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You seem to be confused about who's doing the review. Nellardo has no financial relationship with OSTG. And his text ends above the bar.

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You can purchase 'Blah' from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Someone mod the parent down. OSTG isn't stealling from anyone.

Let me just start by letting everyone know I live (and am currently typing this) from Manhattan.

Me too. East 11th Street between First and Second Avenues. For those readers not so intimately familiar with Manhattan geography, that puts me a couple miles, perhaps, from the WTC (takes about 30 minutes to walk there). It also put my apartment inside the neighborhood Rudy Giuliani closed in the wake of the WTC attack.

I used to dislike cops. THey harassed me, the were disrespectful to me, and messed with my friends.

I had no such direct personal beef with cops. I'm white. Aside from tattoos (pretty common in my neighborhood), I don't especially stand out as a trouble-maker. I had severe reservations on police behavior, based on ethical profiling, the spurious War on Drugs, and other abuses, but this wasn't based on anything police did to me personally.

I take it all back. All of it.

I don't. I'm more scared of cops than ever before. Perhaps you live in a part of Manhattan where didn't have to show a police officer your ID simply to take a right turn on 14th street to walk home. The prospect of police being given that kind of power at all is terrifying.

I have a new respect for all police in New York City since the attacks on the world trade center. They, along with the firemen all risked thier lives to help get people out of the buildings as quickly as they could. But, as you know, the building collapsed, trapping thousands (literally) of New York's finest men and women, who selflessly gave thier lives to help the rest of us.

I'm reminded instead of a scene in Ashes of Victory by David Weber. This is the latest in the Honor Harrington series of sci-fi novels. Honor has recently broken out of the worst prison planet known, taking more than 400,000 prisoners with her. Starting out imprisoned herself, with no access to equipment other than two shuttlecraft and short her own left arm and left eye. The Queen of Manticore (Honor's boss) and her Prime Minister want to give Honor the highest award for valor that she can.

Honor declines. Because everything she did was her duty. It was her job. It was amazing and heroic and spectacular, but it was nothing more and nothing less than her duty required of her. It was her duty to escape if she could. It was her duty to help subordinates if she could. So she did.

I don't mean to denigrate or reduce in any way, shape, or form, the efforts rescuers have put into the WTC situation. But bluntly, the police and fireworkers did exactly what they were supposed to. They risked their lives, but that's what they signed up for. For a while, police recruiting posters in New York had a line to the effect of "Most people wouldn't take this job for a million dollars. Some do it for a lot less."

Their heroic actions in rescue efforts doesn't mitigate or excuse abuses or crimes of the past. Does pulling a corpse out of the rubble make it okay for a cop to shoot a black man whose "gun" was his wallet?

Now, when I see a police man on the street, I smile at him. He is ensuring my safety, and the safety of others.

I smile too, but only out of self-defense. No reason to give them a reason to harass me.

Now, its our turn. Sure, the government may have "demonized" us before. But times are fundamentally different now.

Not in the way you mean, they aren't. Terrorists have been around for a long time. Robin Hood was a terrorist. The fact that "weapons" of mass destruction are a heck of a lot nastier now doesn't change the ethical basis of terrorism and how to deal with it.

No, the way times might be different now is that Bush has what many people consider legitimate cause to impose the equivalent of martial law, all with Senate and Congressional approval and encouragement. The Office of Homeland Security is a name worthy of George Orwell and Stalin. When I was young, I read 1984. Then I lived through the year and chuckled at the Apple ads spoofing IBM as Big Brother. Remember those t-shirts about "Win95=Mac84"? George Bush 2001 = Big Brother 1984 is too scary to let me sleep comfortably. And the ATA and the Office of Homeland Security help make it possible.

Don't think the death of bin Laden will be anything more than proof that Big Brother Loves You. There will always be terrorists and if terrorists justify totalitarianism in the Land of the Free, that totalitarianism will only go away with revolution. No Senator ever got re-elected for repealing anything except Prohibition. Today's politicians (or their handlers) understand bread and circuses too well for that. Just a couple of months ago, Bush was bribing most citizens with $300 checks.

I'm getting a little heated now, so I'm gonna shut up. But the logic is there. Look at the history and expansion of the War on Drugs and the potential for the War on Terrorism is, well, terrifying.

Brook Conner, aka nellardo

Try Meyer, T., Blair, D., and Conner, D. B."WAXweb: Toward Dynamic MOO-based VRML", Proceedings VRML 95. It talks about adding VRML to a MOO, which covers the client-server topology, as well as 3D. The MOO itself provided all the chat you could want. Since the MOO could track when objects moved from room to room, and people were just objects, and the MOO could spit out VRML to correspond to objects, you had simple 3D avatars and such.

The Worlds, Inc. people almost certainly knew about this, as Tom Meyer, one of the authors, was on the VRML Advisory Group, and I'm pretty certain someone from Worlds, Inc. was on the VAG, too. This was also at the first VRML conference, in 1995. And WAXweb was one of the very first (if not the first) sites to serve VRML over the World-Wide Web.

And Stephenson's Snowcrash was all over the VRML community at that time. Everyone knew that what they wanted to do was implement the Black Sun - the bar where Hiro demonstrates his abilities as a "hacker." In fact, one of the VRML start-ups was called Black Sun.

You can go back even farther to check out Lucas's Habitat system, back in the eighties. Actually, now that I think of it, I remember hearing at the time that Worlds was planning on patenting some of this stuff - my boss at the time was Andy van Dam, one of the leading lights of computer graphics, who scoffed at the prospect of Worlds patenting anything so obvious. Andy and Tom were both all over that stuff, as they were instrumental in establishing the VRML Consortium.