They certainly are greedy, (as are all businesses) but they acquired their position by developing products their customers want and marketing them effectively. They are in essence being punished for their success, for being "too competitive, and making "too much" money.
You didn't read Jackson's "findings of fact" paper, did you? MS are most certainly not merely being punished for being too successful. It is probably true that Sun, Netscape, etc. would happily have done all the same things that Microsoft has done, were they in a position to do so, but that doesn't justify Microsoft.
In general, I agree that Katz is a windbag, but for once in his life, this time he got it right.
Choose your employer carefully
on
NetSlaves
·
· Score: 1
I work in Silicon Valley as a software engineer. I know there are a lot of people in the Valley who will identify with the portraits in this book, but I'm not one of them. I don't feel exploited, overworked, underappreciated, etc. Probably one reason for this is that engineers tend to be treated a little better, on average, than QA, MIS, or customer support people. But I think the principal reason is that I've learned to be careful about choosing the people I work for. When I first interviewed at my present company, I came away thinking, "Nice, intelligent people" more than "This place is going to be the next (insert some huge corporation's name here)." Of course, I wouldn't have signed on if I'd thought their business plan was loony, or if they weren't offering decent stock options, but the quality of the people was as important to me as the business details.
It also helps that I'm no longer in my twenties. When you're first getting started in a career, you don't have much to recommend you other than talent (not yet fully developed) and a willingness to work hard. So you have to work hard unless somebody like Jim Clark hand-picks you to be the next-Bill-Gates poster boy for his new company (which is another kind of servitude, albeit a lucrative one). But after you've been around several years and proved yourself (if you manage to do that), you're in a much better position to choose your employers, rather than taking whatever job comes along. You've also had time to learn more about people and the work environment in general, which is helpful in detecting abusive employers in advance (at which point you can either avoid them, as I do, or make a conscious choice to put up with them for a few years in order to achieve some goal of your own, such as pioneering in a new field, becoming filthy rich, or whatever).
What it really comes down to is just that your twenties are a time of apprenticeship, and apprenticeships involve a lot of hard work. This is not unique to the software industry, or to high-tech.
Jon Katz, of course, tends to view all corporate executives as evil exploiters of the common worker. This isn't really true. There are certainly a lot of assholes running companies and working in management, but I think in many cases it's not so much evil and greed as mere incompetence that is the basis of abusive treatment of employees. And there are also some very intelligent, decent people running successful companies. You just have to find them.
It's best to remember that Rob Glaser (CEO, RealNetworks) is an ex-Microsoft man. However much he whines about how they mistreat him now, he plays the game the same way they do, and is fundamentally no different from them.
Imagine the logical extreme... java/javascript ad banners...
I think that would be great. Then I could get rid of ad banners just by disabling Java, which wouldn't be anywhere near as annoying as disabling graphics altogether.
I would love it if all ads on the Web were accompanied by some tag indicating that they were ads. Then you could disable ads directly. Of course, the people buying ad space on web pages wouldn't appreciate that...
actually, a half-competent auditor would tear you to shreds if you tried this "thin" scam on any significant tax liability.
Okay, you seem to know more about this than I do. Can you elaborate on this? It isn't obvious to me how a tax auditor could determine that an offshore company, paying you from a numbered offshore account, is actually just you in disguise.
Real tax avoidance schemes
Is this a minor glitch on your part, or are we not talking about the same thing? Money laundering per se is not a tax-avoidance scheme; in fact, for money to be laundered, you have to pay taxes on it. The point of money laundering is simply to make illegal gains look like legitimate income. (Again, if you disagree, please elaborate.)
find a way to get that cash overseas, without federal knowledge (aka money laundering)
Quibble: Money laundering is not simply getting money out of the country without anyone noticing. Money laundering involves getting it back into the country in such a way that it appears to be legitimate income. This is important if you have a large amount of money derived from illegal activities.
One simple way of laundering money is to get yourself one of these anonymous offshore bank accounts, then create a fictitious offshore company that hires you to perform expensive consulting work. You have really hired yourself, but it's hard to tell that's what has happened, and harder still to prove it. So you then submit work records and bills to the bogus company and get paid. Your income appears to be legitimate. Of course, this means you have to pay income tax on it, but at least you get to keep the rest, and you can pass an IRS audit with flying colors.
This is great for relatively small amounts of money (say, up to a few million). There are much more sophisticated games you can play with things like currency futures trading if you really need to launder massive sums.
There was a really interesting book (now out of print) called Power On Earth by Nick Tosches (New York: Arbor House, c. 1986) which covered the story of the Italian banker Michele Sindona, who was reputed to have ties to the Mafia and, by his own admission, knew some pretty shady characters. At one point in the book, Sindona gives a good overview of what money laundering is (and isn't) and several ways it can be done.
I do not believe I have rejected any model, except for an implicit model that says that there is nothing going on in human sociology that we are unaware of.
Well, by dismissing the conventional view of the world as a "disease" (or symptomatic of one), I would say you are rejecting it. If that is the "implicit model" you are now referring to, and which you seem to acknowledge rejecting, then I think we are in agreement: you are indeed rejecting it.
Nor do I believe that the Reciprocality model is complete - quite the reverse.
True, you do make the point that it is a work-in-progress. I think because you seem so eager to trumpet the great breakthroughs you believe yourself to have reached, I got the impression that you considered the new model to be, if not complete, at least objectively "correct" as far as it currently goes, and theoretically extensible to become a complete, perfect explanation of everything. That may well have been a too-hasty assumption on my part, for which I apologize.
The argument of this posting seems to be that since all is mush, and there is no such thing as reality, no theory or attempt to understand anything can ever be valid.
I don't believe I suggested that. My view, which I did not really go into in my earlier posting, is that no model, including yours, can ever be perfect, and that the closest one can come to "escaping the box" is not to build another box, as you are doing, but to see the merits and demerits of a variety of paradigms, understanding that they are all, at best, only a partial and imperfect explanation of reality as it appears from a particular point of view.
There is in fact an objective reality, and we can get better at seeing it.
Unless one chooses the path of pure solipsism, there is presumably something out there, sure. The problem lies in being able to say anything certain about it, given that you cannot escape the limitations of the human brain and experience reality directly and in totality. Everything you perceive is basically an image created by your brain from the intersection of various sensory inputs, subjected to a variety of preconscious filtering designed by evolution to detect patterns in fragmentary data (which sometimes involves seeing things that aren't there, as when you see a familiar face in a crowd, but then get a better look and realize that it's actually a stranger). This imaged world in the mind is, according to some interpretations, the world of illusion which is called Maya, the Abyss of Hallucinations, and various other names. You can never really escape it, but seeing it for what it is helps to reduce its influence on you. Thus the notion of "perfect seeing" involves not a direct view of objective reality (though, due to semantic confusion, some have claimed that it is), but an understanding of the nature of seeing (and, thereby, an understanding of yourself, since you are not only the thing that sees, but also one of the things that you see, and therefore, just as much a part of the brain-imaged world as anything else).
I remember a wonderful quote of Stephen Hawking's about Schroedinger's Cat. I'll have to paraphrase since I don't have the article anymore (it was in Scientific American a few years ago, as I recall), but he basically said he didn't care whether it was possible in "reality" for a cat to be dead and alive at the same time, because he didn't know anything about "reality". All that concerned him was whether quantum mechanics could be used successfully to predict the outcome of experiments; by that standard, he was quite happy with it.
Claims that it is the mystics that are irrational are not usually backed up [...]
Some mystics are quite clear about their claims to be, not irrational, but beyond rationality. This is what Zen koans are all about, for example.
But as far as I know, Magritte did not endorse the conventional interpretation, and mine does more to explain the abiding, disturbing nature of this painting than the usual one.
This is what is conventionally known as a matter of opinion. I happen to disagree. Since your view, apparently, is that you possess the one objective truth, and mine is that you possess merely an arrogant opinion, there probably isn't too much point in pursuing this part of the discussion.
For one thing, how many schools are going to spend the money on the software and the training?
When I referred to "trained" humans, I just meant someone trained to perform counseling; I wasn't assuming that any Mosaic-specific training was needed beyond skimming the user manual.
How many schools will defer the "decisions" that GDB refers to completely to the software?
Well, let's consider what they use in the absence of Mosaic. Right now there's a counselor, and s/he probably has some written guides (a book or published article) about conducting evaluations of this sort. Now they'll have some software too. Maybe the book will be left on the shelf. The final responsibility for any conclusions reached, and actions taken, will still rest with the counselor and the school, not GDB. All in all, not much difference.
Can the combination of being a Doom player, Anthrax fan and losing your temper in Social Studies class lead to a recommendation for therapy?
Losing your temper in class, all by itself, might be enough, depending what you do. If you attack someone physically or yell something like, "I oughta kill you!", then, sure, you ought to be sent to the school counselor for an evaluation. The presence or absence of Mosaic has no effect on that.
Katz may be assuming the worst [...]
No, I don't think he's just "assuming the worst". I think he's totally out of touch with reality, drifting in a paranoid fantasy world where everything that any authority figure does, good or bad, is tantamount to an Orwellian nightmare. If products like Mosaic were already a standard feature of school counselors' offices, and they decided to stop using them, I seriously suspect that Jon Katz would write a hysterical article about how the fate of non-conformist kids was now going to be left to the individual judgment of biased, unsympathetic counselors, and claiming that expert systems served as a moderating influence on the counselors' determinations. In fact, I think that's probably more true that what he actually wrote.
You're missing the point. If some kid is heard threatening to kill people in school, he'll be sent to a counselor for an evaluation. That's true already, and has been true for a long time. Mosaic doesn't change that. It's just an expert system that suggests further questions to ask based on the answers to previous questions. It does not categorize kids as being "good" or "bad"; it poses no inherent risk to the student's privacy or civil rights. If you think otherwise, please outline your concerns clearly and rationally, without recourse to Jon Katz's paranoid frothing-at-the-mouth or empty rhetoric such as your own final paragraph. Exactly how do you think Mosaic threatens anyone?
Katz, as is his wont, has flown into a paranoid frenzy, his mind full of hysterical visions of every kid with a Marilyn Manson t-shirt being subjected to Orwell's Room 101 treatment. This doesn't really help me to understand the situation, since it reduces the article's signal-to-noise ratio drastically. I had to look elsewhere to even get a basic idea of what Mosaic-2000 really is, since Katz tells us next to nothing about it other than that his teenaged sources (in whose perspective he displays an amazing degree of confidence, considering how oversimplified and us-vs-them the average teenager's worldview is) don't like it.
Not surprisingly, there is a website, www.mosaic2000.com, promoting Gavin de Becker Inc. and its products. The site describes Mosaic-2000 as follows:
"a method for evaluating students who make threats"
This sounds good; they're not suggesting you run all the kids in the school through it to magically find all the killers. Instead, when threats are made, you use the system as an aid in trying to figure out how serious the situation is.
"not a computer program, but rather an evaluation method that is computer-assisted"
This is even better; they're not just asking the machine to evaluate people. Instead, they're using it as one part of a process primarily conducted by humans (trained ones, one hopes).
"MOSAIC suggests to the user which questions are most likely to produce a quality evaluation."
"MOSAIC-2000 does not make decisions; it is a tool that helps school administrators by identifying the areas of inquiry that experts feel will produce the best evaluation of the situation."
It sounds like Mosaic is really just an expert system intended to be used as a guide in a counselor's evaluation.
Are you confusing meditation with intellectual analysis?
There is something amusing about finding myself accused of cluelessness regarding Buddhism from someone who descends to rudeness at the first hint that someone else's interpretations differ from his own.
Having realized some of the limitations of one intellectual model, Carter constructs another model and claims it to be perfect. You would think someone as seemingly conversant with philosophy and mathematics as Carter would not have missed the point of Godel's proof that no system can be both complete and without contradiction. Far from solving the mysteries of the universe, Carter has escaped one cage only to build another and lock himself inside.
His claim that all the great mystics valued rational thought is laughable. I can only wonder who is on his list of great mystics -- most of the classic mystics (Buddha, Lao Tse, and so on) denounced rationality when they bothered to mention it at all.
Some of his examples from art are rather amusing as well. He seems to have totally missed the point of Magritte's "This is not a pipe" -- the point is not that "it might be made of chocolate", but that it is, in the most literal sense, not a pipe, but merely a painting of one.
Despite all this, I may read more of Carter's work. Sometimes even the most glaringly wrong ideas can help you to think a bit more carefully about your own views.
Well, I can recognize Caitlin Kiernan's book in your description of "goth", and certainly I was a bit annoyed by her constant references to angst-ridden '80s rock songs. Despite this, I found it an interesting and well-written book. I'd rather read another Kiernan novel than anything by Poppy Z. Brite. I tried reading a collection of PZB's stories a while back; there was one story (title now forgotten, alas) that I thought was really good, but the rest did little for (or to) me.
The Sandman itself ended with issue #75, where Gaiman left it; it has not been revived. DC's Vertigo imprint has had several Sandman- or Gaiman-related titles since then, some written by Gaiman (Stardust, for example), but mostly by other writers. Surprisingly (perhaps), most of these other writers have been very good in their own right. John Ney Reiber's Books of Magic was wonderful. The Dreaming started out a little unfocused, but got much better once Caitlin R. Kiernan took it over. (Kiernan is also the author of an interesting goth-horror novel, Silk.) Sandman Mystery Theatre was a sort of film noir take on the Golden Age Sandman, who was hinted at very briefly in one of Gaiman's early Sandman stories. There have also been a variety of miniseries, most of them worth reading (particularly Kiernan's The Girl Who Would Be Death).
Overall, I think DC/Vertigo have been quite respectful of Gaiman's universe; they have given other writers room to explore and extend it, but the results have been good enough that I would not say they have been "sharecropping" it or merely "exploiting" it.
They also like honest compliments, so if you touch the back of her hand and it makes you feel all warm inside, go ahead and say, "Touching the back of your hand makes me feel all warm inside."
I'm having difficulty imagining a woman who would feel comfortable hearing something like that from a man she wasn't already seriously involved with. If you say something like this to a woman you've just met, she'll probably either be seriously creeped out or she'll assume it's a lame pick-up line.
I doubt Roblimo's article is really going to help anyone do better with women. You don't improve your social skills by reading about them. You just have to get out there and relate to real people and learn from your experiences.
Jon Katz seems to think that a "free country" is one in which you are free to do absolutely anything you want -- anything Jon Katz approves of, at least. By this standard, there has never been, and never will be, a free country, so it's not a very useful definition. (It is, however, typical of Katz's black-and-white thinking.)
Freedom always has limits, and there will always be debate over what those limits should be. This is part of what being a free country is all about.
Katz's examples of current "censorship" are rather lame, though, again, typical of him.
The issue at the Brooklyn Museum is not whether art that some people find offensive should be forbidden, but whether it is appropriate for it to be displayed under (partial) government sponsorship, and in a government-owned building. This is a legitimate topic for debate, since the government is, in theory, representative of the people, and people don't like having their tax money support things that mock their most cherished beliefs. Being mocked is one thing, but being forced to pay for it is another matter. (Katz, in a typical display of rhetorical dishonesty, gives the impression that Mayor Giuliani is the only person offended by the exhibit, which is, of course, not the case.)
Personally, I am not offended by the exhibit, and have no opinion on its merit as art, but I would prefer that government get out of the arts-funding business precisely because it leads to controversies like this that waste (IMHO) public-debate and media time that could better be spent on more significant issues.
The Ventura and Buchanan examples are even more lame. Membership in a political party is not a Constitutional right; a party is a voluntary entity that exists to provide an organizational focus and a sense of belonging for people of more-or-less common political views. If Ventura and Buchanan are being asked, by some contingent of their respective parties, to leave, all that means is that some of their fells Reformists/Republicans can't stand being associated with them anymore. (Considering Buchanan's long history of race-baiting, I'm glad that at least some Republicans can't stand him anymore!) Whether they or their critics should leave the party is beside the point; either way, no one's rights are being violated. Being kicked out of the Reform Party is nowhere near as dangerous to one's well being as, say, being kicked out of the Communist Party in the People's Republic of China.
Peter Singer's case is unfortunate, but the need for guards at his lectures has nothing to do with whether the US is a free country. Even in a free country (for reasonable definitions of the term), antagonizing extremists can get you killed. That he should find himself under attack by his own university administration merely demonstrates, yet again, this thing that Jon Katz just doesn't understand: that freedom is never absolute. Eventually the world will get to a point where it can consider ideas such as Singer's baby-euthanization program, but right now we're having enough trouble just settling the abortion issue. If we as a nation are still unable to agree what right to life, if any, the unborn have, then this is not the time to suggest that some babies be killed after birth. I think, ultimately, Singer is just being criticized (and threatened, unfortunately) for trying to start a debate before its time (though I'm sure his critics don't think of it that way).
If you have lots of money to begin with, you can make a whole lot more, regardless.
Sure. If you want to make a fortune, it helps to have one already. Large amounts of money are typically made as a return on some investment, so having a significant amount of money to invest is a prerequisite.
The real business of technology is in stock market manipulation; the product itself is irrelevant.
I've been in the habit for a few years now of referring to any new Jim Clark company as "another Jim Clark stock scam".
Of course, it isn't really fair to single out Jim Clark, because there is a whole industry out there of people who create companies to cash in on an IPO or acquisition and then bail out, and who have realized that it's less work to create the illusion of a strong company than to actually build one.
A sub-genre that is a little over 15 years old is unlikely to be post-itself anytime soon.
Why not? The '60s new wave didn't last fifteen years. It didn't even last ten years.
If anything, I would say that this is still pre-whatever the future of sci-fi is.
Sure, but that's always the case.
Anyways, the most successful Cyberpunk story of this year was definetly the Matrix, which does not fit into the definition of his post- class by a longshot.
Three points:
(1) Hollywood is always several years behind written SF; otherwise, the Neuromancer movie would have been made in the '80s.
(2) The development of a new genre doesn't prevent anyone from continuing to work in older styles, so even if The Matrix were a novel (there's probably a novelization of it, but I mean an original novel) instead of a movie, it still wouldn't prove your point.
I don't think that it is "correct" or "incorrect", necessarily, to distinguish between cyberpunk and what Person wants to call "post-cyberpunk". It's just a different slice with the analytical scalpel, valuable if it helps to clarify the differences between the things that fall to the left of the slice and those that fall to the right.
I think Person makes a valid distinction between the concerns of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk. While post-cyberpunk is certainly an extension or continuation of cyberpunk, it seems in many ways more mature, more willing to construct plausible futures and characters. Perhaps this is simply because the original cyberpunk writers have gotten older and now want to write about believable people instead of just fantasising about the future of technology. Nevertheless, it is a significant change in the genre's concerns.
'80s cyberpunk always seemed to want the reader to be aware that they were reading something new, different, and exciting, whereas newer books seem to accept the technology behind cyberpunk simply as part of the world -- virtual reality and vast computer networks may be important to the story, but the books don't focus on them so obsessively anymore. In a way, this makes "post-cyberpunk" seem as much an update of older mainstream SF as a continuation of cyberpunk, or an integration of cyberpunk back into the mainstream.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't read Jackson's "findings of fact" paper, did you? MS are most certainly not merely being punished for being too successful. It is probably true that Sun, Netscape, etc. would happily have done all the same things that Microsoft has done, were they in a position to do so, but that doesn't justify Microsoft.
In general, I agree that Katz is a windbag, but for once in his life, this time he got it right.
It also helps that I'm no longer in my twenties. When you're first getting started in a career, you don't have much to recommend you other than talent (not yet fully developed) and a willingness to work hard. So you have to work hard unless somebody like Jim Clark hand-picks you to be the next-Bill-Gates poster boy for his new company (which is another kind of servitude, albeit a lucrative one). But after you've been around several years and proved yourself (if you manage to do that), you're in a much better position to choose your employers, rather than taking whatever job comes along. You've also had time to learn more about people and the work environment in general, which is helpful in detecting abusive employers in advance (at which point you can either avoid them, as I do, or make a conscious choice to put up with them for a few years in order to achieve some goal of your own, such as pioneering in a new field, becoming filthy rich, or whatever).
What it really comes down to is just that your twenties are a time of apprenticeship, and apprenticeships involve a lot of hard work. This is not unique to the software industry, or to high-tech.
Jon Katz, of course, tends to view all corporate executives as evil exploiters of the common worker. This isn't really true. There are certainly a lot of assholes running companies and working in management, but I think in many cases it's not so much evil and greed as mere incompetence that is the basis of abusive treatment of employees. And there are also some very intelligent, decent people running successful companies. You just have to find them.
It's best to remember that Rob Glaser (CEO, RealNetworks) is an ex-Microsoft man. However much he whines about how they mistreat him now, he plays the game the same way they do, and is fundamentally no different from them.
I think that would be great. Then I could get rid of ad banners just by disabling Java, which wouldn't be anywhere near as annoying as disabling graphics altogether.
I would love it if all ads on the Web were accompanied by some tag indicating that they were ads. Then you could disable ads directly. Of course, the people buying ad space on web pages wouldn't appreciate that...
One simple way of laundering money is to get yourself one of these anonymous offshore bank accounts, then create a fictitious offshore company that hires you to perform expensive consulting work. You have really hired yourself, but it's hard to tell that's what has happened, and harder still to prove it. So you then submit work records and bills to the bogus company and get paid. Your income appears to be legitimate. Of course, this means you have to pay income tax on it, but at least you get to keep the rest, and you can pass an IRS audit with flying colors.
This is great for relatively small amounts of money (say, up to a few million). There are much more sophisticated games you can play with things like currency futures trading if you really need to launder massive sums.
There was a really interesting book (now out of print) called Power On Earth by Nick Tosches (New York: Arbor House, c. 1986) which covered the story of the Italian banker Michele Sindona, who was reputed to have ties to the Mafia and, by his own admission, knew some pretty shady characters. At one point in the book, Sindona gives a good overview of what money laundering is (and isn't) and several ways it can be done.
I remember a wonderful quote of Stephen Hawking's about Schroedinger's Cat. I'll have to paraphrase since I don't have the article anymore (it was in Scientific American a few years ago, as I recall), but he basically said he didn't care whether it was possible in "reality" for a cat to be dead and alive at the same time, because he didn't know anything about "reality". All that concerned him was whether quantum mechanics could be used successfully to predict the outcome of experiments; by that standard, he was quite happy with it.
Some mystics are quite clear about their claims to be, not irrational, but beyond rationality. This is what Zen koans are all about, for example. This is what is conventionally known as a matter of opinion. I happen to disagree. Since your view, apparently, is that you possess the one objective truth, and mine is that you possess merely an arrogant opinion, there probably isn't too much point in pursuing this part of the discussion.You're missing the point. If some kid is heard threatening to kill people in school, he'll be sent to a counselor for an evaluation. That's true already, and has been true for a long time. Mosaic doesn't change that. It's just an expert system that suggests further questions to ask based on the answers to previous questions. It does not categorize kids as being "good" or "bad"; it poses no inherent risk to the student's privacy or civil rights. If you think otherwise, please outline your concerns clearly and rationally, without recourse to Jon Katz's paranoid frothing-at-the-mouth or empty rhetoric such as your own final paragraph. Exactly how do you think Mosaic threatens anyone?
Not surprisingly, there is a website, www.mosaic2000.com, promoting Gavin de Becker Inc. and its products. The site describes Mosaic-2000 as follows:
This sounds good; they're not suggesting you run all the kids in the school through it to magically find all the killers. Instead, when threats are made, you use the system as an aid in trying to figure out how serious the situation is. This is even better; they're not just asking the machine to evaluate people. Instead, they're using it as one part of a process primarily conducted by humans (trained ones, one hopes). It sounds like Mosaic is really just an expert system intended to be used as a guide in a counselor's evaluation.In summary: typical Katz paranoia.
There is something amusing about finding myself accused of cluelessness regarding Buddhism from someone who descends to rudeness at the first hint that someone else's interpretations differ from his own.
His claim that all the great mystics valued rational thought is laughable. I can only wonder who is on his list of great mystics -- most of the classic mystics (Buddha, Lao Tse, and so on) denounced rationality when they bothered to mention it at all.
Some of his examples from art are rather amusing as well. He seems to have totally missed the point of Magritte's "This is not a pipe" -- the point is not that "it might be made of chocolate", but that it is, in the most literal sense, not a pipe, but merely a painting of one.
Despite all this, I may read more of Carter's work. Sometimes even the most glaringly wrong ideas can help you to think a bit more carefully about your own views.
Well, I can recognize Caitlin Kiernan's book in your description of "goth", and certainly I was a bit annoyed by her constant references to angst-ridden '80s rock songs. Despite this, I found it an interesting and well-written book. I'd rather read another Kiernan novel than anything by Poppy Z. Brite. I tried reading a collection of PZB's stories a while back; there was one story (title now forgotten, alas) that I thought was really good, but the rest did little for (or to) me.
Overall, I think DC/Vertigo have been quite respectful of Gaiman's universe; they have given other writers room to explore and extend it, but the results have been good enough that I would not say they have been "sharecropping" it or merely "exploiting" it.
I'm having difficulty imagining a woman who would feel comfortable hearing something like that from a man she wasn't already seriously involved with. If you say something like this to a woman you've just met, she'll probably either be seriously creeped out or she'll assume it's a lame pick-up line.
I doubt Roblimo's article is really going to help anyone do better with women. You don't improve your social skills by reading about them. You just have to get out there and relate to real people and learn from your experiences.
Freedom always has limits, and there will always be debate over what those limits should be. This is part of what being a free country is all about.
Katz's examples of current "censorship" are rather lame, though, again, typical of him.
The issue at the Brooklyn Museum is not whether art that some people find offensive should be forbidden, but whether it is appropriate for it to be displayed under (partial) government sponsorship, and in a government-owned building. This is a legitimate topic for debate, since the government is, in theory, representative of the people, and people don't like having their tax money support things that mock their most cherished beliefs. Being mocked is one thing, but being forced to pay for it is another matter. (Katz, in a typical display of rhetorical dishonesty, gives the impression that Mayor Giuliani is the only person offended by the exhibit, which is, of course, not the case.)
Personally, I am not offended by the exhibit, and have no opinion on its merit as art, but I would prefer that government get out of the arts-funding business precisely because it leads to controversies like this that waste (IMHO) public-debate and media time that could better be spent on more significant issues.
The Ventura and Buchanan examples are even more lame. Membership in a political party is not a Constitutional right; a party is a voluntary entity that exists to provide an organizational focus and a sense of belonging for people of more-or-less common political views. If Ventura and Buchanan are being asked, by some contingent of their respective parties, to leave, all that means is that some of their fells Reformists/Republicans can't stand being associated with them anymore. (Considering Buchanan's long history of race-baiting, I'm glad that at least some Republicans can't stand him anymore!) Whether they or their critics should leave the party is beside the point; either way, no one's rights are being violated. Being kicked out of the Reform Party is nowhere near as dangerous to one's well being as, say, being kicked out of the Communist Party in the People's Republic of China.
Peter Singer's case is unfortunate, but the need for guards at his lectures has nothing to do with whether the US is a free country. Even in a free country (for reasonable definitions of the term), antagonizing extremists can get you killed. That he should find himself under attack by his own university administration merely demonstrates, yet again, this thing that Jon Katz just doesn't understand: that freedom is never absolute. Eventually the world will get to a point where it can consider ideas such as Singer's baby-euthanization program, but right now we're having enough trouble just settling the abortion issue. If we as a nation are still unable to agree what right to life, if any, the unborn have, then this is not the time to suggest that some babies be killed after birth. I think, ultimately, Singer is just being criticized (and threatened, unfortunately) for trying to start a debate before its time (though I'm sure his critics don't think of it that way).
Sure. If you want to make a fortune, it helps to have one already. Large amounts of money are typically made as a return on some investment, so having a significant amount of money to invest is a prerequisite.
I've been in the habit for a few years now of referring to any new Jim Clark company as "another Jim Clark stock scam".
Of course, it isn't really fair to single out Jim Clark, because there is a whole industry out there of people who create companies to cash in on an IPO or acquisition and then bail out, and who have realized that it's less work to create the illusion of a strong company than to actually build one.
Yep. In this case, it's called "growing up". Some people never do. I respect Bruce Sterling for not repeating himself into his grave.
Why not? The '60s new wave didn't last fifteen years. It didn't even last ten years.
If anything, I would say that this is still pre-whatever the future of sci-fi is.
Sure, but that's always the case.
Anyways, the most successful Cyberpunk story of this year was definetly the Matrix, which does not fit into the definition of his post- class by a longshot.
Three points:
(1) Hollywood is always several years behind written SF; otherwise, the Neuromancer movie would have been made in the '80s.
(2) The development of a new genre doesn't prevent anyone from continuing to work in older styles, so even if The Matrix were a novel (there's probably a novelization of it, but I mean an original novel) instead of a movie, it still wouldn't prove your point.
(3) Popularity is irrelevant.
I think Person makes a valid distinction between the concerns of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk. While post-cyberpunk is certainly an extension or continuation of cyberpunk, it seems in many ways more mature, more willing to construct plausible futures and characters. Perhaps this is simply because the original cyberpunk writers have gotten older and now want to write about believable people instead of just fantasising about the future of technology. Nevertheless, it is a significant change in the genre's concerns.
'80s cyberpunk always seemed to want the reader to be aware that they were reading something new, different, and exciting, whereas newer books seem to accept the technology behind cyberpunk simply as part of the world -- virtual reality and vast computer networks may be important to the story, but the books don't focus on them so obsessively anymore. In a way, this makes "post-cyberpunk" seem as much an update of older mainstream SF as a continuation of cyberpunk, or an integration of cyberpunk back into the mainstream.