Who's going to buy the burgers? Who's going to buy our software? When all the burger flippers etc. are out of work, we can sell our nice shiny software to each other, but we're doing that already. With the burger flippers dropping out, you're talking about a shrinking economy. (Okay, now some libertarian will rear up and burn me at the stake for heretically questioning the Grace of the Holy Market:)
the smart hackers/engineers/managers get a shitload of money . . .
It'll be more complex than that. Actually, it is now: The stupid managers get an incredible amount of money (n), the smart ones get n/2, the webmonkeys get n/4, programmers get n/8, etc.
and everyone else is reduced to serving burgers/help-desk/sales-droid.
They have been already. What you started off talking about is a time when a bunch of Q3 bots serve your burger and the people who are now relegated to min-wage "service industry" jobs will look back on minimum-wage-no-benefits as a sort of lost paradise.
When things get that bad for a large segment of the population, I have a feeling that all the freedom-loving affluent geeks of the world will get real fond of police states real quick. As they've done in NYC already.
They always have been, and they always will be. They favor censorship, nativism, theocracy, xenophobia, the whole nine yards. They push ignorance because they benefit from it. They attack education and free speech because educated and informed people are harder to goad into mob action. It's not impossible, God knows, but it's harder.
I think I first read C. S. Lewis' Narnia novels around that age. They're very cool. There's a subtle Christian subtext in them, but when I was a kid it was way too subtle for me to notice.
Robert A. Heinlein's "juvenile" novels: The Star Beast (which lured me into SF at around age 8), Time for the Stars, Between Planets, Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Farmer in the Sky, Red Planet, Podkayne of Mars, Tunnel in the Sky, and several others that don't come to mind immediately. I assume you've read Heinlein's adult SF, but if you haven't, you should know that (IIRC) anything he wrote for adults after the early 1960's tends to have sex in it. His juveniles, though, were written in the 1950's with the intent of reaching a wide audience of young people and getting them interested in space exploration, and they stay within the bounds of what was considered "suitable for children" at that time.
Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea novels are very good also: In order, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore. There's a fourth one, Tehanu, which was intended for adults and which may or may not be suitable for a child. It's pretty grim in spots. It's also slow-moving enough that a child may just be bored by it.
Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels. Del Rey published a set of these back in the 1980's which had some of the best cover art I've ever seen, but um, the art itself was a bit racy in spots. The books themselves, however, are entirely "suitable for children" by the standards that were current around 1919.
Hmmm . . . of the above, Lewis and LeGuin and to some extent Burroughs fall more in the "fantasy" category than "SF", but at that age I didn't make much of a distinction. At any rate, all of the above are books that I still read from time to time in my thirties.
All the "suitable for children" crap above is merely because I don't know where you stand on such things, and for some people that's a concern. My parents let me read anything I wanted to, and it didn't seem to do me any harm.
Hi, I'm Venomous Louse. I haven't owned a TV for five years now, and while it sometimes sucks a bit not to be able to rent movies, I've yet to lose any sleep about that. The fact is, TV sucks. Try not watching TV for a year, and then turn one on and watch a few commercials. It's like opening a door into an insane asylum, for God's sake! I am telling you, it is not normal to sit in a chair watching perfect strangers scream at you about how you should buy things that you don't care about. It may or may not be identical to North Korean mind-control techniques, but it's close enough to chill my blood and no mistake. In the rare intervals when they're not screaming at you to buy crap, they're bombarding you with dull jokes, bad acting, and silly melodrama. All of this seems normal and reasonable to the habitual TV user, but after a year or so of drying out, you will suddenly begin to see it as a strange form of madness.
Watching the news used to be given as a valid reason to have a TV, but there were always newspapers, and now we have the web. Both of those (especially newspapers) provide more depth than television anyway.
It's depressing how free software people are so deeply in love with shoddy, incompetent use of English, while at the same time making so much noise about careful, detail-oriented use of languages like C and whatnot. Hmmm . . . Innarestin', innit?
I love it when people babble incoherent gibberish at me and then whine that I "know what they mean". "You know what I mean" translates roughly as "I don't know what I mean." The semantic meatgrinder of idiomatic, uneducated American English is so destructive that the language as commonly spoken can be used only to express the most trivial platitudes, and even then only if the listener knows from context which one to expect. In other words, most people may as well just walk around all day grunting and pointing. They express emotion by the tone of their voices, but so does an orangutan. Big deal.
They teach themselves Perl and enhance their t-shirt collections.
Hmmm... Are you sure this is an adequate description of someone like, say, ESR, RMS, Larry Wall, Wozniak, Carmack, etc?
No, it's not. I took "the self-teaching, self-enhancing swag of techno-brutes" to refer to a much larger group of people than just the few stars. Looking back, I'm not so sure that I was justified in assuming that. I'd say that Raymond and Wall are certainly trying desperately to be "intelligentsia", and that RMS is succeeding whether he's trying or not. Since I'm not the one who gets to hand out the membership cards, my personal opinion of Wall and Raymond is really irrelevant. I don't know much of anything about Wozniak, but Carmack strikes me as a pretty sharp cookie. I don't know if he's a brilliant person or just a brilliant technician ("Specialization is for insects." -- Robert Heinlein), but he's smarter than I am either way, whether he's read Pound or not:)
Some of the best thinkers in the world, some of the more poetic and intelligence-oriented people out there are working in the high-tech world for the sake of economic growth and prosperity
I find that thought depressing. Personally, I write code because I love it (most days). The money is a convenient by-product. YMMV, I guess. I've met some programmers who were in it for the money, and they were invariably the kind of people you really don't want working on your code. Anybody who needs money as a motivator probably belongs in sales where s/he can't do so much damage.
. . . there could be any number of "intelligentsia" (elite vanguard) groups which are for ever obscured by the daily growth of the Internet.....
Just because you dont see it does not mean it does not exist, and not seeing something on the Internet is VERY VERY easy.
Well, it hardly seems fair to argue with me by being right, because that leaves me nowhere to go!:)
Still, you are right: The fact that I don't see them doesn't prove they're not there. I'll stick with my assertion that Slashdot ain't it (and in the 14 or so months since I've been here, hasn't been). But that leaves a hell of a lot of territory I haven't looked at. All I can say with confidence is that I haven't found such a thing yet, and that I'm getting (perhaps unreasonably) discouraged.
I once had a professor who told me that Boeing (or maybe it was one of the major airlines...) had a billion lines of COBOL in its computer systems. That kind of code base cannot be ported by humans to a newer language--not in next year, not in the next decade.
This is a real strong point. There's also the fact that, for example, no particular C implementation has lasted for more than N years, but C itself has lasted for about twenty-seven years and is still going strong. The vast majority of it will live on in C++ for a long time after ANSI C as such is "obsolete". The STL isn't a code base, it's an, um, uhhh, architecture or something:) It's an archetype or whatever; implementations come and go.
. . . I think Pound is overrated.
That's a thorny one. I can't think of many other writers who've had a similar facility with the language; Shakespeare comes to mind, then Joyce and Eliot, and then you're into some very long arguments about lesser figures and personal favorites (e.g. Robert Browning, Jack Vance, etc.). But Pound, even more than Joyce and Eliot, is f*cking opaque as all hell . . . When Shakespeare was writing, he was understandable without footnotes; Pound never was understandable without major documentation. I've got a guide to the Cantos that's several times the size of the Cantos themselves, but mostly I just swim around in the stuff rather than trying to grok it too much.
It's a long argument, and I'm not gonna go there because I'm not that sure I disagree with you:)
I point out that well-crafted code is not a manufactured device, no matter how humble the system in which it's embedded. Witness the skill of the original PDP hackers and "Spacewar", and the tight code of the old-school video game developers. Those devices I believe I'm fully justified in feeling awe for.
Of course well-crafted code is "manufactured", as is shitty code, as is a novel. IMHO it's just fine to feel awe for something done extraordinarily well. If I can feel good and awed by Exile on Main Street or Pound's Cantos, I can feel equally awed by the Standard Template Library. It's all good for you!:)
Maybe Sterling's point is that the Cantos (for example) will continue to be of practical interest long after the STL has gone to join Simula, Multics, and PL/I in the dustbin of history. If so, he's got something of a point, but as you illustrate with your games example, there's still nothing wrong with appreciating "obsolete" code: The achievement is what it is, regardless of how long ago it happened.
Where IMHO a line must be drawn is between respect (even unto awe) for great craftsmanship, and mindless technofetishism. I know a guy who gets all excited and wiggly whenever somebody announces a microprocessor with a greater number of MHz than was announced a month previous. He is in awe of these ever-increasing numbers. As it happens, he doesn't know what MHz means, and he's totally incapable of appreciating the engineering that goes into these things. People who get breathlessly excited about things they don't understand are depressing and pathetic.
Unfortunately, Sterling is just yammering about Bright New Horizons and all that crap, as if getting rid of all those stupid nines in the year is going to change anything. Nonsense, it's all arbitrary. Hope springs eternal but we're still just as screwed (or not screwed) as we were a week ago, or ten years ago, or whatever.
". . . the Internet has made a new intelligentsia possible."
Of course, it could just be that he's contradicting himself:)
I do see the smiley there, but even so I'm gonna pop my hand up and disagree. For example: My last raise made it possible for me to buy a new car, but I haven't (and certainly won't until my poor old Honda gasps its last in another 100,000 miles or so). "To make foo possible" is not "to bring foo about".
I'm going to disagree with Sterling on other grounds: There's nothing about the net which is likely to have any qualitative effect on any "new intelligentsia" which may rear its pointy little head in the years to come. E-commerce is turning out to be little more than a vastly improved interface for catalog shopping à la Sears Roebuck ninety years ago. Intellectuals are people who shoot their mouths off at each other, and the net means they can do it from their home in Sheboygan instead of having to move to Paris like Hemingway did. That's actually a damn good thing, but it's just a change in the interface. People make too much of this stuff. 99% of the "exciting changes" now happening are quantitative improvements on old news. It's all very cool and useful (not to mention the software boom economy that provided the raise which could provide me with a new car if I really wanted one:), but let's not lose our heads.
It's a handful of funny trolls and a handful of informative coders, sitting atop a vast shitheap of yammering idiots.
Are the various forums and communities that exist all over the Internet totally devoid of intelligentsia?
Well . . . yes. They are. I spent some time subscribed to the Thomas Pynchon listserv this Fall. What a waste of bandwidth. And the net goes downhill from there, the only exceptions being Suck and McSweeney's. Feed has its moments too, I guess. But none of those is a "community" in any sense at all. Hey, wait, there's Neal Stephenson, too; IMHO he's ahead even of the Sucksters in the "internet intellectual" game. He's a thoughtful, intelligent person who groks the damn subject well enough to illuminate it. Jon Katz is endlessly amusing and I think he's a perfect fit for Slashdot, but he's not thoughtful, he's not intelligent, and he sure as hell doesn't grok anything, least of all technology.
I was under the impression that before this 'new economy' came a whole new brand of intelligentsia - the self-teaching, self-enhancing swag of techno-brutes that have been lifting themselves out of the muck of obscurity with the tools of the Internet and creating whole new social spheres, which subsequently resulted in entirely different modes of online economy.
They teach themselves Perl and enhance their t-shirt collections. This has nothing to do with an "intelligentsia". I'm hoping that you're using "economy" in some figurative sense, 'cause if you're not, you've missed the point more thoroughly than I care to contemplate. It's really not about making a quick buck at all. Crack dealers do that. BFD. If you're coming from a hard-core libertarian perspective, that would explain a lot: That viewpoint is fundamentally hostile to intellectualism, and answers all questions with the word "money". Hey, it's a free country, YMMV, it takes all kinds, etc. No problem. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just a very profoundly different thing.
am I missing something here or is Bruce waxing poetic and I'm just being too literal?
Yer waxin' a bit poetic there yourself, my friend:) You're not being literal, he is. He's talking about a phenomenon that hasn't existed in the US for the last few decades, that's all. It's nothing most Americans have ever encountered, at least not since the lad in my.sig shuffled off.
The Bell Curve was a very popular book, and a lot of people took it as gospel. There are unapologetic master race theorists running around loose
That sounds like I'm describing Murray and Herrnstein as "unapologetic master race theorists", which is not accurate and was not my intent. Their work is popular among unapologetic master race theorists, and their views do tend towards that end of the scale, but they're not a couple of full-blown Nazis or anything like that. Read the book, if you're really bored. Their thesis (though IMHO not a reasonable one) is somewhat more nuanced than either their fans or their detractors would have one believe.
Earlier in this century, we dabbled in eugenics, only to learn that a "super-race," or perfect human beings are not possible, no matter how much you tweak and perfect genetics.
Some of us learned that. Others didn't. The Bell Curve was a very popular book, and a lot of people took it as gospel. There are unapologetic master race theorists running around loose even as we speak, and of course everyone writes those nuts off as crackpots, but there are a lot of normal people who buy into it just a little bit farther than can be logically justified. It's hard to draw the line. Our genes do have an effect on us. It's easy for some people to start making it out to be more than it's worth.
I don't think it's wise to stop worrying about people who take this stuff too seriously. Still,there are many beneficial uses for this knowledge, and you can't put the genie back in the bottle anyway. We've learned to live with sharp rocks, bows and arrows, nuclear warheads, Ponzi schemes, and Slashdot. We have no choice but to learn to live with this, too.
It's always good to have an antidote for mindless technofetishism. Sometimes a little Luddism is just what the doctor ordered.
Great, another goddamn anti-Commie paranoia festival. Coming soon to a Slashdot near you!
Is China a blockable topic in the Slashdot preferences? I'll have to check.
Yeah, and we can nuke 'em right back.
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A manned module and an ICBM is it's payload.
Not to be too much of a stickler for detail, but an ICBM (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile) isn't a payload so much as a delivery system. Nowadays, the payload of an ICBM is usually a group of warheads ("Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles" [MIRV] for the military acronym aficionados [MAA] out there). Obviously this doesn't affect your point at all. I'm just feeling pedantic this morning.
Take note: China can put a nuke on your doorstep.
I doubt that whatever perceived deterrent capacity we have is likely to be any less effective against China than it was against them Rooskies.
Anyhow, putting something in orbit is tougher than delivering a warhead. Didn't we and them Rooskies both have ICBM's before orbital stuff? Even if not -- and I'm probably wrong -- we and they and everybody have always had bombers, submarines, and whatnot. The Chinese have most likely been able to put little bundles of nuclear joy on people's doorsteps for decades now. Capability does not necessitate use, or at least it hasn't so far. We're still the only nation that ever did use nukes, but it's been more than fifty years since then and we haven't done it again, and nobody else ever bothered at all. Nobody really needs a world-encircling Doomsday Shroud, y'know? When you strip away the paranoid nationalist rhetoric and the Pharaonic/Reaganomic urge to overspend fantastically on redundant and/or useless weapons, the deterrence thing is eminently sensible.
I do, however, have a few words in favor of your concerns: After decades of Cold War paranoia, many Americans had become hardened paranoia addicts, and since the Soviet Union crapped out they've had to seek their fix elsewhere, mostly by developing paranoid systems of belief about the federal government. It might be a refreshing change of pace for them and for the rest of us if they were to devote themselves to fearing China for a while. "A change is as good as a rest", as Brendan Behan used to say. On the other hand, it might be even nicer if they kicked the habit entirely.
St. Sebastian (patron of archers, athletes, and soldiers; died c. AD 288) was a Roman soldier who, upon being revealed as a Christian, was shot full of arrows, which he surived. There are a few different paintings depicting the event, some better-known than others. It looks to me like they're hitting the St. Sebastian button with the arrows there.
------------------------------------------------ St. Sebastian info from John J. Delaney, Dictionary of Saints, Doubleday, 1980. It's a handy book to have around the house. The pink power ranger is not mentioned as a martyr, either actual or potential.
I don't agree about democracy (OT)
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Focus Group Art
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"The principle of democracy is that over 50% of the people can get it right over 50% of the time. Whoever came up with this was obviously a moron."
Robert Heinlein felt that way, too: "Zero times a million still equals zero", or some such. It's a snappy bon mot, but IMHO it misses the point.
The purpose of democracy is not to govern well as such. Rather, it is to minimize the natural human tendency to govern badly. The purpose of democracy is to prevent tyrrany by putting authority over the government in the hands of the people who will suffer from its mistakes. Stalin didn't have to suffer from the mistakes he made. The US voter does.
On the whole, the US voter has done a better job than Stalin did: Even though the US voter is, arguably, a moron, his record of less than 50% is in fact remarkably good compared to that of your average dictator. When the voters do something stupid, that's a bummer, but they do seem to learn from their mistakes sometimes (or at the very least repent and vote in a new and different set of thieves once in a while).
In other words, since the decline of the doctrine of the divine right of kings, a government has been generally seen to have no reason for being other than to benefit its constituents. They have to put up with it, they fund it, why not let them run it? It's theirs. Heinlein says that if you let people vote, they'll vote themselves bread and circuses and society will ultimately collapse. He's right. What he doesn't mention is that if you don't let them vote, things are likely to be a hell of a lot worse. I'm sure we all remember Churchill's laugh line about how of all the rotten systems of government, democracy is the least rotten . . . The great thing about it is that the system itself has a built-in tendency to control its own excesses. By contrast, a really good philosopher-king will govern far better than any nation of voters ever did -- but he will one day die, and his son may be a hopeless incompetent, and you'll up shit crick. Democracy tends to average it all out, and provide a consistent output of mild incompetence and venality. In avoiding Catherine the Great we lose Peter the Great. Bummer.
This painting thing is funny because art and government have no parallels. Exceptionally bad art won't destroy us on the one hand, and on the other hand if there is no great art, then art is not worth having at all. A mediocre government can be a satisfactory government, while mediocre art is of no worth whatsoever.
Read my post again, about "mindless ideological orthodoxy". I'm willing to give Raymond credit for not killing anybody, but he is a great fan of the same kind of ideology-first/reality-second crap that Mao was so fond of. Yeah, his ideology is somewhat less noxious than that of Chairman Mao, but nobody ever thought Communism would end in the collectivization of the Ukraine until it happened. I don't trust these world-savers who have One Simple Solution (the acronym is purely accidental!) to all our problems. It's a crock.
And by the way, the Cultural Revolution was not conducted by the government. It was a mostly decentralized mob movement. Mao just made some announcements and got out of the way. The rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution bore a creepy resemblance to current US conservative rhetoric in many ways; for example, it was asserted that academics were corrupting youth by de-emphasizing the teaching of values. It was also asserted that government officials had abandoned values and turned to pragmatism. Mao launched the whole thing, basically, by way of pursuing a power struggle (which he won, in the short term) against officials who he believed to have turned away from the core values of the nation -- in their case, communism. Sound familiar?
The abuses and excesses of the PRC are well known and are repugnant to me, but that doesn't mean that, if sombody else objects to it, I am required to agree with them about everything else. Until the Republicans finish consolidating their power, this is still a somewhat free country.
In any case, my intent was not to trivialize the suffering of the Chinese people, and if I gave that impression I apologize.
In closing, it should be noted that many right-wing/libertarian boneheads, in contrast to your remarks, assert that gun control is indeed a step on the road to totalitarian communism, and is therefore equivalent to communism itself. You've heard the rhetoric, you don't need me to recapitulate in detail. I may have jumped to conclusions in assuming that Mr. Raymond holds that view himself; if so, and if I was wrong, that's the only thing I implied that I'd care to retract.
That would blow away his rabid victimization -- he claims that Christians are evil and wicked because we persecuted his "spiritual forbears".
If so, that's really annoying and depressing. Yeah, some Christians did exactly that, and other Christians are trying to do it now. Then again, I doubt that very many Quakers have any hand in that stuff, and the last time I checked, they were Christians too.
It's fine -- in fact, admirable -- to object to objectionable acts by members of a given group, but Raymond generally seems to go a step farther and claim that the objectionable acts are characteristic of the entire group, and are furthermore necessitated by membership in that group. With a self-selected group like Christians or communists or Nazis, that's not nearly as scary as it would be with an "ethnic" or "racial" group, but it's still unjust and goofy. We've had a rash of very public violence in the news these past few months, and the balance of the perpetrators were people with strong anti-government and pro-2nd-Amendment views. Would Raymond care to be lumped in with those characters? I doubt it very much -- after all, he hasn't shot up any JCC's and I can't imagine that he would condone such a thing, much less do it himself. Similary, the fact that Hitler may have been a pagan tells us absolutely nothing about the racial or political views of other pagans, Eric Raymond included. If he's gonna generalize unreasonably, I guess it's good to be consistent and do it to himself, too, but he's really getting worked up about nothing.
Incidentally, my devoutly Catholic friend Tom would never condone any persecution of Raymond for his beliefs. Tom has pagan friends and he considers their beliefs as silly as they consider his -- but since they're all nice people, they don't hassle each other about it. I don't crawl up his ass with my atheism, either, and we get along just fine.
Kind of sad.
That strikes me as unfair. I don't know about Raymond, but speaking for myself (unlike Raymond, I'm unable to speak for anybody else:) I'd rather be called an "asshole" than "kind of sad". "Kind of sad" implies helplessness and stupidity. You can communicate with somebody who hates you, but not with somebody who feels sorry for you. Regardless of my personal opinion of Mr. Raymond's intellect and morals, communication seems more productive to me than condesenscion (the spelling of which just doesn't look right to me -- all spelling flames welcome).
His logic is badly skewed, but he did get the words right. The "kulaks", a Russian term for prosperous farmers, got stomped rather badly. IIRC this was a Stalinist thing that happened in the aftermath of Lenin's "New Economic Policy" (mild free-marketish reforms in the early 1920's or thereabouts), but my last Russian history course was many years ago so don't quote me on that.
. . . Is incompatible with mindless ideological orthodoxy -- which happens to be the root cause of the abuses in China, as well as a favorite passtime of the annoying Libertarian comissar who we call "Eric Raymond".
Will he next inveigh against users who advocate gun control? Those who remain neutral on the issue? Will he declare that Linux may not be used by those whose religion he doesn't approve of? By Democrats? Microsoft employees? ATF/FBI employees? It's not like anybody will give a rat's ass if he does, but it's still ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't mean to post anonymously. That was me.
Who's going to buy the burgers? Who's going to buy our software? When all the burger flippers etc. are out of work, we can sell our nice shiny software to each other, but we're doing that already. With the burger flippers dropping out, you're talking about a shrinking economy. (Okay, now some libertarian will rear up and burn me at the stake for heretically questioning the Grace of the Holy Market
the smart hackers/engineers/managers get a shitload of money . . .
It'll be more complex than that. Actually, it is now: The stupid managers get an incredible amount of money (n), the smart ones get n/2, the webmonkeys get n/4, programmers get n/8, etc.
and everyone else is reduced to serving burgers/help-desk/sales-droid.
They have been already. What you started off talking about is a time when a bunch of Q3 bots serve your burger and the people who are now relegated to min-wage "service industry" jobs will look back on minimum-wage-no-benefits as a sort of lost paradise.
When things get that bad for a large segment of the population, I have a feeling that all the freedom-loving affluent geeks of the world will get real fond of police states real quick. As they've done in NYC already.
What, just because it's "high tech" it's got to be fucking stupid? What a crock.
Heh heh, look: I've already wasted more time on it than it's worth.
Have the Right Wing Trolls weighed in yet on this one?
They always have been, and they always will be. They favor censorship, nativism, theocracy, xenophobia, the whole nine yards. They push ignorance because they benefit from it. They attack education and free speech because educated and informed people are harder to goad into mob action. It's not impossible, God knows, but it's harder.
I think I first read C. S. Lewis' Narnia novels around that age. They're very cool. There's a subtle Christian subtext in them, but when I was a kid it was way too subtle for me to notice.
Robert A. Heinlein's "juvenile" novels: The Star Beast (which lured me into SF at around age 8), Time for the Stars, Between Planets, Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Farmer in the Sky, Red Planet, Podkayne of Mars, Tunnel in the Sky, and several others that don't come to mind immediately. I assume you've read Heinlein's adult SF, but if you haven't, you should know that (IIRC) anything he wrote for adults after the early 1960's tends to have sex in it. His juveniles, though, were written in the 1950's with the intent of reaching a wide audience of young people and getting them interested in space exploration, and they stay within the bounds of what was considered "suitable for children" at that time.
Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea novels are very good also: In order, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore. There's a fourth one, Tehanu, which was intended for adults and which may or may not be suitable for a child. It's pretty grim in spots. It's also slow-moving enough that a child may just be bored by it.
Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels. Del Rey published a set of these back in the 1980's which had some of the best cover art I've ever seen, but um, the art itself was a bit racy in spots. The books themselves, however, are entirely "suitable for children" by the standards that were current around 1919.
Hmmm . . . of the above, Lewis and LeGuin and to some extent Burroughs fall more in the "fantasy" category than "SF", but at that age I didn't make much of a distinction. At any rate, all of the above are books that I still read from time to time in my thirties.
All the "suitable for children" crap above is merely because I don't know where you stand on such things, and for some people that's a concern. My parents let me read anything I wanted to, and it didn't seem to do me any harm.
I love the Grinch. No childhood without the Grinch is complete, dammit.
Hi, I'm Venomous Louse. I haven't owned a TV for five years now, and while it sometimes sucks a bit not to be able to rent movies, I've yet to lose any sleep about that. The fact is, TV sucks. Try not watching TV for a year, and then turn one on and watch a few commercials. It's like opening a door into an insane asylum, for God's sake! I am telling you, it is not normal to sit in a chair watching perfect strangers scream at you about how you should buy things that you don't care about. It may or may not be identical to North Korean mind-control techniques, but it's close enough to chill my blood and no mistake. In the rare intervals when they're not screaming at you to buy crap, they're bombarding you with dull jokes, bad acting, and silly melodrama. All of this seems normal and reasonable to the habitual TV user, but after a year or so of drying out, you will suddenly begin to see it as a strange form of madness.
Watching the news used to be given as a valid reason to have a TV, but there were always newspapers, and now we have the web. Both of those (especially newspapers) provide more depth than television anyway.
I dig it.
It's depressing how free software people are so deeply in love with shoddy, incompetent use of English, while at the same time making so much noise about careful, detail-oriented use of languages like C and whatnot. Hmmm . . . Innarestin', innit?
I love it when people babble incoherent gibberish at me and then whine that I "know what they mean". "You know what I mean" translates roughly as "I don't know what I mean." The semantic meatgrinder of idiomatic, uneducated American English is so destructive that the language as commonly spoken can be used only to express the most trivial platitudes, and even then only if the listener knows from context which one to expect. In other words, most people may as well just walk around all day grunting and pointing. They express emotion by the tone of their voices, but so does an orangutan. Big deal.
They teach themselves Perl and enhance their t-shirt collections.
Hmmm... Are you sure this is an adequate description of someone like, say, ESR, RMS, Larry Wall, Wozniak, Carmack, etc?
No, it's not. I took "the self-teaching, self-enhancing swag of techno-brutes" to refer to a much larger group of people than just the few stars. Looking back, I'm not so sure that I was justified in assuming that. I'd say that Raymond and Wall are certainly trying desperately to be "intelligentsia", and that RMS is succeeding whether he's trying or not. Since I'm not the one who gets to hand out the membership cards, my personal opinion of Wall and Raymond is really irrelevant. I don't know much of anything about Wozniak, but Carmack strikes me as a pretty sharp cookie. I don't know if he's a brilliant person or just a brilliant technician ("Specialization is for insects." -- Robert Heinlein), but he's smarter than I am either way, whether he's read Pound or not
Some of the best thinkers in the world, some of the more poetic and intelligence-oriented people out there are working in the high-tech world for the sake of economic growth and prosperity
I find that thought depressing. Personally, I write code because I love it (most days). The money is a convenient by-product. YMMV, I guess. I've met some programmers who were in it for the money, and they were invariably the kind of people you really don't want working on your code. Anybody who needs money as a motivator probably belongs in sales where s/he can't do so much damage.
. . . there could be any number of "intelligentsia" (elite vanguard) groups which are for ever obscured by the daily growth of the Internet
Just because you dont see it does not mean it does not exist, and not seeing something on the Internet is VERY VERY easy.
Well, it hardly seems fair to argue with me by being right, because that leaves me nowhere to go!
Still, you are right: The fact that I don't see them doesn't prove they're not there. I'll stick with my assertion that Slashdot ain't it (and in the 14 or so months since I've been here, hasn't been). But that leaves a hell of a lot of territory I haven't looked at. All I can say with confidence is that I haven't found such a thing yet, and that I'm getting (perhaps unreasonably) discouraged.
I once had a professor who told me that Boeing (or maybe it was one of the major airlines...) had a billion lines of COBOL in its computer systems. That kind of code base cannot be ported by humans to a newer language--not in next year, not in the next decade.
This is a real strong point. There's also the fact that, for example, no particular C implementation has lasted for more than N years, but C itself has lasted for about twenty-seven years and is still going strong. The vast majority of it will live on in C++ for a long time after ANSI C as such is "obsolete". The STL isn't a code base, it's an, um, uhhh, architecture or something
. . . I think Pound is overrated.
That's a thorny one. I can't think of many other writers who've had a similar facility with the language; Shakespeare comes to mind, then Joyce and Eliot, and then you're into some very long arguments about lesser figures and personal favorites (e.g. Robert Browning, Jack Vance, etc.). But Pound, even more than Joyce and Eliot, is f*cking opaque as all hell . . . When Shakespeare was writing, he was understandable without footnotes; Pound never was understandable without major documentation. I've got a guide to the Cantos that's several times the size of the Cantos themselves, but mostly I just swim around in the stuff rather than trying to grok it too much.
It's a long argument, and I'm not gonna go there because I'm not that sure I disagree with you
I point out that well-crafted code is not a manufactured device, no matter how humble the system in which it's embedded. Witness the skill of the original PDP hackers and "Spacewar", and the tight code of the old-school video game developers. Those devices I believe I'm fully justified in feeling awe for.
Of course well-crafted code is "manufactured", as is shitty code, as is a novel. IMHO it's just fine to feel awe for something done extraordinarily well. If I can feel good and awed by Exile on Main Street or Pound's Cantos, I can feel equally awed by the Standard Template Library. It's all good for you!
Maybe Sterling's point is that the Cantos (for example) will continue to be of practical interest long after the STL has gone to join Simula, Multics, and PL/I in the dustbin of history. If so, he's got something of a point, but as you illustrate with your games example, there's still nothing wrong with appreciating "obsolete" code: The achievement is what it is, regardless of how long ago it happened.
Where IMHO a line must be drawn is between respect (even unto awe) for great craftsmanship, and mindless technofetishism. I know a guy who gets all excited and wiggly whenever somebody announces a microprocessor with a greater number of MHz than was announced a month previous. He is in awe of these ever-increasing numbers. As it happens, he doesn't know what MHz means, and he's totally incapable of appreciating the engineering that goes into these things. People who get breathlessly excited about things they don't understand are depressing and pathetic.
Unfortunately, Sterling is just yammering about Bright New Horizons and all that crap, as if getting rid of all those stupid nines in the year is going to change anything. Nonsense, it's all arbitrary. Hope springs eternal but we're still just as screwed (or not screwed) as we were a week ago, or ten years ago, or whatever.
". . . we have no new intelligentsia."
". . . the Internet has made a new intelligentsia possible."
Of course, it could just be that he's contradicting himself
I do see the smiley there, but even so I'm gonna pop my hand up and disagree. For example: My last raise made it possible for me to buy a new car, but I haven't (and certainly won't until my poor old Honda gasps its last in another 100,000 miles or so). "To make foo possible" is not "to bring foo about".
I'm going to disagree with Sterling on other grounds: There's nothing about the net which is likely to have any qualitative effect on any "new intelligentsia" which may rear its pointy little head in the years to come. E-commerce is turning out to be little more than a vastly improved interface for catalog shopping à la Sears Roebuck ninety years ago. Intellectuals are people who shoot their mouths off at each other, and the net means they can do it from their home in Sheboygan instead of having to move to Paris like Hemingway did. That's actually a damn good thing, but it's just a change in the interface. People make too much of this stuff. 99% of the "exciting changes" now happening are quantitative improvements on old news. It's all very cool and useful (not to mention the software boom economy that provided the raise which could provide me with a new car if I really wanted one
I rest my case
What, then, is the Slashdot community?
It's a handful of funny trolls and a handful of informative coders, sitting atop a vast shitheap of yammering idiots.
Are the various forums and communities that exist all over the Internet totally devoid of intelligentsia?
Well . . . yes. They are. I spent some time subscribed to the Thomas Pynchon listserv this Fall. What a waste of bandwidth. And the net goes downhill from there, the only exceptions being Suck and McSweeney's. Feed has its moments too, I guess. But none of those is a "community" in any sense at all. Hey, wait, there's Neal Stephenson, too; IMHO he's ahead even of the Sucksters in the "internet intellectual" game. He's a thoughtful, intelligent person who groks the damn subject well enough to illuminate it. Jon Katz is endlessly amusing and I think he's a perfect fit for Slashdot, but he's not thoughtful, he's not intelligent, and he sure as hell doesn't grok anything, least of all technology.
I was under the impression that before this 'new economy' came a whole new brand of intelligentsia - the self-teaching, self-enhancing swag of techno-brutes that have been lifting themselves out of the muck of obscurity with the tools of the Internet and creating whole new social spheres, which subsequently resulted in entirely different modes of online economy.
They teach themselves Perl and enhance their t-shirt collections. This has nothing to do with an "intelligentsia". I'm hoping that you're using "economy" in some figurative sense, 'cause if you're not, you've missed the point more thoroughly than I care to contemplate. It's really not about making a quick buck at all. Crack dealers do that. BFD. If you're coming from a hard-core libertarian perspective, that would explain a lot: That viewpoint is fundamentally hostile to intellectualism, and answers all questions with the word "money". Hey, it's a free country, YMMV, it takes all kinds, etc. No problem. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just a very profoundly different thing.
am I missing something here or is Bruce waxing poetic and I'm just being too literal?
Yer waxin' a bit poetic there yourself, my friend
The Bell Curve was a very popular book, and a lot of people took it as gospel. There are unapologetic master race theorists running around loose
That sounds like I'm describing Murray and Herrnstein as "unapologetic master race theorists", which is not accurate and was not my intent. Their work is popular among unapologetic master race theorists, and their views do tend towards that end of the scale, but they're not a couple of full-blown Nazis or anything like that. Read the book, if you're really bored. Their thesis (though IMHO not a reasonable one) is somewhat more nuanced than either their fans or their detractors would have one believe.
Earlier in this century, we dabbled in eugenics, only to learn that a "super-race," or perfect human beings are not possible, no matter how much you tweak and perfect genetics.
Some of us learned that. Others didn't. The Bell Curve was a very popular book, and a lot of people took it as gospel. There are unapologetic master race theorists running around loose even as we speak, and of course everyone writes those nuts off as crackpots, but there are a lot of normal people who buy into it just a little bit farther than can be logically justified. It's hard to draw the line. Our genes do have an effect on us. It's easy for some people to start making it out to be more than it's worth.
I don't think it's wise to stop worrying about people who take this stuff too seriously. Still,there are many beneficial uses for this knowledge, and you can't put the genie back in the bottle anyway. We've learned to live with sharp rocks, bows and arrows, nuclear warheads, Ponzi schemes, and Slashdot. We have no choice but to learn to live with this, too.
It's always good to have an antidote for mindless technofetishism. Sometimes a little Luddism is just what the doctor ordered.
Great, another goddamn anti-Commie paranoia festival. Coming soon to a Slashdot near you!
Is China a blockable topic in the Slashdot preferences? I'll have to check.
A manned module and an ICBM is it's payload.
Not to be too much of a stickler for detail, but an ICBM (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile) isn't a payload so much as a delivery system. Nowadays, the payload of an ICBM is usually a group of warheads ("Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles" [MIRV] for the military acronym aficionados [MAA] out there). Obviously this doesn't affect your point at all. I'm just feeling pedantic this morning.
Take note: China can put a nuke on your doorstep.
I doubt that whatever perceived deterrent capacity we have is likely to be any less effective against China than it was against them Rooskies.
Anyhow, putting something in orbit is tougher than delivering a warhead. Didn't we and them Rooskies both have ICBM's before orbital stuff? Even if not -- and I'm probably wrong -- we and they and everybody have always had bombers, submarines, and whatnot. The Chinese have most likely been able to put little bundles of nuclear joy on people's doorsteps for decades now. Capability does not necessitate use, or at least it hasn't so far. We're still the only nation that ever did use nukes, but it's been more than fifty years since then and we haven't done it again, and nobody else ever bothered at all. Nobody really needs a world-encircling Doomsday Shroud, y'know? When you strip away the paranoid nationalist rhetoric and the Pharaonic/Reaganomic urge to overspend fantastically on redundant and/or useless weapons, the deterrence thing is eminently sensible.
I do, however, have a few words in favor of your concerns: After decades of Cold War paranoia, many Americans had become hardened paranoia addicts, and since the Soviet Union crapped out they've had to seek their fix elsewhere, mostly by developing paranoid systems of belief about the federal government. It might be a refreshing change of pace for them and for the rest of us if they were to devote themselves to fearing China for a while. "A change is as good as a rest", as Brendan Behan used to say. On the other hand, it might be even nicer if they kicked the habit entirely.
St. Sebastian (patron of archers, athletes, and soldiers; died c. AD 288) was a Roman soldier who, upon being revealed as a Christian, was shot full of arrows, which he surived. There are a few different paintings depicting the event, some better-known than others. It looks to me like they're hitting the St. Sebastian button with the arrows there.
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St. Sebastian info from John J. Delaney, Dictionary of Saints, Doubleday, 1980. It's a handy book to have around the house. The pink power ranger is not mentioned as a martyr, either actual or potential.
"The principle of democracy is that over 50% of the people can get it right over 50% of the time. Whoever came up with this was obviously a moron."
Robert Heinlein felt that way, too: "Zero times a million still equals zero", or some such. It's a snappy bon mot, but IMHO it misses the point.
The purpose of democracy is not to govern well as such. Rather, it is to minimize the natural human tendency to govern badly. The purpose of democracy is to prevent tyrrany by putting authority over the government in the hands of the people who will suffer from its mistakes. Stalin didn't have to suffer from the mistakes he made. The US voter does.
On the whole, the US voter has done a better job than Stalin did: Even though the US voter is, arguably, a moron, his record of less than 50% is in fact remarkably good compared to that of your average dictator. When the voters do something stupid, that's a bummer, but they do seem to learn from their mistakes sometimes (or at the very least repent and vote in a new and different set of thieves once in a while).
In other words, since the decline of the doctrine of the divine right of kings, a government has been generally seen to have no reason for being other than to benefit its constituents. They have to put up with it, they fund it, why not let them run it? It's theirs. Heinlein says that if you let people vote, they'll vote themselves bread and circuses and society will ultimately collapse. He's right. What he doesn't mention is that if you don't let them vote, things are likely to be a hell of a lot worse. I'm sure we all remember Churchill's laugh line about how of all the rotten systems of government, democracy is the least rotten . . . The great thing about it is that the system itself has a built-in tendency to control its own excesses. By contrast, a really good philosopher-king will govern far better than any nation of voters ever did -- but he will one day die, and his son may be a hopeless incompetent, and you'll up shit crick. Democracy tends to average it all out, and provide a consistent output of mild incompetence and venality. In avoiding Catherine the Great we lose Peter the Great. Bummer.
This painting thing is funny because art and government have no parallels. Exceptionally bad art won't destroy us on the one hand, and on the other hand if there is no great art, then art is not worth having at all. A mediocre government can be a satisfactory government, while mediocre art is of no worth whatsoever.
Read my post again, about "mindless ideological orthodoxy". I'm willing to give Raymond credit for not killing anybody, but he is a great fan of the same kind of ideology-first/reality-second crap that Mao was so fond of. Yeah, his ideology is somewhat less noxious than that of Chairman Mao, but nobody ever thought Communism would end in the collectivization of the Ukraine until it happened. I don't trust these world-savers who have One Simple Solution (the acronym is purely accidental!) to all our problems. It's a crock.
And by the way, the Cultural Revolution was not conducted by the government. It was a mostly decentralized mob movement. Mao just made some announcements and got out of the way. The rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution bore a creepy resemblance to current US conservative rhetoric in many ways; for example, it was asserted that academics were corrupting youth by de-emphasizing the teaching of values. It was also asserted that government officials had abandoned values and turned to pragmatism. Mao launched the whole thing, basically, by way of pursuing a power struggle (which he won, in the short term) against officials who he believed to have turned away from the core values of the nation -- in their case, communism. Sound familiar?
The abuses and excesses of the PRC are well known and are repugnant to me, but that doesn't mean that, if sombody else objects to it, I am required to agree with them about everything else. Until the Republicans finish consolidating their power, this is still a somewhat free country.
In any case, my intent was not to trivialize the suffering of the Chinese people, and if I gave that impression I apologize.
In closing, it should be noted that many right-wing/libertarian boneheads, in contrast to your remarks, assert that gun control is indeed a step on the road to totalitarian communism, and is therefore equivalent to communism itself. You've heard the rhetoric, you don't need me to recapitulate in detail. I may have jumped to conclusions in assuming that Mr. Raymond holds that view himself; if so, and if I was wrong, that's the only thing I implied that I'd care to retract.
That would blow away his rabid victimization -- he claims that Christians are evil and wicked because we persecuted his "spiritual forbears".
If so, that's really annoying and depressing. Yeah, some Christians did exactly that, and other Christians are trying to do it now. Then again, I doubt that very many Quakers have any hand in that stuff, and the last time I checked, they were Christians too.
It's fine -- in fact, admirable -- to object to objectionable acts by members of a given group, but Raymond generally seems to go a step farther and claim that the objectionable acts are characteristic of the entire group, and are furthermore necessitated by membership in that group. With a self-selected group like Christians or communists or Nazis, that's not nearly as scary as it would be with an "ethnic" or "racial" group, but it's still unjust and goofy. We've had a rash of very public violence in the news these past few months, and the balance of the perpetrators were people with strong anti-government and pro-2nd-Amendment views. Would Raymond care to be lumped in with those characters? I doubt it very much -- after all, he hasn't shot up any JCC's and I can't imagine that he would condone such a thing, much less do it himself. Similary, the fact that Hitler may have been a pagan tells us absolutely nothing about the racial or political views of other pagans, Eric Raymond included. If he's gonna generalize unreasonably, I guess it's good to be consistent and do it to himself, too, but he's really getting worked up about nothing.
Incidentally, my devoutly Catholic friend Tom would never condone any persecution of Raymond for his beliefs. Tom has pagan friends and he considers their beliefs as silly as they consider his -- but since they're all nice people, they don't hassle each other about it. I don't crawl up his ass with my atheism, either, and we get along just fine.
Kind of sad.
That strikes me as unfair. I don't know about Raymond, but speaking for myself (unlike Raymond, I'm unable to speak for anybody else
His logic is badly skewed, but he did get the words right. The "kulaks", a Russian term for prosperous farmers, got stomped rather badly. IIRC this was a Stalinist thing that happened in the aftermath of Lenin's "New Economic Policy" (mild free-marketish reforms in the early 1920's or thereabouts), but my last Russian history course was many years ago so don't quote me on that.
. . . Is incompatible with mindless ideological orthodoxy -- which happens to be the root cause of the abuses in China, as well as a favorite passtime of the annoying Libertarian comissar who we call "Eric Raymond".
Will he next inveigh against users who advocate gun control? Those who remain neutral on the issue? Will he declare that Linux may not be used by those whose religion he doesn't approve of? By Democrats? Microsoft employees? ATF/FBI employees? It's not like anybody will give a rat's ass if he does, but it's still ridiculous.