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That was a strongly worded reply!!

Have you ever hung out in a University English department (I have)? There are lots of Charlenes. Anyway, what makes caricatures of post-modernists so sacronsat? Most of post-modernism is mumbo-jumbo that deserves to be satirized. Satire and characature have a long and respected history in literature, going back to Jonathan Swift, even the Eripides, and it has a useful corrective effect on public opinion.

Would you have been more happy if Stephenson satirized Microserfs, or Bill Gates instead? Or maybe Repulicans? Why are po-mo feminists taboo?

-----------------------------------

re: Charlene, emasculated academic types.

I'd agree that they're caricatures if they weren't essentially accurate. Any English or Women's Studies department is chock full of people who match this description, and the classes contain many larval-form Charlenes. There's some exaggeration of the salient characterstics, and the people are a bit flat, yeah, but not by much as you might think.

I agree that the female characters here are a little few and far between (Mary was pretty clearly a German plant with an ulterior motive -- Bischoff or some other German guy admits as much), but Stephenson has written excellent female characters before (YT from Snow Crash, Sarah Jane Johnston from The Big U, 3 or 4 (including Miss Matheson/YT) in Diamond Age), and the shortage of 'stage time' for females in Cryptonomicon is not perhaps an indicator of N.Stephenson's downward slide into misogyny, the shibboleth of our age.

For high-octane misogyny, check out Cerebus (Not that Dave Sim's misogyny (and to a lesser extent, generalized misanthropy) detracts from the many fine artistic qualities of that series).

I suspect that this article is just a reflection
of the age of the author; forgive me, I too
remember the 70s/80s - albeit distantly - in the
days when PCW and BYTE had more pages of signal
than they did advertising noise, and computing
was looking forward to its future.

Before the OOPS fad, before the 4GL fad, there
were continual fads in the 80s that computing
was going to change for the better; articles
about compilers that would understand natural
languages and produce programs on demand, that
would do what we wanted without error. User
interfaces that would make everything we wanted
to do, simple and obvious.

This was the boom time of AI and GUI development
in academia, and the mindset is propagated in
hackers of a certain age, disposed to consider
whatever hardware or software they are using as
crud that will soon be surpassed by something
much much better than they could imagine.

This is, of course, a caricature, but I hope
that some of it is recognisable.

My point is: there are some people who will tar
any existing technology as crap and invariably
promise something better down the road; these
people can be classified as:

1) visionaries
2) sci-fi writers
3) marketeers

...depending upon their remit; I suspect that
Bob falls into one of the two former categories,
suffering some sort of self-loathing that nothing
has changed since his day.

I do not believe he falls into category 3
(which M$ excels at) where the remit is to
prevent adoption of some technology which
might undermine profits from some competing
technology of their own.

There is a depressing tendency, amongst these
people, to deride Linux for it's Unix heritage.
They forget that the flipside of "old" includes
"tried", "tested", and "well-understood enough
to be robustly optimised to hell and back",
all of which are also important features to
most computer users.

Or, at least, the ones who don't think that
one crash per week is acceptable.

- alec

See the Salon article

--which takes an opposite view...that too much time is wasted on Dr. Evil, and not enough on other characters and Powers himself.

Personally, I find Powers, as a caricature, terribly amusing, at a low consumption level. After about five minutes, I find myself wanting to tear my hair out. The problem I had with the first film is that it was like a Saturday Night Live skit that was too long. (A common criticism.) Nevertheless, I find Powers so interesting, I'll probably see the film anyway.

Ah, good old Scientific Triumphalism! I thought it had mostly died out in this cynical age, but apparantly there are still some proponents.

You write:

Science is not a destination; it's not an Answer. Science is a means of travelling, so that you can find your own answers. Science is a journey.

Actually, science is not a means for finding your own answers. It is a means for everyone to come up with the same answers. Thus the need for testing and independant verification of results.

And in reality, while those who do science can be said to be on some sort of Journey Toward Truth, the rest of the folks who are not part of the scientific priesthood are supposed to "journey" by simply soaking up the popularized consensus of currently-fashionable theories, and then treating this popularization as "true" and somehow meaning something (until scientific fashion changes, and there's a new "truth" that one would be "ignorant" to not take seriously).

But yet, time and again new knowledge surfaces that directly contradicts a firmly entrenched religious dogma. The earth is round, the sun is the center of the solar system, the universe is older than 6000 years.

I don't know what religion you're referring to, unless it's a caricature of some flavor of Fundamentalist Christianity. Yes, you can find some (not all) Fundamentalists who will argue that a young-earth, literal 7x24-hour Creation is dogma. This has never been so for the majority of Christianity. In Catholicism, Orthodoxy, mainline Protestantism, and even much of Fundamentalism, none of the things you mention as "dogma" are, in fact, held as dogma.

The defining dogmas of Christianity are hardly secret, and are most completely summarized in the Nicene Creed. Here are the relevant lines from the Creed:

We believe in one God
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

Hmm. Nothing in there about the earth being flat vs. round, or what revolves around what, or how long ago the Father did all of this.

Of course, in the spirit of scientific objectivity and inquiry, I expect you to not simply take my word for this, but to do your own investigation into the truth of this matter, and discover what is and is not dogma within Christianity. And, of course, to revise your opinion based upon the data you uncover that might contradict your presuppositions and prejudices. But I won't hold my breath in the meantime.

Science, on the other hand, discards the arrogance of religion. There is no dogma in science.

You then contradict yourself utterly by listing some pretty arrogant dogmas.

All things are knowable.

This is a humble attitude? As compared to the arrogance of saying "my reason is flawed and finite; I need Divine help to make sense of myself and the mysteries of life." You must mean different things by the words "humble" and "arrogant" than I'm used to.

Knowledge is colorblind

While I agree with this statement, I don't agree with the subtle ad hominem. Racism is not inherent to Christianity. "Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all." (Colossians 3:11, RSV) Our saints, martyrs, and theologians have been of every race and color since the beginning of Christianity. Nor has science somehow magically been free of racism. Examples here are numerous, and the obvious one in this century invokes Godwin's Law, so I won't mention it.

The sense of wonder at the universe that you describe the the cornerstone of science! How great and wonderful is the universe! How great and wonderful the journey to try and understand it!

Indeed! It's so great that even a rationalist can hardly help but get caught up in it. :^)

I am mystified, however, by the idea that the "scientific" way of looking at the universe as a meaningless object that just happened to happen, and our understanding of that universe as a journey leading nowhere, should enhance one's sense of wonder, whilst the religious perspective that the journey has a destination, and that this universe did not simply happen, but is the work of a great Artist, would decrease one's sense of wonder at the marvelous world around us.

But scientists, who ought to know
Assure us that it must be so.
Oh, let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about.
-- Hilaire Belloc

I don't agree with Katz on many issues, but I almost always enjoy reading his work because it's substantive enough to make me think about issues I might not have considered.

I was disappointed with the article in the Village Voice because it didn't do that for me. While my experiences in high school weren't as bad as many of Katz' correspondents, I refuse to have my own sour memories and mild but still perhaps too-lingering resentment caricatured like I'm in a John Hughes film.

There are sick people out there. What are we going to do about it? Try to "profile" them so we can head them off, and catch mostly well-adjusted (or at least non-threatening) people in the process? Pretend to restrict access to media (when does an 'R' rating actually stop a 16-year-old)? Pretend to restrict access to firearms? Hasn't society learned yet? There are no easy answers, but it's a good step in the right direction to just start being nice to each other.

The Hellmouth series didn't solve the problem, and I don't think that's really what it was for. It gave me an important insight, though. The system is not merely damaged; it's broken. Katz is significant simply because he opened a discussion on a large scale that didn't previously exist, and perhaps, by opening that discussion, he has contributed to helping thousands or millions of people realise they're not alone. Jane Dark didn't seem to be blaming guns (or worse, pictures of guns), so it's all the more frustrating that on so many levels, she seems to have missed the point.

Humans are not constrained to finite compassion. We can care about white, middle-class, teenage boys and still care about malnourished children around the world. They're both symptoms indicitave of broken systems, that is, sets of values that cannot survive in a world that's changing as rapidly as ours. Ms. Dark's article is a symptom, too, that the problem is more pervasive than we might've hoped. It's my responsibility--my moral obligation--as an adult that survived at least one of those situations (hint: I had plenty of food), to try to fix things. I have accepted that most of my attempts will fail. That's okay. I don't have to be successful every time--just once will do.

The problem with Jar-Jar, oh "Hero With a Thousand Faces" student, is not one of design but of implementation.

Jar-Jar is symptomatic of the biggest problem that plagues "The Phantom Menace":
Unlike "A New Hope", the characters are not "archetypes" as you suggest, but caricatures. The essential mythological qualities of each character are developed out of proportion to and at the expense of any normal character development which is generally referred to as "depth".

Jar-Jar is not just an outsider. He is instead the total inverse of the "insider". He is annoying because he is contrived to be an outsider in every possible way, which make him completely unbelievable.


As for the ladies' favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle:
I believe Leonardo couldn't possibly be as damaging to the series as Jar-Jar. However, he is as likely to demonstrate a complete inability to act in the big part as was the lovely and (otherwise) talented Natalie Portman.

While she may be the finest Hollywood actress to grace the silver screen since Audrey Hepburn, in "The Phantom Menace" Miss Portman's acting stank like a river of pig vomit. This is the problem with populating the new Star Wars series with "fine Hollywood actors". These actors are accustomed to playing parts in which it is their characters that make the story interesting; in Star Wars it is the story that makes the characters interesting.

It takes a mature actor (e.g. Liam Neeson, Alec Guiness) or one who has not yet been spoiled by acting in parts where the entire story centers on the development of his or her character (e.g. Harrison Ford, Mark Hammil) to make a two dimensional character (like those in all the Star Wars movies) interesting enough to watch.

As opposed to the original trilogy being heavily biased against females, in case you hadn't noticed?

Has a lot to do with why women, even those who otherwise like sci-fi, don't generally seem to get into the whole SW thing. It's certainly why I've always liked Star Trek better than Star Wars!
*shrug*

And as for "religion," it's not a religion. It's a bad caricature of most of the world's major religions, all rolled into one. Not that this is stopping people from scrolling pagan groups with nonsense about "the Dark Side" at the moment. *sigh*

I'll be much happier when this fuss dies down.

"for him to infringe on my freedom to call it anything I want irks me."

Thanks to the liberal, open-minded scheme that GNU utilities are distributed under you can call it _anything_you_like. You are not being prevented from calling it_anything_you_like. RMS is merely stating his viewpoint that more credit should be given to the GNU project. You are insisting that HE capitulates to what YOU want to call the system that you run every day. To stridently attack someone for stating their viewpoint, as you do in this post, belies your claim to love freedom. Or perhaps its just YOUR freedom that you care about?
Do you agree that there is a move afoot to submerge the "political" ideals of the FSF underneath a welter of new acronyms that are more "friendly" to business? Do you agree that there is a chance that the structure of the programming community could develop in very different ways depending on which ideals have hegemony?
I was particularly irritated by your post because the very things that you accuse RMS of are embodied in your own post. Further, it follows on from a particularly trite and irritating article that expresses conservative shibboleths: the idea that ANY debate over language is "political correctness" and that this is in itself a bad thing; the idea that one can label those that see the world in a different way as "political" and that they are therefore "extreme". All these merely add up to saying "stop disagreeing with me, shut up and let me win". RMS is caricatured frequently and freely whenever his views are discussed. It doesn't matter if any of these characterizations are based in fact, all that matters is the logical correctness or otherwise of the arguments. I put it to you that to have contributed such a huge chunk of the distributions that we use and to receive no overt recognition of this is insulting and demeaning to RMS and all of the FSF programmers and writers.
Anyway brother, live wild and free in the programming Utopia created for you by other people, but whatever you do don't lose sight of the fact that there is a history to it and that
there will be a future which depends on what you
believe.

A teenager's #1 modus operandi is to define the self. Perhaps she comes up with a definition of herself by herself but she needs interaction on a personal and familiar level with others to enforce her own view of herself. In a freshman class of 60 (like mine was), you pretty quickly learn about everyone as individuals...it's much harder to categorize them as simply cheerleader or class-officer-geek if you have to interact with them on a personal level 7 hours a day. You're bound to see more of their idiosyncracies and they become individuals to you, whether you like them or not.

In a school of 1800 you have 460 in your freshman class...there's no WAY you're going to learn about each one by name and individual personality. They are a sea of faces to you and as such you can invent and make yourself believe just about anything you want about them..."she's rich and all the boys like her; she doesn't have a care in the world"...(which of course is never true).

State of the Art schools are great but not when it means you've got a WalMart size student body. Of course teachers, parents, other students are going to generalize and categorize, b/c that's what we all do when presented with a large group of people that we have to navigate around...

What's the point of a $12M school with state of the art equipment if you're going to just herd the kids in and out? Better there be 4 or 5 state of the art schools with TOTAL enrollment of less than 400 kids in all four classes. But it's cheaper to build one than 5, so therein lies the rub...

If nobody knows you and nobody cares who you are, how hard would it be to kill people you've objectified into caricatures of whom they really are?

My answer is smaller schools with smaller classes where a teen can not only learn but also interact with other teens...not be shuffled around and suffer the humiliation of no one knowing who you are.

---diva

"The situation is somewhat like trying to explain what a computer does by playing with the GUI, but no clue about the implementation levels underneath. There would be a lot of guesses you would have to make, and a substantial number would likely be wrong. "

Very good. A good reverse engineer wouldn't make unsubstantiated guesses, though. You don't *have* to make any guesses, although in order to make any sort of useful model tentative inferences would be necessary.

A good reverse engineer would figure out a great deal about the internals of the computer by strategic inputs and measured outputs. he wouldn't know everything for certain, but given a good amount of time and freedom with that computer he could construct a very good model.

reverse engineering is a fine metaphor for psychology. the point is, it would be very nice to know exactly how memory works in every detail. but we hardly know anything right now, and will most likely never know *everything.* in the meantime, we can construct good working models from the information that is available to us.

incomplete information should cause us to approach the problem with caution, not just throw up our hands and say "we can't make any psychological statements until we know every last detail of how the brain works."

That said, coming up with post hoc evolutionary stories explaining why X, Y, and Z news items happened definitely smacks of silliness. the stories can't be verified empirically at all.
that's the weakness of considering people (or their behavior, or their minds) from an evolutionary perspective.
the strength lies in building theory. based on the premise that people evolved, and based on information about the environment they evolved in, you can make useful (and testable) inferences about how people work.

the idea that evolutionary psychology mainly consists of a lot of post hoc storytelling that immediately explains mysteries of human behavior is a caricature and a straw man. evolutionary thinking is just as essential to the study of human behavior as it is to the study of squirrel behavior. it simply requires more care.

>'Fair use' is a constitutionally protected right. >I happen to think the parodies in Mad magazine >(et al) blow chunks. But that doesn't alter the >fundamental right folks have to 'steal' material >from others and warp it.

Therein lies your misperception. You put stealing and "stealing" under the same roof. The fact of the matter is simple. The person who created "Dilbert-Hole" comics directly stole- he downloaded the strips off of The Dilbert Zone and then chop-shopped them with GIMP or Photoshop or something. That is direct theift and is what he got nailed for. On the other hand, MAD Magazine (et al), "steal." They take pop-culture images, draw them in caricature, and crack jokes about them.

There's the difference. See it? When you caricature with your own "marks," you're creating something that is legally original. When you chop-shop the works of others, you're in for it.

Tell you what. Why don't you go get a KMFDM CD collection, sample it, and put together a song called "Suck my Cock, German Whores?" Make it funny and offensive, but not your own work, and not as a poke at KMFDM.

Wax-Trax Records would be sending you a letter as soon as they heard.

Here's what I just wrote to every email address I could find on Al Gore's web page:

..................
WHOA! STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING, and pay attention.

I just saw your website and I want to clarify something for you.

First, I'm doing this as a registered Democrat in a place with a stauch Republican machine firmly in place.

Second, please notice the email addresses above that I'm cc:-ing to.

The multimedia volunteer appeal is appropriate for a political campaign. The open source code appeal is NOT. Apparently, some nitwit party ideology wonk has decided that open source was somehow the same kind of ideological territory, ripe for exploitation. Wrong-o. First of all, any kind of "open source code" that a political campaign could use for its purposes is already available. But your webpage's appeal for "source code" without any PROGRAMMING objective being articulated is like me telling my students, "write something."

The open source software movement can not be colonized or appropriated to your parochial, political purposes. Open source is a "gift culture." Party politics is not. It's that simple. Politics is about power AND money being put to work to either help or control people. But any "open source" software given to the Democrats would, BY LOGICAL NECESSITY have to be given also to the Republicans and Reform and Green and Socialist and Little-Green-Men parties. That FACT of the open source movement is what makes your appeal so patently absurd.

The fact is, the very people who are in a position to know about open source and in a position to send you some are much, much too savvy to send you so much as a desktop icon.

Already, the talk among the open source community is OVERWHELMINGLY negative and skeptical and hostile about your "open source" appeal. They find it hilarious for its dimwittedness. You've made the campaign look absolutely foolish to the very people you'd wish to attract. The open source movement can't be harnessed for your purposes. It's bigger and more cosmopolitan and more radical and more humane than your mother could ever hope you'd become when you ever grow up.

By all means, do the multimedia thing. (You'll be lucky if you do not receive hoax material, after this faux pas.)

But pull the source code thing off the page now.

For crying out loud, that doofus from Tennessee is being caricatured for claiming to have had a leading role in development of the Internet. Institutional political power can NEVER control or harness hacker power. The merest chance of repeating or reinforcing that caricature should make your blood run cold. And you've gone and done it. AGAIN.

And I'm SYMPATHETIC to keeping the Democratic Party as a meaningful expression of American principles. And if Al gets the nomination, I'll be sympathetic to his cause, BUT NOT UN-AMBIVALENTLY SO, because I fear he's never had an original idea, but is only the mouthpiece of a machine that is more concerned with trendiness than with actually understanding real trends.

The whole bunch of you need to pull your heads out, NOW!

And if I get an email "form-letter" from any of you, you can all kiss my vote and my ass goodbye. I am challenging you to THINK about what you're doing. I have a doctorate degree that I COULD use to do you some good, but you can bet I'd take you to school first.

Social Darwinism. I'll trust you to be fair and consistent and also advocate zero subsidies for failed savings and loans, failed derivatives trades, and failed Third World loans -- often the result of an irresponsibility far worse than that of any ghetto-dwelling caricature. In practice, that sort of fairness hasn't happened; while there have been scattered cases of babies dying as a result of reduced subsidies for "welfare mothers" (I promise you that I'm not being hysterical when I say that; the combination of cuts and increased red tape has made it hard to get proper nutrition and medical care in some locales), there's still the mantra of "too big to fail" when it comes to derivatives snafus and bad Eastern European and Third World debt.

We would NOT "certainly have implosions in third world countries" without IMF bailouts.

I think places like Jamaica would have gone nuts; however horrible the IMF "cure" was, it more or less worked in those days. Paraguay isn't looking so good these days; maybe they're "too small to count". But I wasn't referring to the IMF -- I meant the taxpayer-funded bailouts of banks that invested (and lost) in the Third World. I think those are two separate issues, though I could be wrong.

--

I think the main influence for this argument is creationism and science in general.. religious groups have often considered science and furthering of development to be 'evil' as it detracts from creationism, i.e. that the earth was here a long time before humans were, and that the bible may not be wholly right.

By saying 'religious' he means someone who is more interested in staying true to their beliefs than looking at the world around them, while by scientific you would think the opposite - someone who is more interested in discovering the world around them than paying attention to what people may strongly believe in.

Tim O'Reilly's position that morality is incompatible with science is a breathtakingly unpleasant and dishonest position. Science may guide you on the consequences of particular behaviour, but it can't tell you which consequences are desirable or what behaviour is acceptable. O'Reilly caricatures all attempts to advocate ethical behaviour as religious posturing - as if all atheists are bound to act amorally.

When he argues that free software should be "teted in the marketplace", he doesn't feel the slightest need to justify his belief that this will lead to consequences in the common good; whatever consequences emerge, they will be good simply because they're the ones blessed by the magic market, even if it might seem to those who don't have faith in the market that they require unethical behaviour from the participants. So who's got religion now?

How he can pretend to imagine that his position and RMS's are not so different when moral arguments are at the heart of RMS's stance is beyond me. It's almost enough to turn me into a fundamentalist Stallmanist.
--

Yeah, Starship Troopers was hilarous, a volontary caricature of sci-fi/war films as well as teen-movies (especially the beginning in school). I can't imagine how some people were stupid enough to take the film seriously. I guess some people don't have that much sense of humor...

"Profit is not evil" you say. And how true this is. As you rightly point out it is merely an abstracted measure of something else, in this case "how well you're doing". Unfortunately in focussing on an ill-formed caricature of the objections that many have to big-business you elide some of the important points of these arguments. Your rant in favour of "free-market economics" ignores the fact that profits which measure how-well-you're-doing can be based on BAD things or GOOD things. BAD things (to define my terms) include profiting off other people starving, getting sick, having to do unpleasant things (like sexual or physical prostitution). So if one merely applies your pollyannaish definitions that refuse to look at the actual results of the mechanisms of profit then one might feel as you do that everything in the garden is rosy. But then you're not the one that is coping with the toxins produced from the manufacture of your PC and you didn't slave in a factory to produce the McDonald's Happy Toy which is probably cutely adorning your PC. (Or maybe you do pay some of the environmental price in Windsor). Anyway this nasty reply is motivated by your patronizing assumption that "people don't understand that profits aren't bad, oh they are so stupid, why can't they see it's a measure" rant. Perhaps you would like to step back and assume that RMS is not the "idealist utopian" who is pitted against the "pragmatic utilitarian". Perhaps you would like, for the sake of argument, to see what happens if you follow the idea that particular systems tend to evolve to particular classes of outcomes. You make the interesting assumption that freedom can be something that is not "all or nothing" or "COMPLETE". Isn't that like being a little bit pregnant or half dead? In this same paragraph you talk about RMS having a moral view that is not "economically justified". Freedom does not need economic justification, it is an end in itself and as soon as it is forgotten as the primary motivation for the Linux community then the profit-mongers instead of being partially useful symbionts and occasional parasites will be farmers herding the user sheep for their own gain. You buy completely into the false dichotomy of "utilitarian" versus "idealistic". Sometimes idealism is utilitarian and pragmatic.

The Court of Appeals of Paris is fining altern.org 405,000 Francs in damages on behalf of Estelle Halladay, because one of the sites that altern.org hosts had nude caricatures of her, originally published in the magazine Voici. Valentine Lacambre, the provider of altern.org is being blamed in this lawsuit, not the author of the web site.

Last December, in another lawsuit, the ISP Le Village was sued over a webpage featuring gory pictures from horror films. Estelle Halladay's lawyer, said that the provider of altern.org is as responsible for altern.org's content as the owner of newspaper would be. Jacques Bitoun, a lawyer specialising in new technologies, said that the provider must check over the content of their websites, and take action when necessary.

Providers, alarmed by this lawsuit, point out that it is impossible to control all the member pages. They point out that anyone can post anything, and the simplicity of doing this and the huge number of providers makes such control impossible. Michel Mayer, owner of the web host Multimania, which currently has 70,000 members and gains about 300 per day, said providers cannot be held responsible for the sites they host, because members can change the content at any time, so it is financially and humanly impossible to control it all. "If I had to control all the new pages on my site," says Lacambre, "I would [rather?] die."

The condemnation of altern.org is suprising. Admittedly, two providers were sued in 1996 because illegal images were found on discussion forums that they hosted. But, since then, the situation has calmed down: the majority of web hosts have set up strict anti-porn charters, and have removed pornographical, pedophilical, and anti-governmental sites. Besides, Valentine Lecambre removed the images of Estella Halladay before her lawsuit in April of 1998. Before this suit, when a lawsuit over questionable content was brought about, the host was not blamed, and, instead, helped the legal authorities in locating the member who's site is in question. Such happened to Michel Mayer, over a site that illegally posted music.

For the moment, Valentine Lecambre has denied any new members from joining altern.org. A petition for the reversal of the Court of Appeal's decision has been put online on the Web. Iris Association has called for a "huge international mobilization" over this case. And, according to Gilles Gavez, there are "more than twenty other sites" where you can get these pictures.

Sorry for any errors in this translation. Please support altern.org, as I also heve a web site there. The member who's site is in question should be held responsible, not the provider.

1. How much more sophisticated and carefully thought-out and well-articulated his philosophy is, compared to many other people's caricatures of it, and
   
2. How hard he was to deal with