You done said a mouthful. To whom are corporations accountable? To their shareholders, one share one vote. (Department of the obvious: shares are bought with money, which restricts participation to people who have money, and favors people in proportion to their money.)
To whom are (democratic) governments accountable? To all the people, one person one vote.
Why do corporations exist? To earn money for the shareholders.
Why do governments exist (taking USA constitution wording as exemplar)? "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote
the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
Money-tocracy or democracy? I prefer democracy.
yr frn,
NA
Reminds me of that book. . .
on
The DNA Bomb
·
· Score: 2
Acts of the APostles, about evil phamaceutical companies and Gulf War Syndrome. . .
Sorry, couldn't resist. This whole bio-digital-weapons nexus *is* in fact the actual subject of my nanoscopicly famous novel, so I am more or less on topic . . .
Precisely, and that is why I fear & dread the future. I simply do not comprehend people who say "I hope I live to see the day. .." I think the chances of dystopia are so much greater than the chances of utopia that the ratio is essentially infinite.
NA
Hidden deep in the Cyberiad, a classic tale existential tale that some reviewer once called "Beckettian" (or some such. Beckett, you know, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Malloy Dies, etc).
An inspiration to the framers of the Hofstadter Competition for Computer-Written Novels, as reported in their introduction to the collection Cheap Complex Devices, at http://www.wetmachine.com
I don't take electronic payments because the first two times I tried to set up credit card transactions were a fiasco, with double-billed customers and lost transactions, etc. I don't think anybody got burned but about 10 people almost got burned and I got scared off. Since then others have suggested paypal but I don't have the energy to investigate. Lazy, prudent, chickenshit, call me what you will.
I did do a cross-country tour of sorts late last winter. What a trip. I'll put my trip report on my website, which I plan to update and completely overhaul in about 1 week.
Slow learner department: I am working on the companion book to A of A and hope to have it ready in a few (less than 6?) month's time. Maybe I'll go on another tour when I have 2 or 3 titles to hawk instead of one.
Anybody out there listening who has read and enjoyed my little book, feel fee to write an Amazon review! I appreciate it!
I published my famous geek technothriller Acts of the Apostles myself. It has a geek theme and it's open source in the sense that you can download the first 13 chapters (about.3 of the book). It got a great review here at/. and a better one at geek dot com and so forth. It sells for $15. Nevertheless it ain't exactly building my retirement fund. My point is, geek theme, prominent slasdot review, open source, reasonable price-- and low sales. So I urge caution.
You can get Acts of the Apostles from a few bookstores but not many. (Too much hassle setting up distribution.) So far I've sold about 400 copies from my website. (and I only take check and money order--no electronic payments).
Amazon and fatbrain are my biggest distribution channels. People evidently trust the names. Even though my site links to Softpro, (and not Amazon--I'm trying to give Softpro my business) and even though Softpro is a real live 4-store chain with strong local presences in Colorado and Massachussetts, evidently people prefer to go to Amazon. I've only sold about 150 through Softpro. Amazon don't pay too good, but they are VERY easy to work with. Fatbrain is much more disorganized-- a lot of hassle getting paid-- but they do (eventually) pay better than Amazon. Between Amazon and fatbrain I've sold close to 2K copies. (By the way, although I've sold about 50 copies each through Barnes & Noble and Borders, I don't recommend them to small publishers. They don't care about us. They still list my book under "religion," for Pete's sake.)
In deciding to publish myself, I was inspired by my old friend Tim O'Reilly. I remember when he didn't have enough $$ to get the holes in his shoes repaired, and he was producing "Unix in a Nutshell" on photocopiers and stapling them on his kitchen table, selling them mail-order through tiny ads in "Unix Review" (about 1986 or so). As most/. readers know, "O'Reilly & Associates" is now a publishing giant. (Although I couldn't talk them into doing my book, the blighters!). So obviously Tim & Company either had a better product (no argument here) or more fire & passion to succeed as a publisher (without a doubt). The whole point of this is, it's fun but it sure as hell ain't easy, and unless you have the skill of & determination of somebody like Tim you don't stand a very good chance of coming out in the black.
NA
In an aptly titled little technoparanoid fanatsy called Acts of the Apostles. In which the theme (here's where we hit them over the head with the allegory) is that Silicon Valley is home to technology worship and cults of personality. Throw in some nanotechnology and current events and you could have quite a little page turner! Hey, wait a secone, I'm the protagonist in that novel! I knew it sounded familiar. Don't forget to read the Hemos review! NA
Lem and Mymosh The Self-Begotten
on
Solaris
·
· Score: 1
I saw the Russian movie version on the night in premiered in New York City, 1976, in a 2,000-seat theater. There were, I think, about 20 of us in the audience.
Also be sure to check out the Cyberiad, by Lem, and search out the "Beckett-ian" tale of Mymosh the Self-Begotten. It's where SF meets philosophy, and nobody does it better than Lem.
NA
Yes, I know, he's got a lot of personality flaws. He may infact even be off his rocker. OK, so I concede that. Having lived under Reagan and not died, I know that it is possible for the US to survive a president who is off his rocker. It's long term things that concern me, and Nader's arguments are about long-term consequences of current policy, and I largely agree with him (and with Brin). If anybody else would raise the issues that Nader raisses (or even concede that they exist) I would gladly consider changing my vote. Here are the issues I worry about.
1) It is one world, and on a world wide scale, we do have a pyramid, (not diamonds) and it's getting worse. Substitute "corporations" for "aristocrats" in Brin's mail, and you can update what he says about the 19th century to 21st. Go to Indonesia and see if you don't agree with me. I fear corporations for the same reason that that great old free-marketeer Adam Smith feared them centuries ago, and corporations were much weaker things in those days. I fear that simmering class warfare could get very hot indeed, and it will be a worldwide phenomenon, not a USA-localized thing.
2)The good things that Brin celebrates in our (USA) political environment came about because our democracy has more or less worked. Recent trends that cede our sovereignty to things like WTO threaten our ability to control our own destiny, and indeed are inimicable to democracy in so many ways that I can scarely think about it. Nader and Buchanan are the only candidates who agree with me on this one.
3) Like Dwight Eisenhower, that old lefty, I greatly fear the military-industial complex. Bush and Gore are as one with it.
4) I am very scared that we are evolving into a police state. Every day the "security forces" ask for and recieve more surveillance authority, at the same time that the court swats back the rights of the accused, and at the same time that television celebrates the notion of ceding civil rights in the name of better entertainment ("COPS," "Police Chases," etc, etc.) Therefore I am distraught at the treatment of Nader by the candidates and the Commission on Presidential debates. His exclusion from the Boston debates was worthy of Milosovic, and it was treated with a yawn. (Old timers who were around for Nixon: Can you imagine what a principled person like Eliot Richardson would have done? I cannot imagine that he would have remained silent as Bush and Gore have done). I myself was harrassed and detained by the police at the Boston rally. I am a balding old man who went only to pick up his teenage daughter, not to cause a ruckus, and I was treated worse by arrogant police than I ever was in my travels in Africa. Call me nuts (this is slashdot, I know you'll call me a lot worse than that) but I see signs of fascism wherever I look.
5) I fear the prison-industrial complex, and I fear that as a money-making organism it needs a supply of prisoners, and that is why we have the war on drugs-- to keep poor people (espescially black people) down and in prison. I say this as an old white guy who hasn't smoked a joint in 25 years. I fear the militarization of the war on drugs in south america, because it will consolidate the power of the military-industrial complex and the prison industrial complex.
6) I like Patti Smith and Eddie Vedder.
Thanks,
N.A.
This appears to be a lame attempt at a software-only attempt to implement the "overmind" architecture (AKA "New Gospel") spec'd out in "Vannevar Engleton"'s (Monty Meekman's) long suppressed ACM article of the same name.
I couldn't finish reading it. Looks interesting but all this futuristic stuff makes me very, very jumpy. I think it's the nanobots in my blood sensing their arrival home.
If I had published "Acts of the Apostles" in this format I wouldn't have all those cases of books in my bedroom. On the other hand if I stubbed my toe at night on the vial instead of a cardboard box my entire inventory would soak into the carpet in an instant. NA.
I was at Sun when the NeXT machine came out; in fact I was some manager's brainstorm off-site at a swanky resort (which we got to use because Sun had rented it for board of directors meeting which McNealy had to cancel, and he couldn't get his money back. It was deluxe!). The people at this meeting were responsible for Sun's Object-oreinted software and GUI toolkit.
We got ahold of the Jobs video and the functional specs and tried to decide how to respond. As I recall (this was a long time ago) we came to the decision that the hardware was way overpriced and the disk decision was a fiasco. Also the machine had too little memory. Also Jobs came off as an arrogant jerk, referring to himself as "we" as if he were the Queen of England.
But right then and there we cancelled some software projects, and within a few weeks Sun and NeXT were announcing plans for joint software development.
When faced with a similar problem, here's what I did: 1) Let it fester until I was useless at work; 2) Got downsized; 3) Got contracts to write technical books and half-finished them; 4) Started drinking irresponsibly; 5) Took jobs as warehouseman, construction laborer, and truck driver; 6) Wrote novel about burned out software engineer who (almost?) saves the world (Acts of the Apostles, check it out); 7) Stopped drinking irresponsibly; 8) 7 years later went back to origial profession. Hope this helps, N.A.
I wrote a novel, I published it myself. I put the first 13 chapters on the web ("Acts of the Apostels" at www.wetmachine.com). It took me about 4 years to write it, $12k to print a bunch of copies, and several $$k to format the book and put up my website. Right now the rest of the book isn't online anywhere. It's on a tape in my desk drawer. Call me paranoid. Most people who want the book find it easier to shell out the $$15 for a copy than to rip up another's copy and photocopy it. And "Print-on-demand" books are still a little in the future. I figure I've got a couple of years before a napster-equivalent scan-and-print for books becomes prevalent. When that happens, I'm fucked. In the meantime, would you like to buy a copy?
So after writing my soon-to-be-famous nano-bio-techno-paranoid thriller "Acts of the Apostles" (www.wetmachine.com)(see review by Hemos May/00)in which I basically said (in the words of other/. posters) that the genie cannot be put back in the bottle and that people should maybe be concerned about it, I sent a few notes to the Foresight Institute. Most of these notes were ignored, but I had one "funny" exchange with one of the dudes on the Foresight roster, who told me, basically, that I wasn't qualified to have an opinion. He reached this conclusion because (a) my website violated generally accepted website design principles, (b) I think Ayn Rand is a crackpot Nazi, and (c) I didn't show proper respect for the wise old graybeards of the Foresight Institute. The Foresight Institue and their nonprofit, tax-free "everything is just peachy" ilk really believe that they've got everything under control, and that the rest of us should shut up and let Erik Drexler figure the future out for us. Their belief in the goodness of all this stuff is basically a religious belief. Since they consider themselves eminiently rational scientists, there's nothing that riles them more than to be called religious cultists. Which is why my book is called what it is: it's a pie in the face to the techno-idolatrors. Call me the Roger Moore of the neo-luddites. John Sundman, soon-to-be-famous novelist.
Your analysis agrees with mine. And in the meantime, what I've been doing is going to the PN website five times a day and submitting eloquent commentary using various freemail spam accounts as a return addresses. Samples: 1) Predictive Networks: Bad technology. Bad attitude. Bad motive. Bad consequences. Bad People. 2) To whatever human person may be reading this note: I'm going to bed now. Would you please give our older brother a kiss goodnight for me? 3)Fuck you. Childish, sure, like shooting spitballs at the Deathstar. But who knows? "Lotus Marketplace" was cancelled after the big stink, and this looks a lot worse than that. N.A.
The year that SIGCHI was held in Austin (88? 89?) one of the keynote speakers was a shuttle astronaut. He said that since three systems in the cockpit had been desinged by three different companies with no overall design spec, the shuttle "programmers" had to learn three different obscure languages simly to "fly the bird:" a rudimentary BASIC-like command language, octal, and hex! One of the earliest missions nearly landed in the ocean because of a hex-octal mistake. It was this guy's opinion that the shuttle was as much an ergonomic lab as a zero=gravity, low=space lab. Also, the designers had bolted shut one of the access panels because they were sure nobody would ever need to get into it. One mission was saved only because one of the astronauts had smuggled up a Vise-grip, which was verboten.
Shoot me for BSP, I don't care. The best place to read about social implications of nanotechnology (and brain mapping, and human genome project, and any other technology that you might have read of in Slashdot threads or in Bill Joy's "Wired" article) is in the geeky technothriller "Acts of the Apostles," at http://www.wetmachine.com. (It so happens that I am the protagonist of this novel.)
Slashdot Mirror
To whom are (democratic) governments accountable? To all the people, one person one vote.
Why do corporations exist? To earn money for the shareholders.
Why do governments exist (taking USA constitution wording as exemplar)? "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
Money-tocracy or democracy? I prefer democracy.
yr frn,
NA
Sorry, couldn't resist. This whole bio-digital-weapons nexus *is* in fact the actual subject of my nanoscopicly famous novel, so I am more or less on topic . . .
yr frn,
Precisely, and that is why I fear & dread the future. I simply do not comprehend people who say "I hope I live to see the day. . ." I think the chances of dystopia are so much greater than the chances of utopia that the ratio is essentially infinite.
NA
NA
An inspiration to the framers of the Hofstadter Competition for Computer-Written Novels, as reported in their introduction to the collection Cheap Complex Devices, at http://www.wetmachine.com
NA
I don't take electronic payments because the first two times I tried to set up credit card transactions were a fiasco, with double-billed customers and lost transactions, etc. I don't think anybody got burned but about 10 people almost got burned and I got scared off. Since then others have suggested paypal but I don't have the energy to investigate. Lazy, prudent, chickenshit, call me what you will.
I did do a cross-country tour of sorts late last winter. What a trip. I'll put my trip report on my website, which I plan to update and completely overhaul in about 1 week.
Slow learner department: I am working on the companion book to A of A and hope to have it ready in a few (less than 6?) month's time. Maybe I'll go on another tour when I have 2 or 3 titles to hawk instead of one.
Anybody out there listening who has read and enjoyed my little book, feel fee to write an Amazon review! I appreciate it!
NA
You can get Acts of the Apostles from a few bookstores but not many. (Too much hassle setting up distribution.) So far I've sold about 400 copies from my website. (and I only take check and money order--no electronic payments).
Amazon and fatbrain are my biggest distribution channels. People evidently trust the names. Even though my site links to Softpro, (and not Amazon--I'm trying to give Softpro my business) and even though Softpro is a real live 4-store chain with strong local presences in Colorado and Massachussetts, evidently people prefer to go to Amazon. I've only sold about 150 through Softpro. Amazon don't pay too good, but they are VERY easy to work with. Fatbrain is much more disorganized-- a lot of hassle getting paid-- but they do (eventually) pay better than Amazon. Between Amazon and fatbrain I've sold close to 2K copies. (By the way, although I've sold about 50 copies each through Barnes & Noble and Borders, I don't recommend them to small publishers. They don't care about us. They still list my book under "religion," for Pete's sake.)
In deciding to publish myself, I was inspired by my old friend Tim O'Reilly. I remember when he didn't have enough $$ to get the holes in his shoes repaired, and he was producing "Unix in a Nutshell" on photocopiers and stapling them on his kitchen table, selling them mail-order through tiny ads in "Unix Review" (about 1986 or so). As most /. readers know, "O'Reilly & Associates" is now a publishing giant. (Although I couldn't talk them into doing my book, the blighters!). So obviously Tim & Company either had a better product (no argument here) or more fire & passion to succeed as a publisher (without a doubt). The whole point of this is, it's fun but it sure as hell ain't easy, and unless you have the skill of & determination of somebody like Tim you don't stand a very good chance of coming out in the black.
NA
In an aptly titled little technoparanoid fanatsy called Acts of the Apostles. In which the theme (here's where we hit them over the head with the allegory) is that Silicon Valley is home to technology worship and cults of personality. Throw in some nanotechnology and current events and you could have quite a little page turner! Hey, wait a secone, I'm the protagonist in that novel! I knew it sounded familiar. Don't forget to read the Hemos review! NA
I saw the Russian movie version on the night in premiered in New York City, 1976, in a 2,000-seat theater. There were, I think, about 20 of us in the audience. Also be sure to check out the Cyberiad, by Lem, and search out the "Beckett-ian" tale of Mymosh the Self-Begotten. It's where SF meets philosophy, and nobody does it better than Lem. NA
Yes, I know, he's got a lot of personality flaws. He may infact even be off his rocker. OK, so I concede that. Having lived under Reagan and not died, I know that it is possible for the US to survive a president who is off his rocker. It's long term things that concern me, and Nader's arguments are about long-term consequences of current policy, and I largely agree with him (and with Brin). If anybody else would raise the issues that Nader raisses (or even concede that they exist) I would gladly consider changing my vote. Here are the issues I worry about. 1) It is one world, and on a world wide scale, we do have a pyramid, (not diamonds) and it's getting worse. Substitute "corporations" for "aristocrats" in Brin's mail, and you can update what he says about the 19th century to 21st. Go to Indonesia and see if you don't agree with me. I fear corporations for the same reason that that great old free-marketeer Adam Smith feared them centuries ago, and corporations were much weaker things in those days. I fear that simmering class warfare could get very hot indeed, and it will be a worldwide phenomenon, not a USA-localized thing. 2)The good things that Brin celebrates in our (USA) political environment came about because our democracy has more or less worked. Recent trends that cede our sovereignty to things like WTO threaten our ability to control our own destiny, and indeed are inimicable to democracy in so many ways that I can scarely think about it. Nader and Buchanan are the only candidates who agree with me on this one. 3) Like Dwight Eisenhower, that old lefty, I greatly fear the military-industial complex. Bush and Gore are as one with it. 4) I am very scared that we are evolving into a police state. Every day the "security forces" ask for and recieve more surveillance authority, at the same time that the court swats back the rights of the accused, and at the same time that television celebrates the notion of ceding civil rights in the name of better entertainment ("COPS," "Police Chases," etc, etc.) Therefore I am distraught at the treatment of Nader by the candidates and the Commission on Presidential debates. His exclusion from the Boston debates was worthy of Milosovic, and it was treated with a yawn. (Old timers who were around for Nixon: Can you imagine what a principled person like Eliot Richardson would have done? I cannot imagine that he would have remained silent as Bush and Gore have done). I myself was harrassed and detained by the police at the Boston rally. I am a balding old man who went only to pick up his teenage daughter, not to cause a ruckus, and I was treated worse by arrogant police than I ever was in my travels in Africa. Call me nuts (this is slashdot, I know you'll call me a lot worse than that) but I see signs of fascism wherever I look. 5) I fear the prison-industrial complex, and I fear that as a money-making organism it needs a supply of prisoners, and that is why we have the war on drugs-- to keep poor people (espescially black people) down and in prison. I say this as an old white guy who hasn't smoked a joint in 25 years. I fear the militarization of the war on drugs in south america, because it will consolidate the power of the military-industrial complex and the prison industrial complex. 6) I like Patti Smith and Eddie Vedder. Thanks, N.A.
This appears to be a lame attempt at a software-only attempt to implement the "overmind" architecture (AKA "New Gospel") spec'd out in "Vannevar Engleton"'s (Monty Meekman's) long suppressed ACM article of the same name.
I couldn't finish reading it. Looks interesting but all this futuristic stuff makes me very, very jumpy. I think it's the nanobots in my blood sensing their arrival home.
If I had published "Acts of the Apostles" in this format I wouldn't have all those cases of books in my bedroom. On the other hand if I stubbed my toe at night on the vial instead of a cardboard box my entire inventory would soak into the carpet in an instant. NA.
I liked how, in "Batman and Robin," the cinematographer somehow managed to make Alicia Silverstone look just like a Cabbage Patch Kid.
Who more boring? Jon Katz or Katz bashers, exemplified by Phil "Feeling Good" Lingood? My vote: Phil more boring! By landslide! Your turn! N.A
I was at Sun when the NeXT machine came out; in fact I was some manager's brainstorm off-site at a swanky resort (which we got to use because Sun had rented it for board of directors meeting which McNealy had to cancel, and he couldn't get his money back. It was deluxe!). The people at this meeting were responsible for Sun's Object-oreinted software and GUI toolkit. We got ahold of the Jobs video and the functional specs and tried to decide how to respond. As I recall (this was a long time ago) we came to the decision that the hardware was way overpriced and the disk decision was a fiasco. Also the machine had too little memory. Also Jobs came off as an arrogant jerk, referring to himself as "we" as if he were the Queen of England. But right then and there we cancelled some software projects, and within a few weeks Sun and NeXT were announcing plans for joint software development.
When faced with a similar problem, here's what I did: 1) Let it fester until I was useless at work; 2) Got downsized; 3) Got contracts to write technical books and half-finished them; 4) Started drinking irresponsibly; 5) Took jobs as warehouseman, construction laborer, and truck driver; 6) Wrote novel about burned out software engineer who (almost?) saves the world (Acts of the Apostles, check it out); 7) Stopped drinking irresponsibly; 8) 7 years later went back to origial profession. Hope this helps, N.A.
Since I'm already scared to death of all this stuff I'll let you read it and figure the implications. Please tell me when it's safe to come out.
I wrote a novel, I published it myself. I put the first 13 chapters on the web ("Acts of the Apostels" at www.wetmachine.com). It took me about 4 years to write it, $12k to print a bunch of copies, and several $$k to format the book and put up my website. Right now the rest of the book isn't online anywhere. It's on a tape in my desk drawer. Call me paranoid. Most people who want the book find it easier to shell out the $$15 for a copy than to rip up another's copy and photocopy it. And "Print-on-demand" books are still a little in the future. I figure I've got a couple of years before a napster-equivalent scan-and-print for books becomes prevalent. When that happens, I'm fucked. In the meantime, would you like to buy a copy?
So after writing my soon-to-be-famous nano-bio-techno-paranoid thriller "Acts of the Apostles" (www.wetmachine.com)(see review by Hemos May/00)in which I basically said (in the words of other /. posters) that the genie cannot be put back in the bottle and that people should maybe be concerned about it, I sent a few notes to the Foresight Institute. Most of these notes were ignored, but I had one "funny" exchange with one of the dudes on the Foresight roster, who told me, basically, that I wasn't qualified to have an opinion. He reached this conclusion because (a) my website violated generally accepted website design principles, (b) I think Ayn Rand is a crackpot Nazi, and (c) I didn't show proper respect for the wise old graybeards of the Foresight Institute. The Foresight Institue and their nonprofit, tax-free "everything is just peachy" ilk really believe that they've got everything under control, and that the rest of us should shut up and let Erik Drexler figure the future out for us. Their belief in the goodness of all this stuff is basically a religious belief. Since they consider themselves eminiently rational scientists, there's nothing that riles them more than to be called religious cultists. Which is why my book is called what it is: it's a pie in the face to the techno-idolatrors. Call me the Roger Moore of the neo-luddites. John Sundman, soon-to-be-famous novelist.
Your analysis agrees with mine. And in the meantime, what I've been doing is going to the PN website five times a day and submitting eloquent commentary using various freemail spam accounts as a return addresses. Samples: 1) Predictive Networks: Bad technology. Bad attitude. Bad motive. Bad consequences. Bad People. 2) To whatever human person may be reading this note: I'm going to bed now. Would you please give our older brother a kiss goodnight for me? 3)Fuck you. Childish, sure, like shooting spitballs at the Deathstar. But who knows? "Lotus Marketplace" was cancelled after the big stink, and this looks a lot worse than that. N.A.
The year that SIGCHI was held in Austin (88? 89?) one of the keynote speakers was a shuttle astronaut. He said that since three systems in the cockpit had been desinged by three different companies with no overall design spec, the shuttle "programmers" had to learn three different obscure languages simly to "fly the bird:" a rudimentary BASIC-like command language, octal, and hex! One of the earliest missions nearly landed in the ocean because of a hex-octal mistake. It was this guy's opinion that the shuttle was as much an ergonomic lab as a zero=gravity, low=space lab. Also, the designers had bolted shut one of the access panels because they were sure nobody would ever need to get into it. One mission was saved only because one of the astronauts had smuggled up a Vise-grip, which was verboten.
Shoot me for BSP, I don't care. The best place to read about social implications of nanotechnology (and brain mapping, and human genome project, and any other technology that you might have read of in Slashdot threads or in Bill Joy's "Wired" article) is in the geeky technothriller "Acts of the Apostles," at http://www.wetmachine.com. (It so happens that I am the protagonist of this novel.)