Let me spell it out for you. This is a bunch of military bureaucrats jockeying for publicity. Were you hoping the US military was any less spectacularly full of BS than the civilian branch of our government? What were you thinking?
What are they going to do, spoof Saddam's homepage?
You know, I hear that Matthew Broderick is an Ace hacker. Maybe they should get him in on this.
Review=Bad, Comments=Good
on
The Sparrow
·
· Score: 1
Funny, I just finished this over the holidays as well. Perhaps a lot of these were given as gifts?
Full of weaknesses, such as shallowly developed yet overly worshipped characters, and with the slack, lackadaisacal self-indulgent meandering of a Heinlein novel. But then, this is science fiction, so that's nothing you haven't all seen before. The question is, is it _good_?
I'm tempted to say it's emotionally manipulative at it's core - so my enjoyment and appreciation of it was a weakness. Certainly, if you like post-doc physics realism or lit mag snobbish character development, you won't find it here - and yet you're still supposed to be _really moved_. On the other hand, I wouldn't say the book was exactly weak - Russel just seems to be focused elsewhere.
She has some things to say about some classic religious arguments - free will versus predestination, and the nature of god. But most interesting is the secular, anthropological thinking - the network of relationships between animal and man. The book presents an innocent hunter-gatherer society's development of agriculture. The foundation that lays for deep thinking about the development of society, and indeed, religion... innocence and natural balance, versus intelligence, proliferation and conflict... very interesting. There are enough avenues of speculation here to keep you thinking.
Perhaps she keeps quiet about her biggest religious statement - perhaps it's even unintended? But you have enough room to read it that the explorers take the role of the serpent in the Garden of Eden... making a tremendous indictment of a carnivorous God. Or perhaps God is just plain irrelevant, until the pandora's box of agriculture is opened, and natural balances get thrown out of whack - a statement in itself. (For the non-clued, primitive man's development of agriculture is widely speculated to be the primary turning point of the collective human psychology - indirectly at least, a catalyst of organized religions - of most things modern, really.)
In any case, Russell could have written a paper, but it takes a novel, even a roughshod one, to expose the emotional realities of the issues. And I did enjoy it, whether I should have or not.:)
Captialism is a vigorous organizing principle for a society, but its scope, and the finer points of its philosophical implications, are generally lost in the ideologues' shuffle. Monopolies are a natural result of successful competition. That's one of capitalism's many serious flaws. Eliminating them therefore becomes the one of the little housecleaning chores of the electorate.
A worse flaw still, however, is that there are a number of situations in a technologically advanced society that logically require centralization, if not a monopoly.
Most of these we accept as a matter of course. The military (these days), police, emergency services, power, water, sewage, etc. etc.
Now, look at the infamous monopolies of recent years...
Railroads
Telephones
And not least, certainly,
Operating systems
Why is it that in many countries the "phone company" is actually run by the government? Simple - what's the sense in having a dozen competing phone companies? The infratructure would be horrendous. (Correction - IS horrendous).
If you think about communication as a problem to be solved, you take just one, well-made, system, build it, and everybody uses it. The alternative is an absurd level of redundancy, as every competitor lays their own underground cables, hoists their own telephone poles, and negotiates with your landlord... or, they "cooperate" by leasing each other their cables and facilities. PS, if you think two companies locked in mortal combat "cooperate" effectively, you're one of those charter school kids, aren't you?
To make matters worse, capitalism invariably leads to bad software, and worse software standards.
Hello? tag?
Software development is fundamentelly at odds with commercial enterprise - good software, much like good healthcare and good education, is just not profitable in our economy. And the punchline is that bad software is.
I would hate to be in Jackson's shoes right now. There's nothing the courts can do that will really solve the problem. You've got to have a standard - just as people have to agree on the width of the railroad tracks and the frequencies of the touch tones - otherwise chaos. But as long as some private individual can own and capitalize on that standard, you've got a microsoft in the making. It's no secret there are a thousand niche-microsofts right now... heck, Sun Microsystems is one of them!
What the world needs is an operating system open standard. Or at least some rules to play by. A government-mandated operating system API. Ugh. The irony... I shudder at the thought of depending on federal bureaucrat managing anything more complicated than endorsing a check. Can you imagine the software version of the FCC? Or perhaps the closest match is a kind of architectural standards board...
I wonder which is worse - the stifling effect of a "standard" hardware architecture, a "standard" hardware driver, a "commodity" network protocol, or the stifling effect of Microsoft - with no incentive for and, in fact, many incentives against, ever making any real innovations... coupled with the dread they inspire in anyone who would consider presenting a product, even one vastly superior, to the marketplace.
In the end, I suppose there is no answer really beyond blunt force - something to make the would be monopolists of the future show some forbearance about their dealings with potential competitors - giving them a little push to encourage them to play by the rules of the game. Unfortunately commercial software development is about money, and not software, so I don't know if that's really realistic or not. All this makes the vast body of open source operating system work take on a whole new meaning... It may be our only hope for a truly elegant, robust solution.
Companies are fragile endeavors. "Free software" is a social force - perhaps it's the manifestation of a collective frustration with commercial software?;) But one way or another, as long as programmers have free time, there's nothing Redhat's shareholders, Bill Gates, or anyone else can do to stop them from coding what they feel like coding. And as long as Windows is still out there crashing desktops with abandon and wasting smart people's time all over the world (God bless it), anyone with a sense of self-respect and a modest ability to write code will work on Linux... or FreeBSD... or whatever's next.
Barring any harrowing advances in intellectual property law, Stallman's gift, the GPL, insures that no one, no matter how eeee-vile, will ever be able to take the codebase from them.
The news now is how the video game industry will surpass the movie industry this year in terms of money made... and that makes us all assume that Hollywood-style baggage will soon be weighing us down - politics, networking, cliques, agents, etc... I can guess that is true, but from the inside (and from the top), do you feel that's the really the case? Do you see any good coming out of that trend?
And given the rising costs of making a competitive video game, do you think it's already too late for a small studio or an individual to make it big on their own?
Slashdot Mirror
What are they going to do, spoof Saddam's homepage?
You know, I hear that Matthew Broderick is an Ace hacker. Maybe they should get him in on this.
Full of weaknesses, such as shallowly developed yet overly worshipped characters, and with the slack, lackadaisacal self-indulgent meandering of a Heinlein novel. But then, this is science fiction, so that's nothing you haven't all seen before. The question is, is it _good_?
I'm tempted to say it's emotionally manipulative at it's core - so my enjoyment and appreciation of it was a weakness. Certainly, if you like post-doc physics realism or lit mag snobbish character development, you won't find it here - and yet you're still supposed to be _really moved_. On the other hand, I wouldn't say the book was exactly weak - Russel just seems to be focused elsewhere.
She has some things to say about some classic religious arguments - free will versus predestination, and the nature of god. But most interesting is the secular, anthropological thinking - the network of relationships between animal and man. The book presents an innocent hunter-gatherer society's development of agriculture. The foundation that lays for deep thinking about the development of society, and indeed, religion... innocence and natural balance, versus intelligence, proliferation and conflict... very interesting. There are enough avenues of speculation here to keep you thinking.
Perhaps she keeps quiet about her biggest religious statement - perhaps it's even unintended? But you have enough room to read it that the explorers take the role of the serpent in the Garden of Eden... making a tremendous indictment of a carnivorous God. Or perhaps God is just plain irrelevant, until the pandora's box of agriculture is opened, and natural balances get thrown out of whack - a statement in itself. (For the non-clued, primitive man's development of agriculture is widely speculated to be the primary turning point of the collective human psychology - indirectly at least, a catalyst of organized religions - of most things modern, really.)
In any case, Russell could have written a paper, but it takes a novel, even a roughshod one, to expose the emotional realities of the issues. And I did enjoy it, whether I should have or not. :)
A worse flaw still, however, is that there are a number of situations in a technologically advanced society that logically require centralization, if not a monopoly.
Most of these we accept as a matter of course. The military (these days), police, emergency services, power, water, sewage, etc. etc.
Now, look at the infamous monopolies of recent years...
- Railroads
- Telephones
And not least, certainly,- Operating systems
Why is it that in many countries the "phone company" is actually run by the government? Simple - what's the sense in having a dozen competing phone companies? The infratructure would be horrendous. (Correction - IS horrendous).If you think about communication as a problem to be solved, you take just one, well-made, system, build it, and everybody uses it. The alternative is an absurd level of redundancy, as every competitor lays their own underground cables, hoists their own telephone poles, and negotiates with your landlord... or, they "cooperate" by leasing each other their cables and facilities. PS, if you think two companies locked in mortal combat "cooperate" effectively, you're one of those charter school kids, aren't you?
To make matters worse, capitalism invariably leads to bad software, and worse software standards.
Hello? tag?
Software development is fundamentelly at odds with commercial enterprise - good software, much like good healthcare and good education, is just not profitable in our economy. And the punchline is that bad software is.
I would hate to be in Jackson's shoes right now. There's nothing the courts can do that will really solve the problem. You've got to have a standard - just as people have to agree on the width of the railroad tracks and the frequencies of the touch tones - otherwise chaos. But as long as some private individual can own and capitalize on that standard, you've got a microsoft in the making. It's no secret there are a thousand niche-microsofts right now... heck, Sun Microsystems is one of them!
What the world needs is an operating system open standard. Or at least some rules to play by. A government-mandated operating system API. Ugh. The irony... I shudder at the thought of depending on federal bureaucrat managing anything more complicated than endorsing a check. Can you imagine the software version of the FCC? Or perhaps the closest match is a kind of architectural standards board...
I wonder which is worse - the stifling effect of a "standard" hardware architecture, a "standard" hardware driver, a "commodity" network protocol, or the stifling effect of Microsoft - with no incentive for and, in fact, many incentives against, ever making any real innovations... coupled with the dread they inspire in anyone who would consider presenting a product, even one vastly superior, to the marketplace.
In the end, I suppose there is no answer really beyond blunt force - something to make the would be monopolists of the future show some forbearance about their dealings with potential competitors - giving them a little push to encourage them to play by the rules of the game. Unfortunately commercial software development is about money, and not software, so I don't know if that's really realistic or not. All this makes the vast body of open source operating system work take on a whole new meaning... It may be our only hope for a truly elegant, robust solution.
Barring any harrowing advances in intellectual property law, Stallman's gift, the GPL, insures that no one, no matter how eeee-vile, will ever be able to take the codebase from them.
And given the rising costs of making a competitive video game, do you think it's already too late for a small studio or an individual to make it big on their own?