takes a database of CDs presented as physical CDs, that you flip through, reading the labels
Yeah, that makes sense. It's not as if I could go into the next room and flip through my CDs, I clearly need a computer program to simulate the experience.
Direct manipulation is metaphor to allow non physical things. A direct manipulation interface to a simulation of real things is ratherpointless.
What we need is not a slighly fancier and no douby much slower version of an existing metaphor, we need new metaphors to do things which are hard to do with direct manipulation and other existing ones.
Eg we have two styles of interface for configuring complex systems. Language based (ie edit a text file) interfaces are easy once you know the language. Forms based (type-ins, selectors, buttong, menus etc) are a basicly simple minded syntax constrained editors for a language based model. To make, for instance, computers easy for non-tehnical people to configure we need a completely new metaphor, and have needed one for a couple of decades. Don't ask me what, but 3D forms are not a step forward.
The reason for the reclassification of tomatos by the biologists was that they started to buy into the evolutionary classification schemes. So the taxonomy was redefined to fit the new theory.
Bollocks. A tomato is a fruit, just as a lettuce leaf is a leaf. It's not about evolution, it's about which bit of the plant it is. The error is in imagining that a fruit can not be a vegetable.
Same thing happened with the Dinosaur formerly known as Brontosaurous. A bunch of jumped up greybeards with nothing to do decided that Brontosaurous and Apatasaurous were the same beast and that their idiotic rules were more important than common sense.
Yeah, it would be perfect common sense to have two official names for the same thing. Wouldn't be at all confusing. Not at all. While we are at it perhaps we should scrap that stupid `venus' and call it `Hesperus' or `Phosphorus' depending on the time of day. Hell, why stick at two, we could have a personal name each for every namable concept at every time of day!
Putting a file on a p2p network is much like leaving your box in a mall, you are not doing anything to insure that the content will not be released.
But why should you? These people had not signed non-disclosure agreements, the things in the package belonged to them -- they can surely be as sloppy about the security of their property as they like.
Sure, states can be bad, but that's not the question at hand.
It is if the issue is the trade off between one form of relatively small risk (terrorism) and giving the state the ability to do things in secret. Every aspect of their operation we allow them to make secret is one we have lost all limits on. The only measure of how bad the results might be we then have is `what could a state with no oversight do with this power'.
The question is whether the democracies that are fighting terrorists can come up with a good security solution that will protect their citizens' rights and yet not be vulnerable to terrorism.
That is a very silly question, since nothing can be invulnerable. We are merely talking of perhaps slightly reduciung the vulnerability, and trading that off against the negatives of secret watch lists.
This discussion is not about the rule of law, which I'm sure we both support. It is about how to go about enforcing the law.
No it isn't. We are talking about what the state is allowed to do to people who have committed no crime (or in some cases no crime since they were last caught and punished).
Harassing people or not allowing them on aircraft because they fit a profile is not enforcing the law. No law has been broken, and in almost all cases no law would be committed if the system was not in place (see other discussions of false positives). This is about social engineering: dividing the population into groups with different rights in the belief thatthis will be for the overall good of society.
The threat would have to be bloody huge before I'd find that acceptable. It ws perhaps just about justifiable during WWII. Maybe. Even then, the US and UK both went too far then with their internment camps.
You imply, either that such Lists are so flawed from the start that they should not be used to pursue suspected terrorists or that such Lists are good in theory, but current practice has shown that they are being used wrongly. [...] Which do you believe?
I believe that such lists have never shown a reasonable trade off between usefulness and safety, and since the problems with them are down to human nature (of the people who operate such schemes), there is no reason to believe they will be better now. I believe that once such systems are created they are bloody hard to destroy. I believe such lists create the very kind of paranoia that the terrorists are trying to create.
More importantly, do you have a fix?
Yes, don't create the list in the first place. If the list is absolutely politically unstoppable, make sure it is public, so the many stupidities it will inevitably contain can be laughed at by everyone and the whole thing can collpse into a joke as soon as possible.
I repeat that the choice of abandoning such a tool is an unacceptable choice.
To you clearly. ISTM we have survived a long time without it.
Abandoning such methods is equivalent to an unspoken surrender to terrorist organization
Quite the reverse, adopting such methods is surrender to the terrorists. Terrorists wish to inspire terror. If you start building an `everyone looks over everyone else's sholder' socety, we have created more fear than their original attacks did.
I have made no claim that there should not be efforts to combat terrorists. Tracking their money, tracking known members, sane levels of measures to make attacks harder, infiltration, forensic work after any attack etc. etc. are all reasonably effective, and can be done reasonably safely. Mass databases of people suspected of maybe perhaps having questionable thoughts or contacts are just too much destruction of our society with too potential little payback.
I have the Koran, Mein Kamf, the Bible The Communist Manifesto, The Taoi Te Ching and several other clearly subversive books in the next room, all bought online. I was just involved in a Usenet discussion of how one might best
No, they're not punishing anyone. They're just collecting a huge database of who downloaded the program and what purpose (depending on filename), plus assigning each computer a unique ID that ran the file.
As I said they are gossips. If I were to keep notes of which of my neighbours park illegally or may be cheating the benefit system, that would not make me a vigilante, just nosey. If I told others about it, that would make me a gossip and a bore, but not a vigilante.
Actually, even if they were doing something negative to the wannabe pirates, it's not clear to me that would be vigilaneism, not just a rather robust likeing for practical jokes.
``Here's a big, mysterious parcel, it contains a baloon, honest. Please hit yourself on the head hard... oh, was it a hammer?''
Tools are not imbued with some intrinsic legitimacy. That is determined by how they are used -- and who is judging them.
Well, yes exactly. And if the person trying to get a tool judges that their use for it will be illegitimate, who are we to argue with them.
I have a set of (notional:-)) security screwdrivers, I bought them in a shop. If someone tried to buy some secretly down a back alley, I think it would be reasonable to assume they wanted to do omething naughty with them, and didn't want them to be traceable.
The person who ran that code didn't intend to compromise their machine. Ergo, they trusted the source.
See under thick as pigshit.
Finally, wishing to perform an action in private does not imply that the action is illicit, or believed to be illicit by the person performing that action. Your contention to the contrary is equivilent to saying "If they are commiting no crime, you have nothing to hide/fear."
If there was even the slightest reason to believe that someone might feel the need to be private about any of these things, then the issue would be different. But the breach of privacy of the world finding out that someone plays Half Life (or whatever it was) is really quite trivial. They presumably stood in a shop where anyone could see them and bought it. (if we are assuming they actually lost the CD and so need the crack legitimately).
Your analogy is flawed; there are legitimate non-infringing uses of keygen programs and no-cd patches. It is also legal to distribute these tools.
It's legal to oen boxes which say `private, personal and mine, do not touch'.
The point is that anyoen with a legitimate use for a legitimate tool would get it from a legitimate, trusted source. Someone who grabs something they have no clue about from a place they know nothing about, and runs it on their PC without checking what it is:
Is clearly thick as pigshit.
Is up to something they consider illicit.
In any case, if something is legitimate, why would anyone object to the world knowing they tried to obtain it? We aren't talking about something embarassing.
Vigilantilism is wrong. Period. Rule of law is characterized by a state monopoly on justice.
But they aren't vigilanties, they are just moralists and gossips. So far as I can see they are not punishing anyone, just stating their opinion of (wannabe) pirates and telling the world that whoeveritis is one.
You've missed the point of the argument. The argument is that intentionally distributing trojan code for installation on machines you don't own or control is a crime;
Interesting question. If you clearly label it as something no one should touch (even if the label is false), but leave it where it can be taken, are you distributing it.
Imagine someone who packaged up some illegal-to-distribute physical substance in boxes labeled `private, personal and mine, do not touch', then left them around. Can they be done for distributing the substance if someone comes along and steals it?
You fear a growing police state more than you fear the threat of terrorism.
Well, indeed, historically states have done a lot more horrible things to a lot more people than terrorists.
If I can turn around your argument, you are worried about this `new' problem of terrorism, but terrorism isn't new, it is just newly high profile in America. As you point out, terrorism is and has been much closer to me. Litter bins in the streets here are designed to be blocked off, I wondered why when I moved here (Edinburgh) in the mid 80s, until I saw that they did it when there was a risk of bombs (eg political, royal or diplomatic events). I shared a flat with someone with family in Locherbie (fortunatly a different part). When I visited the USA a decade or so ago I found the lack of basic security at US airports suprising and vaguely worrying.
Consider the size of the risk. In the very worst year for terrorism in the US, 3000 people died. In the next year 42,000 people died on US roads. Are you 14 times as worried about that than terrorism? How draconic would measures against road accidents have to be before you objected?
The important thing to remember is that if we overreact, if we live in fear, if we start to dismantle our way of life, then we are not acting against terrorism, we are dancing to the terrorists' tune. This is what they want us to do.
If you know of a better solution than is currently being designed, than I would be interested to hear it.
An honest police force will do just as you recommend and determine suspect-traits from evidence gathered investigating the crime. A dishonest police force will have a list of people they want to get regardless of the crime committed, for them, the suspect-traits are just list of names.
More usual is a lazy, or politically driven, police force who just want anyone for this crime.
Either way, the police end up with a secret list of suspects that they need to investigate.
But we aren't, as I understand it, talking about finding people after the crime, but rather tracking people someone thingk may someday commit a crime. So it really is the list of usual suspects names in the desk, not the list of people who may be linked to a crime.
There is, ISTM, a big difference between a short term secret list of the people Plod thinks did the dirty deed he is investigating this week, and an indefinitely long lived list of people who Plod (or more likely his political masters) decides are clearly wrong-uns and who they are sure will do something wrong sometime. Let alone a list of people who are in some way linked to one of those supposed wrong-uns.
What happens when a crime is committed? The police round up suspects. How do they get that list of suspects?
One would hope that they start from the crime and compile the list, rather than starting from a list and trying to fit list members to the crime.
Otherwise we end up with Louis:
Realising the importance of the case, my men are rounding up twice the usual number of suspects.
The classic case in the UK is the `Birmingham Six'. Faced with the worst terrorist attack ther had ever been on the UK mainland, the police started with their list and worked really hard to find some suspects who fitted. Needless to say, those convicted were eventually found innocent and set free, and the people who did it were never caught and punished.
Unless you're operating under the assumption that the people they watch never, EVER turn out to be actual terrorists, I would think the reasons why that's an absolute necessity would be obvious.
I'm sure the East German secret police occasionaly caught someone who was an actual danger to people (rather than to the state). Would that justify their networks of secret informers etc?
I think we are well into ``those who would give up...'' terretory here.
The point of protecting the list from the private sector is because the people on the list are suspicious, but not guilty. Human nature is such that, if a person showed up on a public list of suspected terrorists their life would be ruined.
As someone else has pointed out, this kind of argument would have more weight if it seemed that these new systems were actually needed to combat the evil bad guys.
It seems that the US security services had all the data they needed to prevent the 9/11 attacks, but (understandably) did not join the dots. Ie what they were lacking was analysis and imagination. Those are hard to improve with techno-toys.
ISTM that proposals to gather ever more data are at best publicity efforts to make people think something is being done, at worst have other aims which are being disguised by talk about terrorists.
I think I prefer wanted posters in the post office to a secret list in the police commissioner's desk.
Also, see the Schnier's discussion in Beyond Fear of the effects of the massive number of false positives such systems must throw up (because actual terrorists are so very rare in the population).
BTW, definitely a book everyone should read, worth it just for the anecdote of the guy who has been flying around the US using a photo ID which says he is the martian ambassador, and only had a problem when they started checking for an expiration date. Wouldn't want the Ex-martian ambassador on your plane!
[...]so the government can share this information with the private sector to look for hits, without the private sector seeing the specific data.
I.e. so the state can put people it doesn't like on the list of people to be tracked with less risk that that person, or the rest of us, can know who is on the list.
Yeah, that's really reassuring.
Big brother may be watching you, but you have no way of knowing...
I seem to remember that the class was on symbolism, and the professor chose this book specifically because it had so much to do with naming and the power of names.
Hm. ISTM that the true-names in Earthsea are not a comment on the power of names in reality, but a metaphor for the difference between the name (Sparrowhawk) and the thing (Ged) -- in Earthsea the true-name is the thing itself, so manipulating the true-name is manipulating the thing.
So the story is about Dunny/Ged/Sparowhawk learning that he doesn't need to use archane methods to find the true name of the thing, which he can see is impossible and so runs scared, rather he needs to recognise the thing. By the rules of the Earthsea universe, once you recognise something for what it is, the true-name must be obvious.
Same thing happens in the court of the fountain near the start of The Farthest Shore when Ged recognises the young man who has arrived for what he is, and so knows his true-name.
As a nerdy analogy, a use-name is a variable which may point into memory (reality) if you are lucky. A true-name is the actual sequence of bits in memory. Once you are looking a the right bit of memory, you see the true-name directly.
In the real world, where we don't have true-names, the equivalent of knowing the true-name is precieving the thing itself (as opposed to it's appearance).
The Tao which can be spoken of is not the true Tao
The name which can be named is not the true name
The nameless is the origin of heaven and earth
the named is the mother of the ten thousand things
[Connie Willis vs LeGuin] Is a general warmth towards tradition and religion too politically incorrect to be assigned in those classes that are always pushing LeGuin?
Er, sorry, are we talking about the same LeGuin? The one whose works are perhaps the most religiously based in mainstream SF, with the possible exception of late PKD? The one who is so warm to tradition that she created a whole culture to be able to show us fragments to make us think about the importance of tradition (and of knowing when to throw it away)?
We read this book for a religion class in college and in our discussion focused on the importance of names in the book. That may be why I remember the story as basically a young man's quest to discover the name of the evil thing and thus defeat it.
I hope you didn't pay for that class:-). If that's the impression of the book you came away with, either someone missed the point entirely, or they were not able to get the point across.
Be warned, these are filed under "Juvenile Fiction" and are written at a Middle School/High School level.
Well, two of the handful of fantasy works I consider worth reading are Juveniles -- Earthsea and His Dark Materials. Done well, fantasy doesn't need to deal with things only of interest to adults, nor does it need complexity which would make it inpeniterable by young readers. The complexity should be in what one can draw from it, which is why the best can be re-read so sucessfully.
Earthsea gets that complexity from LeGuin's Taoist underpinnings. HDM from what is going on around the children where adults are doing their bizzare and meaningless (to children) things.
Narnia: kids walk through a wardrobe into a fantasy land.
Don't take this the wrong way, but are you Jerwish or of some other very non-christian background?
The only person I ever knew who had read the narnia books and didn't notice what they were was a Jewish friend. He liked them. Other people either like what they are doing or are able to set it aside.
They make my skin crawl, but they are definitely not just ``kids walk into a wardrobe...''.
I read very little fantasy because almost all of it is drivel written by people who don't understand there is more to it than the same old plots with elves and swords thrown in (just like pseudo SF which is just the same old plots with lazers and space ships). Finding any that is worth reading is almost impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, they usually build those kinds of thing out in the boonies, where land is cheap.
Direct manipulation is metaphor to allow non physical things
Yeah, that makes sense. It's not as if I could go into the next room and flip through my CDs, I clearly need a computer program to simulate the experience.
Direct manipulation is metaphor to allow non physical things. A direct manipulation interface to a simulation of real things is ratherpointless.
What we need is not a slighly fancier and no douby much slower version of an existing metaphor, we need new metaphors to do things which are hard to do with direct manipulation and other existing ones.
Eg we have two styles of interface for configuring complex systems. Language based (ie edit a text file) interfaces are easy once you know the language. Forms based (type-ins, selectors, buttong, menus etc) are a basicly simple minded syntax constrained editors for a language based model. To make, for instance, computers easy for non-tehnical people to configure we need a completely new metaphor, and have needed one for a couple of decades. Don't ask me what, but 3D forms are not a step forward.
Bollocks. A tomato is a fruit, just as a lettuce leaf is a leaf. It's not about evolution, it's about which bit of the plant it is. The error is in imagining that a fruit can not be a vegetable.
Same thing happened with the Dinosaur formerly known as Brontosaurous. A bunch of jumped up greybeards with nothing to do decided that Brontosaurous and Apatasaurous were the same beast and that their idiotic rules were more important than common sense.
Yeah, it would be perfect common sense to have two official names for the same thing. Wouldn't be at all confusing. Not at all. While we are at it perhaps we should scrap that stupid `venus' and call it `Hesperus' or `Phosphorus' depending on the time of day. Hell, why stick at two, we could have a personal name each for every namable concept at every time of day!
But why should you? These people had not signed non-disclosure agreements, the things in the package belonged to them -- they can surely be as sloppy about the security of their property as they like.
But that's the point, it wasn't distributed. It was just left lying around.
It is if the issue is the trade off between one form of relatively small risk (terrorism) and giving the state the ability to do things in secret. Every aspect of their operation we allow them to make secret is one we have lost all limits on. The only measure of how bad the results might be we then have is `what could a state with no oversight do with this power'.
The question is whether the democracies that are fighting terrorists can come up with a good security solution that will protect their citizens' rights and yet not be vulnerable to terrorism.
That is a very silly question, since nothing can be invulnerable. We are merely talking of perhaps slightly reduciung the vulnerability, and trading that off against the negatives of secret watch lists.
This discussion is not about the rule of law, which I'm sure we both support. It is about how to go about enforcing the law.
No it isn't. We are talking about what the state is allowed to do to people who have committed no crime (or in some cases no crime since they were last caught and punished).
Harassing people or not allowing them on aircraft because they fit a profile is not enforcing the law. No law has been broken, and in almost all cases no law would be committed if the system was not in place (see other discussions of false positives). This is about social engineering: dividing the population into groups with different rights in the belief thatthis will be for the overall good of society.
The threat would have to be bloody huge before I'd find that acceptable. It ws perhaps just about justifiable during WWII. Maybe. Even then, the US and UK both went too far then with their internment camps.
You imply, either that such Lists are so flawed from the start that they should not be used to pursue suspected terrorists or that such Lists are good in theory, but current practice has shown that they are being used wrongly. [...] Which do you believe?
I believe that such lists have never shown a reasonable trade off between usefulness and safety, and since the problems with them are down to human nature (of the people who operate such schemes), there is no reason to believe they will be better now. I believe that once such systems are created they are bloody hard to destroy. I believe such lists create the very kind of paranoia that the terrorists are trying to create.
More importantly, do you have a fix?
Yes, don't create the list in the first place. If the list is absolutely politically unstoppable, make sure it is public, so the many stupidities it will inevitably contain can be laughed at by everyone and the whole thing can collpse into a joke as soon as possible.
I repeat that the choice of abandoning such a tool is an unacceptable choice.
To you clearly. ISTM we have survived a long time without it.
Abandoning such methods is equivalent to an unspoken surrender to terrorist organization
Quite the reverse, adopting such methods is surrender to the terrorists. Terrorists wish to inspire terror. If you start building an `everyone looks over everyone else's sholder' socety, we have created more fear than their original attacks did.
I have made no claim that there should not be efforts to combat terrorists. Tracking their money, tracking known members, sane levels of measures to make attacks harder, infiltration, forensic work after any attack etc. etc. are all reasonably effective, and can be done reasonably safely. Mass databases of people suspected of maybe perhaps having questionable thoughts or contacts are just too much destruction of our society with too potential little payback.
I have the Koran, Mein Kamf, the Bible The Communist Manifesto, The Taoi Te Ching and several other clearly subversive books in the next room, all bought online. I was just involved in a Usenet discussion of how one might best
As I said they are gossips. If I were to keep notes of which of my neighbours park illegally or may be cheating the benefit system, that would not make me a vigilante, just nosey. If I told others about it, that would make me a gossip and a bore, but not a vigilante.
Actually, even if they were doing something negative to the wannabe pirates, it's not clear to me that would be vigilaneism, not just a rather robust likeing for practical jokes.
``Here's a big, mysterious parcel, it contains a baloon, honest. Please hit yourself on the head hard... oh, was it a hammer?''
Well, yes exactly. And if the person trying to get a tool judges that their use for it will be illegitimate, who are we to argue with them.
I have a set of (notional:-)) security screwdrivers, I bought them in a shop. If someone tried to buy some secretly down a back alley, I think it would be reasonable to assume they wanted to do omething naughty with them, and didn't want them to be traceable.
The person who ran that code didn't intend to compromise their machine. Ergo, they trusted the source.
See under thick as pigshit.
Finally, wishing to perform an action in private does not imply that the action is illicit, or believed to be illicit by the person performing that action. Your contention to the contrary is equivilent to saying "If they are commiting no crime, you have nothing to hide/fear."
If there was even the slightest reason to believe that someone might feel the need to be private about any of these things, then the issue would be different. But the breach of privacy of the world finding out that someone plays Half Life (or whatever it was) is really quite trivial. They presumably stood in a shop where anyone could see them and bought it. (if we are assuming they actually lost the CD and so need the crack legitimately).
It's legal to oen boxes which say `private, personal and mine, do not touch'.
The point is that anyoen with a legitimate use for a legitimate tool would get it from a legitimate, trusted source. Someone who grabs something they have no clue about from a place they know nothing about, and runs it on their PC without checking what it is:
- Is clearly thick as pigshit.
- Is up to something they consider illicit.
In any case, if something is legitimate, why would anyone object to the world knowing they tried to obtain it? We aren't talking about something embarassing.But they aren't vigilanties, they are just moralists and gossips. So far as I can see they are not punishing anyone, just stating their opinion of (wannabe) pirates and telling the world that whoeveritis is one.
Interesting question. If you clearly label it as something no one should touch (even if the label is false), but leave it where it can be taken, are you distributing it.
Imagine someone who packaged up some illegal-to-distribute physical substance in boxes labeled `private, personal and mine, do not touch', then left them around. Can they be done for distributing the substance if someone comes along and steals it?
Well, indeed, historically states have done a lot more horrible things to a lot more people than terrorists.
If I can turn around your argument, you are worried about this `new' problem of terrorism, but terrorism isn't new, it is just newly high profile in America. As you point out, terrorism is and has been much closer to me. Litter bins in the streets here are designed to be blocked off, I wondered why when I moved here (Edinburgh) in the mid 80s, until I saw that they did it when there was a risk of bombs (eg political, royal or diplomatic events). I shared a flat with someone with family in Locherbie (fortunatly a different part). When I visited the USA a decade or so ago I found the lack of basic security at US airports suprising and vaguely worrying.
Consider the size of the risk. In the very worst year for terrorism in the US, 3000 people died. In the next year 42,000 people died on US roads. Are you 14 times as worried about that than terrorism? How draconic would measures against road accidents have to be before you objected?
The important thing to remember is that if we overreact, if we live in fear, if we start to dismantle our way of life, then we are not acting against terrorism, we are dancing to the terrorists' tune. This is what they want us to do.
If you know of a better solution than is currently being designed, than I would be interested to hear it.
I always liked the rule of law.
More usual is a lazy, or politically driven, police force who just want anyone for this crime.
Either way, the police end up with a secret list of suspects that they need to investigate.
But we aren't, as I understand it, talking about finding people after the crime, but rather tracking people someone thingk may someday commit a crime. So it really is the list of usual suspects names in the desk, not the list of people who may be linked to a crime.
There is, ISTM, a big difference between a short term secret list of the people Plod thinks did the dirty deed he is investigating this week, and an indefinitely long lived list of people who Plod (or more likely his political masters) decides are clearly wrong-uns and who they are sure will do something wrong sometime. Let alone a list of people who are in some way linked to one of those supposed wrong-uns.
One would hope that they start from the crime and compile the list, rather than starting from a list and trying to fit list members to the crime.
Otherwise we end up with Louis:
The classic case in the UK is the `Birmingham Six'. Faced with the worst terrorist attack ther had ever been on the UK mainland, the police started with their list and worked really hard to find some suspects who fitted. Needless to say, those convicted were eventually found innocent and set free, and the people who did it were never caught and punished.I'm sure the East German secret police occasionaly caught someone who was an actual danger to people (rather than to the state). Would that justify their networks of secret informers etc?
I think we are well into ``those who would give up...'' terretory here.
As someone else has pointed out, this kind of argument would have more weight if it seemed that these new systems were actually needed to combat the evil bad guys.
It seems that the US security services had all the data they needed to prevent the 9/11 attacks, but (understandably) did not join the dots. Ie what they were lacking was analysis and imagination. Those are hard to improve with techno-toys.
ISTM that proposals to gather ever more data are at best publicity efforts to make people think something is being done, at worst have other aims which are being disguised by talk about terrorists.
I think I prefer wanted posters in the post office to a secret list in the police commissioner's desk.
BTW, definitely a book everyone should read, worth it just for the anecdote of the guy who has been flying around the US using a photo ID which says he is the martian ambassador, and only had a problem when they started checking for an expiration date. Wouldn't want the Ex-martian ambassador on your plane!
I.e. so the state can put people it doesn't like on the list of people to be tracked with less risk that that person, or the rest of us, can know who is on the list.
Yeah, that's really reassuring.
Big brother may be watching you, but you have no way of knowing...
Hm. ISTM that the true-names in Earthsea are not a comment on the power of names in reality, but a metaphor for the difference between the name (Sparrowhawk) and the thing (Ged) -- in Earthsea the true-name is the thing itself, so manipulating the true-name is manipulating the thing.
So the story is about Dunny/Ged/Sparowhawk learning that he doesn't need to use archane methods to find the true name of the thing, which he can see is impossible and so runs scared, rather he needs to recognise the thing. By the rules of the Earthsea universe, once you recognise something for what it is, the true-name must be obvious.
Same thing happens in the court of the fountain near the start of The Farthest Shore when Ged recognises the young man who has arrived for what he is, and so knows his true-name.
As a nerdy analogy, a use-name is a variable which may point into memory (reality) if you are lucky. A true-name is the actual sequence of bits in memory. Once you are looking a the right bit of memory, you see the true-name directly.
In the real world, where we don't have true-names, the equivalent of knowing the true-name is precieving the thing itself (as opposed to it's appearance).
Er, sorry, are we talking about the same LeGuin? The one whose works are perhaps the most religiously based in mainstream SF, with the possible exception of late PKD? The one who is so warm to tradition that she created a whole culture to be able to show us fragments to make us think about the importance of tradition (and of knowing when to throw it away)?
I hope you didn't pay for that class:-). If that's the impression of the book you came away with, either someone missed the point entirely, or they were not able to get the point across.
Well, two of the handful of fantasy works I consider worth reading are Juveniles -- Earthsea and His Dark Materials. Done well, fantasy doesn't need to deal with things only of interest to adults, nor does it need complexity which would make it inpeniterable by young readers. The complexity should be in what one can draw from it, which is why the best can be re-read so sucessfully.
Earthsea gets that complexity from LeGuin's Taoist underpinnings. HDM from what is going on around the children where adults are doing their bizzare and meaningless (to children) things.
Don't take this the wrong way, but are you Jerwish or of some other very non-christian background?
The only person I ever knew who had read the narnia books and didn't notice what they were was a Jewish friend. He liked them. Other people either like what they are doing or are able to set it aside.
They make my skin crawl, but they are definitely not just ``kids walk into a wardrobe...''.
Never read it, who is the author?
I read very little fantasy because almost all of it is drivel written by people who don't understand there is more to it than the same old plots with elves and swords thrown in (just like pseudo SF which is just the same old plots with lazers and space ships). Finding any that is worth reading is almost impossible.