walking on Glass. His best books; Espedair Street or The Crow Road maintain an (often hilarious) dramatic narrative, whereas A Song of Stone or Canal Dreams are frankly dull.

Mind you, if you liked Espedair Street, read Bill Drummond's 45 for the story of what it was really like.

If this book had been written by someone other than Iain Banks, it would have been slated as a poor pastiche of Banks on a bad day.

This is Banks writing very poorly, in a manner that has no originality left and all he can do is re-hash threads that he was already in danger of over-using. It has all the old Banks favourites in there; the slightly-suppressed horror, the grimy dungeons, but it's unusually light on polished steel spaceships.

Then right at the end, a piece of the Culture's flying cutlery pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. This is a gratuitous deus ex machina that's below the standards of Jeffrey Archer, let alone E E Smith. Any fool can write space opera if you're allowed to simply save the plot by arbitrary invention of unexpected technology.

I never liked Iain M. Banks as much as Iain ~M. (just not my taste), but even the non space-opera hasn't been so good in his last few books. He always was variable :- compare The Bridge against the similar, but less well executed, themes of Walking on Glass. His best books; Espedair Street or The Crow Road maintain an (often hilarious) dramatic narrative, whereas A Song of Stone or Canal Dreams are frankly dull.

Mind you, if you liked Espedair Street, read Bill Drummond's 45 for the story of what it was really like.

If this book had been written by someone other than Iain Banks, it would have been slated as a poor pastiche of Banks on a bad day.

This is Banks writing very poorly, in a manner that has no originality left and all he can do is re-hash threads that he was already in danger of over-using. It has all the old Banks favourites in there; the slightly-suppressed horror, the grimy dungeons, but it's unusually light on polished steel spaceships.

Then right at the end, a piece of the Culture's flying cutlery pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. This is a gratuitous deus ex machina that's below the standards of Jeffrey Archer, let alone E E Smith. Any fool can write space opera if you're allowed to simply save the plot by arbitrary invention of unexpected technology.

I never liked Iain M. Banks as much as Iain ~M. (just not my taste), but even the non space-opera hasn't been so good in his last few books. He always was variable :- compare The Bridge against the similar, but less well executed, themes of Walking on Glass. His best books; Espedair Street or The Crow Road maintain an (often hilarious) dramatic narrative, whereas A Song of Stone or Canal Dreams are frankly dull.

Mind you, if you liked Espedair Street, read Bill Drummond's 45 for the story of what it was really like.

If this book had been written by someone other than Iain Banks, it would have been slated as a poor pastiche of Banks on a bad day.

This is Banks writing very poorly, in a manner that has no originality left and all he can do is re-hash threads that he was already in danger of over-using. It has all the old Banks favourites in there; the slightly-suppressed horror, the grimy dungeons, but it's unusually light on polished steel spaceships.

Then right at the end, a piece of the Culture's flying cutlery pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. This is a gratuitous deus ex machina that's below the standards of Jeffrey Archer, let alone E E Smith. Any fool can write space opera if you're allowed to simply save the plot by arbitrary invention of unexpected technology.

I never liked Iain M. Banks as much as Iain ~M. (just not my taste), but even the non space-opera hasn't been so good in his last few books. He always was variable :- compare The Bridge against the similar, but less well executed, themes of Walking on Glass. His best books; Espedair Street or The Crow Road maintain an (often hilarious) dramatic narrative, whereas A Song of Stone or Canal Dreams are frankly dull.

Mind you, if you liked Espedair Street, read Bill Drummond's 45 for the story of what it was really like.

If this book had been written by someone other than Iain Banks, it would have been slated as a poor pastiche of Banks on a bad day.

This is Banks writing very poorly, in a manner that has no originality left and all he can do is re-hash threads that he was already in danger of over-using. It has all the old Banks favourites in there; the slightly-suppressed horror, the grimy dungeons, but it's unusually light on polished steel spaceships.

Then right at the end, a piece of the Culture's flying cutlery pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. This is a gratuitous deus ex machina that's below the standards of Jeffrey Archer, let alone E E Smith. Any fool can write space opera if you're allowed to simply save the plot by arbitrary invention of unexpected technology.

I never liked Iain M. Banks as much as Iain ~M. (just not my taste), but even the non space-opera hasn't been so good in his last few books. He always was variable :- compare The Bridge against the similar, but less well executed, themes of Walking on Glass. His best books; Espedair Street or The Crow Road maintain an (often hilarious) dramatic narrative, whereas A Song of Stone or Canal Dreams are frankly dull.

Mind you, if you liked Espedair Street, read Bill Drummond's 45 for the story of what it was really like.

If this book had been written by someone other than Iain Banks, it would have been slated as a poor pastiche of Banks on a bad day.

This is Banks writing very poorly, in a manner that has no originality left and all he can do is re-hash threads that he was already in danger of over-using. It has all the old Banks favourites in there; the slightly-suppressed horror, the grimy dungeons, but it's unusually light on polished steel spaceships.

Then right at the end, a piece of the Culture's flying cutlery pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. This is a gratuitous deus ex machina that's below the standards of Jeffrey Archer, let alone E E Smith. Any fool can write space opera if you're allowed to simply save the plot by arbitrary invention of unexpected technology.

I never liked Iain M. Banks as much as Iain ~M. (just not my taste), but even the non space-opera hasn't been so good in his last few books. He always was variable :- compare The Bridge against the similar, but less well executed, themes of Walking on Glass. His best books; Espedair Street or The Crow Road maintain an (often hilarious) dramatic narrative, whereas A Song of Stone or Canal Dreams are frankly dull.

Mind you, if you liked Espedair Street, read Bill Drummond's 45 for the story of what it was really like.

Amazon.co.uk has some wacky prices sometimes, especially with textbook prices. The same textbook might cost only 22 pounds at amazon.co.uk (~ $35US) and $83 at amazon.com.

Perhaps amazon is trying to dump products in the UK in an attempt to drive out competition and underhandedly achieve market dominance. If true, it's just another reason to boycot them.

I am curious why the american editions of Pratchett's books never have the original covers by Josh Kirby. The Kirby covers are imho a lot nicer. So I would suggest that people wanting to read Pratchett try ordering the original, british, edition. (you can check out the covers at Amazon.co.uk )

The last American publisher made dull covers; the current one makes them just plain awful. (The Fifth Elephant was pink, for Om's sake.) I order them from Amazon.co.uk just so I can appreciate decent art. Used to be I ordered them from overseas just so I could get them in time, but Pratchett finally seems to have landed a deal so that his books are released at the same time in America as they are in the rest of the world.

This isn't a new issue, or even one related to technology. If you read Simon Singh's The Code Book he takes a detour out of relating the fascinating history of cryptography to relate how the Rosetta Stone allowed hieroglyphics to be read, and how Linear B (the Minoan script) was translated. Great stuff, and it shows that the problem of old material being in dead languages is an old problem.

Adrian, comrade! You sure reply fast.

As for the Culture, I disagree... Consider Phlebas is incredibly fun, and a thirteen year old such as myself and (I believe) you would be completely at home in it. And if it's slightly above the reading level of the girl in question here, well... all the better.

I've never been a Baxter fan. His stuff is too ... ethereal ... for me. If that word even makes sense in context. It's like it's disconnected from any possible reality...

At least I didn't reccomend Walking On Glass .

Consider Phlebas is what I reccomend to get people started on Sci-Fi. It has worked every time I've tried it (that's on three separate occasions) - it's classic widescreen space-opera, with ringworlds and three-hundred-kilometre long starships, but one can tell it was written by a modern writer: Banks' concept of a post-scarcity society is a giveaway that this book was penned in the eighties. Phlebas has to offer the most believable future I've seen to date, even if it is a few thousand years off.

Excession , which takes place a thousand years after CP in the same universe, has only a handful of human characters - and they're all minor ones. All the main characters are artificial intelligences, which is fitting considering they're the ones who run the Culture. Excession is nearly as good as CP.

Neither of the above are too advanced for a thirteen year old with an above-average reading capability, nor are they too easy for an adult.

The City and the Stars is perhaps the greatest classic science fiction novel. It's touching and powerful on a literal scale and yet is also a metaphor for the progress and awakening of our race: a young boy is born with a new mind into a city whose inhabitants never 'die'; their consciousnesses are simply transplanted into new bodies. Alvin, the boy, becomes obsessed with revealing what is outside his hermetically sealed city of ten million... and when he does, the reader's mind begins to reel.

That's enough for now. I may make another posting with further reviews of my other favorites, A Fire Upon the Deep and Glory Season - the latter especially being great for a teenager.

Consider Phlebas is what I reccomend to get people started on Sci-Fi. It has worked every time I've tried it (that's on three separate occasions) - it's classic widescreen space-opera, with ringworlds and three-hundred-kilometre long starships, but one can tell it was written by a modern writer: Banks' concept of a post-scarcity society is a giveaway that this book was penned in the eighties. Phlebas has to offer the most believable future I've seen to date, even if it is a few thousand years off.

Excession , which takes place a thousand years after CP in the same universe, has only a handful of human characters - and they're all minor ones. All the main characters are artificial intelligences, which is fitting considering they're the ones who run the Culture. Excession is nearly as good as CP.

Neither of the above are too advanced for a thirteen year old with an above-average reading capability, nor are they too easy for an adult.

The City and the Stars is perhaps the greatest classic science fiction novel. It's touching and powerful on a literal scale and yet is also a metaphor for the progress and awakening of our race: a young boy is born with a new mind into a city whose inhabitants never 'die'; their consciousnesses are simply transplanted into new bodies. Alvin, the boy, becomes obsessed with revealing what is outside his hermetically sealed city of ten million... and when he does, the reader's mind begins to reel.

That's enough for now. I may make another posting with further reviews of my other favorites, A Fire Upon the Deep and Glory Season - the latter especially being great for a teenager.

Consider Phlebas is what I reccomend to get people started on Sci-Fi. It has worked every time I've tried it (that's on three separate occasions) - it's classic widescreen space-opera, with ringworlds and three-hundred-kilometre long starships, but one can tell it was written by a modern writer: Banks' concept of a post-scarcity society is a giveaway that this book was penned in the eighties. Phlebas has to offer the most believable future I've seen to date, even if it is a few thousand years off.

Excession , which takes place a thousand years after CP in the same universe, has only a handful of human characters - and they're all minor ones. All the main characters are artificial intelligences, which is fitting considering they're the ones who run the Culture. Excession is nearly as good as CP.

Neither of the above are too advanced for a thirteen year old with an above-average reading capability, nor are they too easy for an adult.

The City and the Stars is perhaps the greatest classic science fiction novel. It's touching and powerful on a literal scale and yet is also a metaphor for the progress and awakening of our race: a young boy is born with a new mind into a city whose inhabitants never 'die'; their consciousnesses are simply transplanted into new bodies. Alvin, the boy, becomes obsessed with revealing what is outside his hermetically sealed city of ten million... and when he does, the reader's mind begins to reel.

That's enough for now. I may make another posting with further reviews of my other favorites, A Fire Upon the Deep and Glory Season - the latter especially being great for a teenager.

For more details, see Farringdon, Morton, Farringdon & Baker's book Analysing For Authorship, University of Wales Press 1996; ISBN: 0708313248.

Thank you for mentioning Robert Rankin. Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors and from reading the reviews of his books, I think I will like Rankin too. As with Pratchett, Rankin's books are available at http://www.amazon.co.uk.

Or can't you tell I'm a Pratchett fan?

Gopnik's book is brilliant, i definitely recommend it.



wray

The mechanism by which real communities were historically moulded from raping, pillaging hordes into the polite and modernised societies which many parts of the world is largely that of an internalisation of the power systems - self-discipline to social norms in other words.

Originally, as noted, there were no rules in society. If you wanted to do something, you did it and didn't care about consequences to anyone else but you. The only way to get anyone to obey was through a range of vicious threats - the medieval times were full of them.

However, once you persuade a community to self-moderate, (and the meta-moderation here is quite similar), such draconian measures just aren't necessary. Few will even think of significantly stepping out of line. Fewer still will actually do so. And when that self-moderation happens internally within each member, destructive behaviour is very rare indeed.

Some communities do operate like this - evolt.org is one of them. Evolt members do enforce community norms without admin intervention - for a community of 3,000 self-opinionated web developers like me, to not to have a flamewar for months at a time is almost unheard of. And the last few times that someone's ripped off our (now former) design, it's been members of the community who have pointed it out and sent private 'cease and desist' notices.

If you want more of the theory behind this, have a look at Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

Fair warning - Amazon Associates apply. Circumvent if you feel that way

I actually think it's dangerous and irresponsible to even consider generating deliberate genetic mutations. As biologists they should know about the dangers of disease themselves but I guess they are blinded by excitement.
Forget nuclear bombs and firebombing. The biggest killer this century, and every other century, has been pandemic disease. Diseases are borne from genetic mutation. (further reading : "Plague's Progress - Arno Karlen" )
But what the heck. Mutation comes from everywhere. Creating organic creatures in a lab is bound to free us (and them) from lives of tyranny and oppression. I hope they make the results open source so we can all grow them!

As Oppenhiemer said :
"I have become death, the destroyer of worlds"

Hm, Amazon.co.uk's page for this book says the book has 1 ;^)

Incidentally, Amazon UK have it for sale at ukp21.83 plus p&p here, which seems like quite a nice price to me. Their review is similarly positive.

Incidentally, Amazon UK have it for sale at ukp21.83 plus p&p here, which seems like quite a nice price to me. Their review is similarly positive.

The Cities in Flight sequence has just been published in the UK by Millennium Masterworks. You can get it at amazon.co.uk.

I read 'Cities in Flight' when I was maybe 15 and the description of a city taking off is still one of the coolest images in SF. I've just finished reading the whole sequence and the last book sort of drifts off on a random tack and trails away to nothing, but the first two and a half books are definitely among the classics of the golden age.

The same imprint has also published 'The Stars My Destination' and 'The Demolished Man' by Alfred Bester, 'Last and First Men' by Olaf Stapledon and 'Player Piano' by Kurt Vonnegut.

In the US. Those in the UK (or with lots of disposable income) might wish to check out a mazon.co.uk, which lists The Broken God as "usually dispatched in 24 hours"

It's Cities in Flight that's out of print, not Teranesia - amazon.com says it's back in February. You can get it from Amazon.co.uk though.

i thought i'd have a look at amazon.co.uk to see if there was a local press of the big-u available. alas, no, but there is this. And it's not cryptonomicon, since it's out in may in paperback. i wonder if the 4069bit error will have been fixed by then.

£14.10 + P&P. Just about the first time I've seen things cheaper on this side of the pond!

Not to mention all those free speech cases the EFF has been involved in - or the inevitable courtroom test of the GPL . . .