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It is only recently (in historic terms) that death has become stigmatised rather than accepted as inevitable, and even welcomed as a natural and positive progression.

I'm not sure if this is utter nonsense, or if you may have a point insofar as the Enlightenment was "historically recent" and has eaten away at some traditional sources of solace.

Attempts at immortality are still for the delusional, disconnected, and mentally ill.

Only if they are flawed attempts. If we eventually get some stuff that actually works, then (ignoring for a moment the larger social upheavals and eventual overpopulation issues--let's say we get plausible long term space travel, too) your choice to die at an arbitrary age of 80 or 90 becomes no different from a choice to die at 30. It is ultimately (and should always be) your choice, but it is not "mentally ill" for not wanting to check out on a timetable based solely on biology.

Noone is a she, and she married anyone in a pretty how town (with up so floating may bells down)

"what kind of machine labors to be born" is presumably a mangled allusion to Yeats' poem The Second Coming, that ends with the lines:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The writer is trying to reference the poem's apocalyptic theme but his version of the image makes no sense. Mothers labour, not the thing being born.

The writer also asks, "And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?". However, he answered this question at the beginning of the same paragraph: "...every decade a new class of computer emerges ..."

He thus conflates two unrelated cycles: the cyclical nature of history implied in the poem's title and the cycle of obsolescence inherent in technology.

One can only hope his thoughts on the future of computing are not so confused.

Good programmers aren't "good" because of their knowledge -

They are "good" because of their will to learn.
Because of their appreciation of code beauty.
Because they like to code.

Bad programmers don't care about coding, they see it as some sort of accounting-like job where you have to crunch symbols and get paid for it.

I didn't meet many bad programmers. I am only 18 and am only in my first programming job and programmers here are selected very carefully.

I only met bad programmers at school. They were the people who tried to copy what the teacher said just to get their grade, and didn't think about coding again until the next lesson.

While the good coders were busy trying to understand why what the teacher said works, what else can be done with that knowledge...

While bad programmers looked at the teacher, the book, or the neighbor good programmer (if they were lucky to have one) for answers, good programmers hacked and hacked until they found the solution /themselves/, enjoying the process.

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I bought yesterday a poetry book by Charles Bukowski. It cost me a lot of money, more than I could afford, and I could have bought two great SF books by Orson Scott Card for the same price. Why did I buy that book? I read the first poem.

It started:

*so you want to be a writer?*

if it doesn't come bursting out of you

in spite of everything,

don't do it.

unless it comes unasked out of your

heart and your mind and your mouth

and your gut,

don't do it.

if you have to sit for hours

staring at your computer screen

or hunched over your

typewriter

searching for words,

don't do it.

rest here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16549

From the poem "Things Fall Apart" :

Actually, the poem is titled The Second Coming.

I've no idea who Shel is, if it matters. . .

Yes, it matters a good deal.

Academy of American Poets bio of Shel Silverstein

NYTBR "A Light in the Attic"

You might know him best as the author of the song "A Boy Named Sue".

KFG

Philip Larkin captures this situation beautifully in his poem Ignorance (1955):

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.

Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,
And willingness to change;
Yes, it is strange,

Even to wear such knowledge - for our flesh
Surrounds us with its own decisions -
And yet spend all our life on imprecisions,
That when we start to die
Have no idea why.

That's a spin of "This is just to say"

http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1380

Care to read it?

(Before you mod me into troll/flamebait heaven, consider that I am taking on issues of race and cultural history and talking about such things is hard to do without offending...)

Harlem in the 1930s was a flourshing center of art, culture, literature, and music. The boom period known as the Harlem Renaissance is unparalleled in American history with perhaps the exception of the late 1960s, also known as the Countercultural Revolution. The Harlem Renaissance inspired poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes, musicians the likes of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, novelists such as Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, and painters like Jacob Lawrence.

Art Deco, the style of art and architecture that exalts urbanism and the modernist avant-garde, flourished during this time, undoubtedly due to the broad sex appeal of jazz, an African-American musical form.

The amazing part about the Harlem Renaissance is that this is period of cultural growth during one of the most abysmal periods in economic history, a period so awful it is named "The Great Depression." You may not know a damn thing about niggers, but you should know that like the Founding Fathers of the United States, they know how to survive when things are tough. But more importantly, they know how to survive with style.

Niggers also have quite a bit in common with geeks. They are despised for their gifts and feared for their power. "Beautiful people" commit violence upon blacks and geeks and laugh about it. Now, imagine being a black geek (reading at -1) and coming to this thread.

It's now 2002, and the systematic (if unorganized) oppression and rejection of African Americans as "niggers" and "shit" is as strong as ever. In the early part of the twentieth century, groups of European-Americans killed blacks with impunity. Blacks were lynched and the KKK was scapegoated for America's racial hatred. I'm not saying the KKK were not guilty, but they were singled out, while everyday forms of racism survive unscathed.

Slashdot is one of my favorite webites. But I've never for a second doubted that some of my fellow /.'ers are racists. Now I have the proof. But I also know many /.'ers really don't have a lot to say about race, and the silence is deafening. So I thought in addition to those moderators who are on the job that I'd send out a few tendrils and try to turn up the signal to noise ratio, FWIW.

I'm really more of a punk rock kinda guy, but when I realized that a friend I hadn't seen in a while might have been in one of the towers, I immediately thought of James Taylor's "Fire & Rain" and went out and found it on the 'net. It was pretty shocking to hear in the 3rd verse (which I had forgotten, if I ever knew it):

...sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground

P.S. For bona fide prophesy (or maybe repetition of history, or just good advice) check out W.H. Auden's September 1, 1939