My first paid coding job (an audio file editor for a now long dead format) was written entirely to Kraftwerk's Autobahn. I had a stereo WAV file of it and just let it run for two straight weeks.
I coudn't listen to it for years afterwards, but at the time it worked really well.
Mostly techno and house stuff, a lot of it early 90's stuff from my days as a purple-haired, multiply-pierced, chain smoking, French grad student. Yes, I code while listening to the kind of Eurotrash any self respecting geek ought to be embarassed by. Snap, Captain Hollywood Project, Amber, La Bouche, KLF, Technotronics... it's awful I know. It just works, what can I say?
Otherwise, a lot of 80's dance stuff - Bananarama, Corey Hart, Men without Hats, Berlin (anybody here besides me remember Berlin's "The Metro"?), Blondie, Prince (before you needed Unicode to write his name), among others.
I do listen to other kinds of music - French bands, classics, old punk, mushy 80's stuff that makes me all nostalgic, even some grunge. And some contemporary pop. But it does me no good when I code. If it doesn't have a beat, it does me no good at work.
The Federal TM database can be searched in person at 2900 Crystal Drive, 2nd Floor, Arlington, Virginia. No online version is available yet. Many law offices keep updated copies on CDROM.
At least, none of the Americans here should be surprised.
For those of you who do not live in the USA, most of you probably live in countries where companies and wealthy individuals are either forbidden or restricted in their contributions to politicians and their parties (assuming you live a nation with a partisan democracy.) In the US, this was once half true. Until 1974, there were some very heavy restrictions on giving to American politicians. Most campaigns - even those of big, wealthy, well-known candidates - ran on a shoestring. Many American politicians were wealthy, but running for Federal office frequently cost them everything they had. Other people and companies found it very difficult to directly, or even indirectly, give to parties or candidates.
In 1974, the elections law changed and a very big loophole was created: anyone could give as much money as they wanted to political parties (but not candidates) and organisations interested in particular issues could make nearly unlimited gifts to particular candidates who supported their cause. During the Reagan administration (81-89, and 89-93 if you count the uninspiring Bush administration), many of the remaining restraints on lobbying (cutting deals directly with elected politicians) and campaign funding (buying political favours in advance) were loosened, and a Supreme Court ruling in the early 90's (the year eludes me right now) determined that political contributions were a form of free speech and could not be denied under the law.
The result was a near complete takeover of the government by well funded interests. Many of these were corporations and wealthy individuals, but some were large pressure groups like AARP (the lobby for the interests of the elderly.) In this political climate, it became necessary, if any kind of functioning government was to exist, to displace the centres of power to unelected officials, and state and local governments. Most civil servants have far greater restrictions on what kinds of favours they can receive, and are require to make public disclosures of the gifts they get.
That is part of why the Federal Reserve Bank has come to act in the same capacity that, in most countries, an elected minister of commerce or industry might act. It is also part of the reason why the military and law enforcement agencies are so frequently able to act without legal restraint.
This system makes no sense to most outsiders. I will tell the non-Americans here that what is amazing is not that the systems works so badly, but that it works at all. However, American government is a lot like American football (the one with the egg-shaped ball): if you read the rules on paper, they will make no sense, but once you start to watch it in action, the logic begins to appear.
America is, quite simply, a place where money is usually the only thing that counts in governance. If you have money, you can lobby government, contribute to campaigns, get your ideas heard, and if all else fails, mount a media campaign to get the public riled up. As a last ditch effort, you can always use the courts to try to block enforcement of whatever policies you oppose.
And if you are poor, few media will cover your interests in any depth, your access to government is minimal, and you have little genuine legal recourse.
Now, many of you will say, "But it's no different here." Trust me, it is different. This kind of activity is far more common in the US than anywhere else in the world.
This process takes years to run to completion or to create stable policies, but eventually, it does - after a fashion - work. Americans have undertaken a political experiment as breathtaking and as pervasive the original American revolution: they have created a free market government. If you have the money, and a policy is worth enough time and trouble to you, you can make it happen. Government policy has become a market average of all those campaign contributions, expensive lobbying, lawsuits and media campaigns.
In this context, it is hardly surprising when the largest company in the world (in terms of market capitalisation) tries to buy not simply changes in policy, but a weakening of law enforcement when they are in trouble. Defense contractors lobby directly for more guns and fighter planes when they need the orders, regardless of real need for the weapons. Drug companies lobby for weaker enforcement of the food and drug laws. Car companies lobby for weaker gas milage restrictions so they can sell expensive SUV's. None of what Microsoft is trying to do is shocking or unusual.
Microsoft will fail so long as those interests who favour continuing enforcment of anti-trust laws have more money and time to spend on it than Microsoft has. Microsoft will succeed if others facing trust problems (like MCI-Worldcom, AT+T, Boeing, and others) have more money on their side.
Full disclosure: I am not American, but I've lived here on and off more than half of my life, since I was 9 years old. I speak the language, I went to school here and I've worked here. I have no great love for the US government, but I do have a great deal of love for the fat paycheck I get working here. I know America as well as most Americans do. Nonetheless, it's their country and if they want free market government, that's their choice. Make no mistake, Americans who are sufficiently aware of poltics to vote all know that their government works this way. Unlike a dictatorship, this is something they have a genuine choice about.
But, do keep what I've said in mind when you next ask yourselves, "Why do Americans allow these things that seem so plainly dumb?" Remember this, the next time a politician in your country tells you that you ought to be more like Americans (and I especially mean you Brits here) just what kind of system they are talking about.
There are some indirect ways to give money to candidates, but the major reason Canada doesn't have the same campaign finance problems is because campaigns are publicly subsidised, and that TV ads aren't usually purchased, the broadcasters are required to air them on a schedule of Elections Canada's choosing (or the provincial equivalent for a local election.)
I'm working on a project that has to support exactly two languages - English and Japanese. It runs only in a console window on UNIX. To do this, I have to support five characters sets in curses, a major headache in and of itself.
I'm all for using Unicode accross the board - this would be an extremely good thing, but it doesn't even begin to solve internationalisation problems. The major european languages use variants of the Roman or Cyrillic alphabets and place spaces between words, as do many other languages that have been alphabetised in the last two centuries. That can be handled easily enough. However, even among these languages, there are some serious issues. Alphabetical order is different from English in many European langauges, such as Swedish, Spanish, Icelandic, and even French (just to name a few). In languages like Hungarian, Finnish and Turkish, complex hyphenation rules have to be taken into account. Indexing of compound characters can be real nightmare. And in German, ü, ö and ä are sometimes indexed with ue, oe and ae for orthographic reasons. Yet another complication: books in French have the table of contents in back. Structured publishing software has to take this kind of thing into account too.
Going global, this is just the beginning of the problems. Chinese, Japanese and Korean don't usually employ spaces between words at all, messing up line justification algorithms. Korean writers sometimes use Sino-Korean (Chinese characters) and sometimes the Korean syllabary for the same words - should they be indexed together? In Japanese, unusual kanji characters are often accompanied by hiragana characters that are either above or to the right of the kanji to aid in pronunciation and comprehension - this is called a ruby, and it's an I18N nightmare. Korean sometimes does the same thing, as do the Chinese speakers in Taiwan with their bopomofo system. Many Chinese characters have two forms - a traditional one still used by many overseas Chinese and simplified characters used in the PRC. This is another indexing problem. Vietnamese uses a very complex variant on the Roman alphabet today, but only a century ago, they too still used Chinese characters, and that double system imposes still more constraints. Also, some Japanese, Korean and Chinese texts are written top to bottom and right to left. Books are generally printed right to left, the reverse of western order. Oh, and I won't bother you with the utter nightmare of alphabetical order in Chinese. Take a look at a Chinese dictionary if you want to see it in action.
Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Thai, Hebrew and Yiddish (among other languages) are written right to left, and Arabic and Hebrew sometimes write the vowels and sometimes don't. This is a major consideration when doing, for example, searches in documents. Allowing a terminal or any application to accept characters in both right to left and left to right (and top to bottom for traditional Mongolian and sometimes for other Asian langauges, as described above) is not very easy, and to truly internationalise, it has to be done across the board. Not to mention the frequent occaisions when both data in the local language and English or some other western language have to be mixed.
Indian and southeast Asian langauges each have their own alphabet, but they are often derived from common sources (usually Sanskrit). Although the letters in each langauge may be different, their are certain equivalencies between them that are often taken into account when indexing or transcribing. The old Indian telegraph system used to use these similarities to provide a unified code for data exchage. How is an I18N system to take these into account?
The Unified Canadian Syllabic system (used for some dialects of Cree, Ojibwa and Inuktitut) has compound letters that have to be taken into account, as well as a unique system of rotating the letter to indicate part of its phonetic value. This matters in making data entry systems (e.g. keyboards) and in alphabetisation.
And of course, it's a huge nightmare when one system has to provide for unknown combinations of languages, e.g. a Russian who needs to use Japanese, a Pakistani who does business in Chinese, or an Israeli linguist doing work in Cree.
And, lastly and even less pleasantly, an I18N project has to take into account all the existing half-assed standards for encoding and working with these langauges. There are at least three different systems for Japanese alone (EUC, JIS, Shift-JIS), and four for Chinese (GB, Big5, JIS, EUC). The dominant system for encoding Inuktitut is just a font the main newspaper in Iqaluit made up so they can put their articles on the web (Nunatsiaq News).
There are no simple answers for internationalisation, and we can't just tear down all the existing software and rebuild it to work right. I hope the OSS community is up to this because this is a major project that has to be undertaken in a unified way, from top to bottom, or else it will not succeed.
NASDAQ suspended trading in CORL at 2:50 PM EST, the same time as TSX suspended it. That does not mean this is an SEC action, exchanges can suspend trading anytime there are serious questions, since stock markets are private ventures that are, in principle, subject only to the terms of their private contract.
Generally, it is pretty awkward to have a company suspended on one exchange and not another. Usually, the exchanges cooperate with each other and the regulators on these matters, since getting blackballed by the cops would be very, very bad for an exchange.
Basically that's it. At my company, there are certain times that are blocked out for employees above a certain rank (within a few weeks of quarterlies for instance) and everyone gets notified. For the top officers and board memebers, the schedule is even more limiting. When you run a company, they stock had better do good, because you'll have a hard time selling it while you work there.
Canada, ironically, does not have an equivalent of the SEC. This is part of the problem. Corel is being investigated by the Ontario Securities Commission, a provincial body. Financial markets are not directly regulated by the Feds and the provinces are, in some cases, quite deep into the pockets of the business community.
Ontario likes to think of itself as the home of high-tech in Canada. They may hang Cowpland, but they won't touch Corel in any way that might seriously hurt the company. The NDP might have stepped aside and let the courts decide, but the PC will never allow it to get that far out of hand.
I agree. (I'd volunteer if I had the time too - or got offered some money:^)
I have an undergrad degree in Physics, and after flunking the Master's, got into linguistics. My science and math training have done me no end of good there. I would like to add the following to the list of requirements, from my experience:
1- This person must be literate enough in the sciences to follow the literature. Maybe not to understand everything, but to at least get the gist of major papers and to be able to understand the abstracts. This means understanding basic statistics, physics, modern biology (including the main issues in neodarwinism) and at least a little chemistry. The most important these, perhaps even more important than an in-depth understanding of the scientific method, is statistics. Stats lie most convincingly.
2- They need to know who to call to understand the bits they don't understand.
3- They need to know where to look for good material and to do the research on claims put forth in the popular press. These days, too much science is getting published without proper peer review, without controls, and directly into the popular press. It's getting harder to tell the truth from the fiction, because the truth is pretty weird but the popular press still can't get more than a minimum of facts straight. This means know how to wade through the preprints and the journals and do research.
4- Some exposure to science culture would be a good thing. I know, we're all down on cultural studies of the sciences, but I assure you science remains as culturally foreign as Mongolia and very little like its portrayal science fiction.
5- Most of the science issues that touch on the/. community relate to the odd world of cognitive science. Although some physics and bio material get posted here, cogsci dominates by far. If there's one relavant sub-domain, that's it. It would be nice to get someone conversant in the subject as science editor.
That's all I can think of right now. The odds of actually finding such a person is minimal - all the people I know who meet these criteria either are poor communicators, or, like me, they work in computing to pay the bills and haven't necessarily the time.
I think MTV's been downhill since Martha Quinn quit. (God, that makes me old doesn't it?)
I bailed on the USA in '91 - right after graduation. MTV was still watchable. I came back in '94 and got cable in '95. Since then, I only watch MTV for Beavis and Butthead.
I hate being a member of the VH1 generation. I want my MTV.
On October 13th at 10 pm MTV will debut True Life: I'm a Hacker reported by MTV's Serena Altschul. Although most of this show will feature young hoodlums who get their kicks from breaking into other people's systems, the L0pht is also interviewed showing the more productive side of hacking."
I'm guessing MTV wasn't really interested in the productive side of hacking. The MTV press release (http://www.l0pht.com/misc/hackerrel.html) mentions it in only one sentence: "Finally, the show examines a more productive side of hacking, visiting The L0pht, a group of Boston hackers who develop security software for major companies, and act as advisors to the U.S. Government on how they can maximize security mechanisms on their own systems."
An exerp from elsewhere in the press release:
"Venturing into the inner-most sanctums of this cyber subculture, 'True Life: I'm a Hacker' explores how hackers communicate with one another and where they learn the tricks of the trade."
Hackers have inner-most sanctums? Boy, am I missing out...
Quoting one of their subjects: "It's like being God."
Geez, and here I am wasting my time sitting in a cubicle gaining weight when I could be Godlike, just because I know what int main(int argc, char *argv[]) means.
"Through on-line chats and talk shows cybercast to thousands of their peers worldwide, many young hackers, who otherwise would have simply blended in, have an opportunity to achieve major levels of recognition and adulation."
A '/' is a barre oblique, but the word "slash" is a lot closer to "tiret" in meaning. "tiretpoint.org" is a lot neater a domain name than "barreobliquepoint.org", unfortunately, "-." isn't quite the same as "\.". Or maybe just "barrepoint.org" makes more sense ("|." - close enough).
Personally, I like a Deutschlish "Slaschpunkt.org" a lot better. German has a way of getting coughed out that fits the programmer mindset a lot better than French morphology.
I like the ZDTV standard of just dropping the "http://" when they give urls and saying "com" as "calm", "org" just the way it looks, and national domains are spelled out (".ca" as "dot-cee-aye"). If you've had a browser more than 10 minutes, you already know how to make a URL.
That pronunciation strategy works a lot better in translation too. es-el-`a-es-hache-de'-^o-te'-point-comme seems a lot easier to work with.
I assume Radio-Canada will get on that bandwagon one of these days.
Trust me, no linguist will use this. It would be like getting a perl user to switch to TCL - they would carp for years about all the things they can't do the way they want to, assuming they can even do all the things they want.
Other types of tech will probably steer just as clear of it when they realise how frustrating it is to compose for an artificial semantically unambiguous language.
Chomsky revises everything he thinks every 10 years or so. The existence of a universal grammar of the type Chomsky currently advocates (and it is by no means clear that this is true) still doesn't necessarily mean that we can construct a common, useable language for everyone. Remember, every language used in the world is one of those "special cases."
Chomsky claims (despite evidence to the contrary) that syntax can be analysed apart of semantics, implying that if we could agree to a universal word list and definitions, it might be possible to devise an equally neutral grammar to use for machine translation. However, it is quite clear that words, even pseudosynonyms, don't mean the same thing in different languages.
My inclination is that Chomsky is just plain wrong about it in the first place: that there is no universal underlying order of constituents, but rather that human language structure are restrained to a subset of all valid ways of organising information linearly, and that those constraints are biological.
This means that any real machine translation requires us first to make real progress in understanding how humans process and store linguistic information. This field is in its infancy.
There's no real technical information on the website, and no evidence at all that a linguist is actually participating in this project. It sounds like a bunch of computer scientists who think they understand language.
Actually, the only real data they offer suggests that they are recreating the work Anna Wierzbicka was doing in the 80's with her ad-hoc theory of semantics. She ultimately showed why it wouldn't work, and now criticises the idea of using controlled language at all for machine understanding.
No, these people don't seem to have any idea what they've gotten themselves into. This kind of thing was what I did graduate work on. Controlled language is a useful idea, but a very limited one, and using pivot languages for translation will only take you about as far as Systrans' system (the one used in Babelfish.)
There are much more sophisticated efforts going on elsewhere, and even those are getting bogged down in the ugly reality of natural language. This will languish and go nowhere. With some luck, some more realistic project, like some of the automatic text summary projects and natural language to knowlege base projects will eventually produce a usable product, but this UN university effort sounds like a waste of time.
Alright, "junk" is perhaps a bit harsh, but really, how useful were Plato's insights? Or Aristotle's? Science is certainly no longer based on axiomatic reasoning, nor is Plato's view of humanity particularly well received anywhere. (Full disclosure: I suspect Plato of being a crank. Aristotle tried his best, but when was the last time anyone quoted him in a serious context?)
How should one construct a philosophical system when everyone in history who has claimed to be right on any basis other than empiricism has ultimately proven to be horribly, horribly wrong?
The only conclusion I can draw is that any attempt to devise such a philosophy would probably lead to anarchic confusion as each party was forced to investigate their own prejudices before attempting to make sense of phenomena - which strikes me as the perfect description of postmodernism.
Literary criticism, or even cultural analysis, lends itself poorly to empirical analysis. Postmodernism has served literary studies fairly well. It is broad-based, tolerant, and evades the fallacy of objectivism that haunted the incredibly useless structuralism that preceded it. I'm still very fond of Bakhtin (bless his Trotskyist heart), even when I don't agree with him. Foucault is reasonable when he's awake. Saussure is often claimed by postmodernists (I wonder what he would think of that) as is Roman Jakobson, and both are, IMHO, rightly well regarded for very scientific analyses of language as well as somewhat more amorphous analyses of semiotics.
Cultural studies are nearly impossible when someone believes their world view to be so right that anyone else's is just silly native superstition. This was what the cultural wing of the postmodernist camp was rebelling against. When you can't ever objectively look at another society, what options do you have outside of some sort of crypto-postmodernism?
Now, the wrong conclusion to draw form this is that reality itself is a product of how you think about it. That is bunk, and some postmodernists do press that point of view. That is antithetical to the scientific method.
Science does have a way of resolving its conflicts, but the humanites and some of the social sciences never really have, and in that context postmodernism makes a lot of sense, in broad outlines if not specifics. I rail against scum like Latour and Lacan as hard as the next guy when they pass of a lot of nonsense as wisdom, and they are usually at their worst when they talk about the sciences. But I can't quite go from the Typhoid Marys of the French Disease to saying that pomo is essentially anti-science. That Latour is, sure.
But who among the structuralists, or their 19th century predecessors was doing better? Nietzsche? Marx (who would probably have hated the pomos)? Hegel? The era's largely forgotten French philosophers? Confusius? Calvin (please, dear God, don't let Calvinism become fashionable)? Each had their own version of absolute truth that was completely unable to stand the test of empiricism. At best, their systems were axiomatic and therefore of no importance.
There are some classics of philosophy that are worth the trouble of understanding, I don't mean to reject the previous 4000 years of thought, but those are not usually the things people disagree about. I can't remember that last time I heard an argument over Cartesiansim outside of linguistics. The existence of God is something of a nonsequiter. Human liberty and political science is just as ill-suited to empiricism. Economics has its own problems. No, the postmodernists are dealing with a confusing world at least as well as their predecessors, in part by admitting that it's confusing.
The pomos are pretty harmless and occaisionally, when sufficiently modest and aware of their limitations, make important observations. Like every other movement in history, they have plenty of tenured cranks and extremists, and they are embarassed by them, but the replacement of postmoderism by one of its predecessors is unlikely at best, and I suspect undesireable.
The Diamond Age described a future that has gone back, sort of, to an earlier set of values. However, this too is revealed to be a lot less than utopian, and not always a good idea. I already put far more of my time than I like in a cubicle, working for a company with no vested interest in my well being, it would be worse to be forced to spend time in the company church and put my children in the company school in order to keep my privileges. The Neo-Victorians struck me as a very unpleasant society to live in. They didn't strike me as having much at all to do with common sense, rather they were the expression of a society tired of having to think about what values they ought to have and whether other people had the right to their own values. Instead, they substituted a complex social structure that was no more than a cultural invention, not because it was right but because they thought they needed to believe in something, even if they didn't know what.
I am reminded of a remark in Stephenson's online essay ("In the beginning there was the comand line" - I'm too lazy to look it up). Paraphrasing: people still believe there is an absolute right and wrong, even if they think that they have to tolerate other people's ideas of right and wrong to survive. That may well be true, but it doesn't make one set of values right and another wrong. It means that people have to have a sense of right and wrong, even if there is no way of objectively determining who is right against some absolute set of values.
That idea doesn't seem to me to contradict any of the non-lunatic parts of the postmodern world. Indeed, it seems to validate many of them.
If I may paraphrase Friedman here, somewhere there may be two postmodernists who agree with each other, but I am not one of them.
Actually, I wouldn't characterise myself as especially postmodern either, just as someone who thinks that the junk that preceded the postmodernists wasn't any more useful. Going back to more rigourous philosophies would be an interesting trick, since I am unaware of any well defined philosophy that would genuinely qualify itself as rigourous (the sole exception being objectivism, which I can only qualify as a sick, twisted joke.)
Pomos aren't well described using simple declarative sentences. To say that postmodernism *is* something is almost always false, which seems to be exactly how most pomos like it. That can be frustrating, and it certainly makes it nearly impossible to say what postmodernism is, but then the same can be said of most philosophy and ALL literary criticism. To characterise it as anti-science (at least, as anymore anti-science than, say, the US Department of Defence) isn't really accurate. Ignorant of science, I might agree with that, but then so are probably the majority of/. readers (and at least some pomos are honest enough to admit it.)
Certainly saying that pomos "object violently to those who disagree with them, because [they] despair of being able to resolve differences rationally" is a stereotyped canard. Have you ever seen rational arguments in any university department (the hard sciences NOT excluded)?
Reason has little to do with debate at the best of times. Try arguing that Linux is anything less than the greatest thing since sliced bread here on/., or suggest that perhaps key escrow encryption isn't a sign of the coming apocalypse. Few people will respond with well reasoned rhetoric.
Here's another important point you make: 'The postmodernists don't believe in "truth" or "reason", so how can you "reason" with someone with a different "belief system"?'
Do scientists believe in truth? In an absolute sense, the answer is a resounding NO. All science is tentative and subject to review. High-energy physics (my old line of work) takes for granted that someone, someday, somewhere will blow the whole apparatus of quantum theory and relativity out of the water.
Do scientists believe in reason? In the old Kantian sense, NO. Pure reason can't accomplish anything - there is no substitute for an instance of empirical results. Experiment and simple observation trump reason every time and arguments predicated on reason alone are viewed with deep suspicion. Hunches, on the other hand, are often quite well regarded, although they can never substitute for experimental results.
Stephenson is not ahead of the curve here. Ahead of the curve might have been noting modern trends in academia for what they are, a mixture of frauds looking for tenure and sincere researchers who, like most people, can't always get ahead of their prejudices. This is as true in a physics or economics department as in sociology or ethnic studies. (Actually, I'd say it was most true in economics - I have never seen more intolerance than in an Ivy League Econ department.) Slagging academia is behind the curve - Sokal was there five years ago and he at was attacking those who were plainly frauds instead of painting whole bodies of thought as intolerant.
This is not said to provide any comfort to those who treat Lacan as anything but a fraud, or who expect much out of Derrida other than that he share his drugs. I don't think highly of postmodern theory, but I got there by trying to find out what the principles had actually said (when they were comprehensible at all). And there is much to be admired and considered there, as well as a lot of crap. And, as another/.'er has noted in their sig, in any large group of people most will be idiots.
Britain was the last big EU holdout for encryption controls. With some luck, this will mean a European directive on the subject that won't be encumbered by reservations about some states wanting escrow.
Whoever's in charge in Washington won't be happy though. I remember how they got the EC to kill encrypted digital cellular phones way back in 89 or 90.
I'm about 2/3 of the way through Cryptonomicon (so please don't spoil it for me!) and I'd really like to recommend this book, but I can't. Not that it's a terrible read. I'll take Cryptonomicon over Tom Clancy's latest piece of trash any day. (That doesn't say much, I'll read the nutritional information on the side of a bag of M&M's over a Tom Clancy novel.) The characters aren't badly drawn although they can get a little too cliche. The scenes are fairly well set and the book doesn't bog down too much. And, as in all of Stephenson's novels, there's a brief section of pure humour to be found somewhere in it. In Snow Crash, it was the toilet paper memo, in Interface, the "Prince of Darkness" chapter, and in Cryptonomicon, it's the e-mail from Randy describing his adventure in the Phillipines. I read it out loud to my girlfriend and had her on the floor laughing.
What's missing seems to be a subtext. Snow Crash has a brilliant assault on the libertarian anti-utopia. Diamond Age attacks the 20th century's whole idea of cultural progress, suggesting it's an illusion altogether. Interface slags the process of packaging candidates and selling them like underarm deodorant, adding a few very 90's tricks to this otherwise kind of tired topic. Even Zodiac trashes the softer minded part of the environmental movement. But what is the subtext of Cryptonomicon? I don't know. I hope it's not his weak and insipid attacks on postmodernism. I know, it can be fun, but flamming a pomo is like eating Chinese food: at first you're satisfied, but a few minutes later you want another one. Honestly, we've all been there, and Alan Sokal did it better.
If I want to read WWII historical fiction, I can read a Mitchner novel, and the world of high-tech start-ups is already a little too heavily chronicled. So what is this book for? What does this book have to say that takes 900 pages? At page 650, I have yet to figure it out.
I don't feel that I wasted my $25 getting this book, but I learned little, and I can't say it's made me think. The book may be a commercial sucess, but I can't call it an artistic one. It's well crafted so far, which is pretty good for the Stephenson who seemed to have such a hard time bringing the Diamond Age to a satisfying close.
I really like Stephenson, I have since I bought Zodiac on a lark in train station years ago. He's going where others aren't, and I appreciate that. But he's not Pynchon, at least not yet.
This interview didn't seem to cover any new ground either, except to confirm that he has a background in tech. Salon is a big enough deal that they should be able to keep his attention long enough for a good interview.
I'm on about page 650. Root comes back to life? **groan**
I found the typos appalling to. My best guess is an proofreader who was paying a lot less attention toward the middle of the book than at the beginning.
Yes, it's pretty hypocritical of the frogs (je suis grenouille, moi, et j'en suis fier), but it's pretty hypocritical of the gringos too, as a pretty perfunctionary check of the literature would reveal.
What makes this different is that for the last 20 years, the US, among others, has been pushing for all manner of global trade rules so that US firms could feel secure in Europe and Asia, and, unsurprisingly, those Europeans and Asians have demanded the same kind of treatment here. A lot of global trade rules can be summarised in one statement: you can't do to foreign companies what you don't do to your own.
Now, back in the Cold War, spying on the Russian or Chinese governments and their interests wasn't seen as any big deal. After all, it's hard to imagine the KGB suing in federal court for it's right to privacy. And of course, the shoe went on the other foot. If the USSR stole some commercial technology from Boeing or IBM, there wasn't any way they could go to market and compete with them. There might be patents, or not, either way the USSR wasn't going to pay any attention to them.
Now we have the odd sight of companies suing foreign governments in their own courts for violating their privacy. After all, civil law in the US recognises companies as persons and accords them rights. If the US subsidiary of Bull-Thompson can show it's been damaged by the NSA snooping on their faxes without a warrant, the law makes no distinction between them and somebody like Apple Computers.
Yes, the NSA spies. That's what they get paid for, but allowing them to spy on behalf of US firms introduces a lot of issues of conflict of interests. The US has agreed, in treaty after treaty, to honour the rights of foreign commercial interests in the USA. Whether or not that's a very good idea is a different issue, those treaties are presently US law.
Unfortunately, US law tolerates the government doing all manner of otherwise illegal things in the name of "national security." The US is nominally forbidden from spying on Canadians, Australians, NZ'ers, and UK citizens (but is well known to have done so on at least a few occasions - Gerhard Bull's case comes to mind) but can spy on Japan or France to their hearts content. EU countries aren't supposed to be allowed to spy on each other. This has lead to the UK asking the US to spy on French and German companies on behalf of British firms. (At least it's fairy credibly rumoured that this happens - it certainly isn't a surprise.)
If the dogma of free trade is to be preserved, you can't use government to spy on your competitors, even foreign ones. The French do certainly do it, and the US does, and in all likelihood every country with a foreign espionage service does it at least sometimes. (Neatly excluding Canada - a country that really doesn't seem to take its economic security too seriously.)
But it is also quite clearly illegal and something that you can sue for. What is to happen if a federal judge subpeonas the CIA to testify about espionage against foreign companies, or the NSA to describe in court its signal intelligence operations? The US recently dropped a case against the owner of the pharmaceuticals factory in Sudan that Clinton bombed last year, after he sued in US federal court. In this case, it was probably because the US didn't actually have any evidence against the guy, but the Justice department claimed that it was better to drop the case than "reveal its espionage sources." Is this a precedent for things to come? If so, the US might as well get out of the commercial espionage business altogether,or else it'll be tied up in court in perpetuity, settling espionage claims.
Slashdot Mirror
My first paid coding job (an audio file editor for a now long dead format) was written entirely to Kraftwerk's Autobahn. I had a stereo WAV file of it and just let it run for two straight weeks.
I coudn't listen to it for years afterwards, but at the time it worked really well.
Mostly techno and house stuff, a lot of it early 90's stuff from my days as a purple-haired, multiply-pierced, chain smoking, French grad student. Yes, I code while listening to the kind of Eurotrash any self respecting geek ought to be embarassed by. Snap, Captain Hollywood Project, Amber, La Bouche, KLF, Technotronics... it's awful I know. It just works, what can I say?
Otherwise, a lot of 80's dance stuff - Bananarama, Corey Hart, Men without Hats, Berlin (anybody here besides me remember Berlin's "The Metro"?), Blondie, Prince (before you needed Unicode to write his name), among others.
I do listen to other kinds of music - French bands, classics, old punk, mushy 80's stuff that makes me all nostalgic, even some grunge. And some contemporary pop. But it does me no good when I code. If it doesn't have a beat, it does me no good at work.
The Federal TM database can be searched in person at 2900 Crystal Drive, 2nd Floor, Arlington, Virginia. No online version is available yet. Many law offices keep updated copies on CDROM.
/cgi-bin/trade-marks/search_e.pl.
Canadian trademarks can be searched over the web at: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca
For other countries, I have no information. A web search might reveal more options.
As a European, yes, you can have your domain seized. Network Solutions is bound by US law, as per their agreement with the NSF.
At least, none of the Americans here should be surprised.
For those of you who do not live in the USA, most of you probably live in countries where companies and wealthy individuals are either forbidden or restricted in their contributions to politicians and their parties (assuming you live a nation with a partisan democracy.) In the US, this was once half true. Until 1974, there were some very heavy restrictions on giving to American politicians. Most campaigns - even those of big, wealthy, well-known candidates - ran on a shoestring. Many American politicians were wealthy, but running for Federal office frequently cost them everything they had. Other people and companies found it very difficult to directly, or even indirectly, give to parties or candidates.
In 1974, the elections law changed and a very big loophole was created: anyone could give as much money as they wanted to political parties (but not candidates) and organisations interested in particular issues could make nearly unlimited gifts to particular candidates who supported their cause. During the Reagan administration (81-89, and 89-93 if you count the uninspiring Bush administration), many of the remaining restraints on lobbying (cutting deals directly with elected politicians) and campaign funding (buying political favours in advance) were loosened, and a Supreme Court ruling in the early 90's (the year eludes me right now) determined that political contributions were a form of free speech and could not be denied under the law.
The result was a near complete takeover of the government by well funded interests. Many of these were corporations and wealthy individuals, but some were large pressure groups like AARP (the lobby for the interests of the elderly.) In this political climate, it became necessary, if any kind of functioning government was to exist, to displace the centres of power to unelected officials, and state and local governments. Most civil servants have far greater restrictions on what kinds of favours they can receive, and are require to make public disclosures of the gifts they get.
That is part of why the Federal Reserve Bank has come to act in the same capacity that, in most countries, an elected minister of commerce or industry might act. It is also part of the reason why the military and law enforcement agencies are so frequently able to act without legal restraint.
This system makes no sense to most outsiders. I will tell the non-Americans here that what is amazing is not that the systems works so badly, but that it works at all. However, American government is a lot like American football (the one with the egg-shaped ball): if you read the rules on paper, they will make no sense, but once you start to watch it in action, the logic begins to appear.
America is, quite simply, a place where money is usually the only thing that counts in governance. If you have money, you can lobby government, contribute to campaigns, get your ideas heard, and if all else fails, mount a media campaign to get the public riled up. As a last ditch effort, you can always use the courts to try to block enforcement of whatever policies you oppose.
And if you are poor, few media will cover your interests in any depth, your access to government is minimal, and you have little genuine legal recourse.
Now, many of you will say, "But it's no different here." Trust me, it is different. This kind of activity is far more common in the US than anywhere else in the world.
This process takes years to run to completion or to create stable policies, but eventually, it does - after a fashion - work. Americans have undertaken a political experiment as breathtaking and as pervasive the original American revolution: they have created a free market government. If you have the money, and a policy is worth enough time and trouble to you, you can make it happen. Government policy has become a market average of all those campaign contributions, expensive lobbying, lawsuits and media campaigns.
In this context, it is hardly surprising when the largest company in the world (in terms of market capitalisation) tries to buy not simply changes in policy, but a weakening of law enforcement when they are in trouble. Defense contractors lobby directly for more guns and fighter planes when they need the orders, regardless of real need for the weapons. Drug companies lobby for weaker enforcement of the food and drug laws. Car companies lobby for weaker gas milage restrictions so they can sell expensive SUV's. None of what Microsoft is trying to do is shocking or unusual.
Microsoft will fail so long as those interests who favour continuing enforcment of anti-trust laws have more money and time to spend on it than Microsoft has. Microsoft will succeed if others facing trust problems (like MCI-Worldcom, AT+T, Boeing, and others) have more money on their side.
Full disclosure: I am not American, but I've lived here on and off more than half of my life, since I was 9 years old. I speak the language, I went to school here and I've worked here. I have no great love for the US government, but I do have a great deal of love for the fat paycheck I get working here. I know America as well as most Americans do. Nonetheless, it's their country and if they want free market government, that's their choice. Make no mistake, Americans who are sufficiently aware of poltics to vote all know that their government works this way. Unlike a dictatorship, this is something they have a genuine choice about.
But, do keep what I've said in mind when you next ask yourselves, "Why do Americans allow these things that seem so plainly dumb?" Remember this, the next time a politician in your country tells you that you ought to be more like Americans (and I especially mean you Brits here) just what kind of system they are talking about.
There are some indirect ways to give money to candidates, but the major reason Canada doesn't have the same campaign finance problems is because campaigns are publicly subsidised, and that TV ads aren't usually purchased, the broadcasters are required to air them on a schedule of Elections Canada's choosing (or the provincial equivalent for a local election.)
I'm all for using Unicode accross the board - this would be an extremely good thing, but it doesn't even begin to solve internationalisation problems. The major european languages use variants of the Roman or Cyrillic alphabets and place spaces between words, as do many other languages that have been alphabetised in the last two centuries. That can be handled easily enough. However, even among these languages, there are some serious issues. Alphabetical order is different from English in many European langauges, such as Swedish, Spanish, Icelandic, and even French (just to name a few). In languages like Hungarian, Finnish and Turkish, complex hyphenation rules have to be taken into account. Indexing of compound characters can be real nightmare. And in German, ü, ö and ä are sometimes indexed with ue, oe and ae for orthographic reasons. Yet another complication: books in French have the table of contents in back. Structured publishing software has to take this kind of thing into account too.
Going global, this is just the beginning of the problems. Chinese, Japanese and Korean don't usually employ spaces between words at all, messing up line justification algorithms. Korean writers sometimes use Sino-Korean (Chinese characters) and sometimes the Korean syllabary for the same words - should they be indexed together? In Japanese, unusual kanji characters are often accompanied by hiragana characters that are either above or to the right of the kanji to aid in pronunciation and comprehension - this is called a ruby, and it's an I18N nightmare. Korean sometimes does the same thing, as do the Chinese speakers in Taiwan with their bopomofo system. Many Chinese characters have two forms - a traditional one still used by many overseas Chinese and simplified characters used in the PRC. This is another indexing problem. Vietnamese uses a very complex variant on the Roman alphabet today, but only a century ago, they too still used Chinese characters, and that double system imposes still more constraints. Also, some Japanese, Korean and Chinese texts are written top to bottom and right to left. Books are generally printed right to left, the reverse of western order. Oh, and I won't bother you with the utter nightmare of alphabetical order in Chinese. Take a look at a Chinese dictionary if you want to see it in action.
Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Thai, Hebrew and Yiddish (among other languages) are written right to left, and Arabic and Hebrew sometimes write the vowels and sometimes don't. This is a major consideration when doing, for example, searches in documents. Allowing a terminal or any application to accept characters in both right to left and left to right (and top to bottom for traditional Mongolian and sometimes for other Asian langauges, as described above) is not very easy, and to truly internationalise, it has to be done across the board. Not to mention the frequent occaisions when both data in the local language and English or some other western language have to be mixed.
Indian and southeast Asian langauges each have their own alphabet, but they are often derived from common sources (usually Sanskrit). Although the letters in each langauge may be different, their are certain equivalencies between them that are often taken into account when indexing or transcribing. The old Indian telegraph system used to use these similarities to provide a unified code for data exchage. How is an I18N system to take these into account?
The Unified Canadian Syllabic system (used for some dialects of Cree, Ojibwa and Inuktitut) has compound letters that have to be taken into account, as well as a unique system of rotating the letter to indicate part of its phonetic value. This matters in making data entry systems (e.g. keyboards) and in alphabetisation.
And of course, it's a huge nightmare when one system has to provide for unknown combinations of languages, e.g. a Russian who needs to use Japanese, a Pakistani who does business in Chinese, or an Israeli linguist doing work in Cree.
And, lastly and even less pleasantly, an I18N project has to take into account all the existing half-assed standards for encoding and working with these langauges. There are at least three different systems for Japanese alone (EUC, JIS, Shift-JIS), and four for Chinese (GB, Big5, JIS, EUC). The dominant system for encoding Inuktitut is just a font the main newspaper in Iqaluit made up so they can put their articles on the web (Nunatsiaq News).
There are no simple answers for internationalisation, and we can't just tear down all the existing software and rebuild it to work right. I hope the OSS community is up to this because this is a major project that has to be undertaken in a unified way, from top to bottom, or else it will not succeed.
He has a PhD from Carleton, a trophy wife, a load of debt, and now a securities fraud investigation.
Gee, this is making me all nostalgic for the 80's.
Really, half the CEO's in California look like this guy. Most have better financial advice though.
NASDAQ suspended trading in CORL at 2:50 PM EST, the same time as TSX suspended it. That does not mean this is an SEC action, exchanges can suspend trading anytime there are serious questions, since stock markets are private ventures that are, in principle, subject only to the terms of their private contract.
Generally, it is pretty awkward to have a company suspended on one exchange and not another. Usually, the exchanges cooperate with each other and the regulators on these matters, since getting blackballed by the cops would be very, very bad for an exchange.
Basically that's it. At my company, there are certain times that are blocked out for employees above a certain rank (within a few weeks of quarterlies for instance) and everyone gets notified. For the top officers and board memebers, the schedule is even more limiting. When you run a company, they stock had better do good, because you'll have a hard time selling it while you work there.
Canada, ironically, does not have an equivalent of the SEC. This is part of the problem. Corel is being investigated by the Ontario Securities Commission, a provincial body. Financial markets are not directly regulated by the Feds and the provinces are, in some cases, quite deep into the pockets of the business community.
Ontario likes to think of itself as the home of high-tech in Canada. They may hang Cowpland, but they won't touch Corel in any way that might seriously hurt the company. The NDP might have stepped aside and let the courts decide, but the PC will never allow it to get that far out of hand.
I agree. (I'd volunteer if I had the time too - or got offered some money :^)
/. community relate to the odd world of cognitive science. Although some physics and bio material get posted here, cogsci dominates by far. If there's one relavant sub-domain, that's it. It would be nice to get someone conversant in the subject as science editor.
I have an undergrad degree in Physics, and after flunking the Master's, got into linguistics. My science and math training have done me no end of good there. I would like to add the following to the list of requirements, from my experience:
1- This person must be literate enough in the sciences to follow the literature. Maybe not to understand everything, but to at least get the gist of major papers and to be able to understand the abstracts. This means understanding basic statistics, physics, modern biology (including the main issues in neodarwinism) and at least a little chemistry. The most important these, perhaps even more important than an in-depth understanding of the scientific method, is statistics. Stats lie most convincingly.
2- They need to know who to call to understand the bits they don't understand.
3- They need to know where to look for good material and to do the research on claims put forth in the popular press. These days, too much science is getting published without proper peer review, without controls, and directly into the popular press. It's getting harder to tell the truth from the fiction, because the truth is pretty weird but the popular press still can't get more than a minimum of facts straight. This means know how to wade through the preprints and the journals and do research.
4- Some exposure to science culture would be a good thing. I know, we're all down on cultural studies of the sciences, but I assure you science remains as culturally foreign as Mongolia and very little like its portrayal science fiction.
5- Most of the science issues that touch on the
That's all I can think of right now. The odds of actually finding such a person is minimal - all the people I know who meet these criteria either are poor communicators, or, like me, they work in computing to pay the bills and haven't necessarily the time.
I think MTV's been downhill since Martha Quinn quit. (God, that makes me old doesn't it?)
I bailed on the USA in '91 - right after graduation. MTV was still watchable. I came back in '94 and got cable in '95. Since then, I only watch MTV for Beavis and Butthead.
I hate being a member of the VH1 generation. I want my MTV.
(http://www.l0pht.com)
/. is what they had in mind.
"L0pht to be on MTV's True Life: I'm A Hacker
10.10.1999
On October 13th at 10 pm MTV will debut True Life: I'm a Hacker reported by MTV's Serena Altschul. Although most of this show will feature young hoodlums who get their kicks from breaking into other people's systems, the L0pht is also interviewed showing the more productive side of hacking."
I'm guessing MTV wasn't really interested in the productive side of hacking. The MTV press release (http://www.l0pht.com/misc/hackerrel.html) mentions it in only one sentence: "Finally, the show examines a more productive side of hacking, visiting The L0pht, a group of Boston hackers who develop security software for major companies, and act as advisors to the U.S. Government on how they can maximize security mechanisms on their own systems."
An exerp from elsewhere in the press release:
"Venturing into the inner-most sanctums of this cyber subculture, 'True Life: I'm a Hacker' explores how hackers communicate with one another and where they learn the tricks of the trade."
Hackers have inner-most sanctums? Boy, am I missing out...
Quoting one of their subjects: "It's like being God."
Geez, and here I am wasting my time sitting in a cubicle gaining weight when I could be Godlike, just because I know what int main(int argc, char *argv[]) means.
"Through on-line chats and talk shows cybercast to thousands of their peers worldwide, many young hackers, who otherwise would have simply blended in, have an opportunity to achieve major levels of recognition and adulation."
I wonder if
Je voulais dire "es-el-`a-es-hache-de'-^o-te'-point-orgue".
A '/' is a barre oblique, but the word "slash" is a lot closer to "tiret" in meaning. "tiretpoint.org" is a lot neater a domain name than "barreobliquepoint.org", unfortunately, "-." isn't quite the same as "\.". Or maybe just "barrepoint.org" makes more sense ("|." - close enough).
Personally, I like a Deutschlish "Slaschpunkt.org" a lot better. German has a way of getting coughed out that fits the programmer mindset a lot better than French morphology.
I like the ZDTV standard of just dropping the "http://" when they give urls and saying "com" as "calm", "org" just the way it looks, and national domains are spelled out (".ca" as "dot-cee-aye"). If you've had a browser more than 10 minutes, you already know how to make a URL.
That pronunciation strategy works a lot better in translation too. es-el-`a-es-hache-de'-^o-te'-point-comme seems a lot easier to work with.
I assume Radio-Canada will get on that bandwagon one of these days.
(Regards d'un que'be'cois en exile)
Trust me, no linguist will use this. It would be like getting a perl user to switch to TCL - they would carp for years about all the things they can't do the way they want to, assuming they can even do all the things they want.
Other types of tech will probably steer just as clear of it when they realise how frustrating it is to compose for an artificial semantically unambiguous language.
Chomsky revises everything he thinks every 10 years or so. The existence of a universal grammar of the type Chomsky currently advocates (and it is by no means clear that this is true) still doesn't necessarily mean that we can construct a common, useable language for everyone. Remember, every language used in the world is one of those "special cases."
Chomsky claims (despite evidence to the contrary) that syntax can be analysed apart of semantics, implying that if we could agree to a universal word list and definitions, it might be possible to devise an equally neutral grammar to use for machine translation. However, it is quite clear that words, even pseudosynonyms, don't mean the same thing in different languages.
My inclination is that Chomsky is just plain wrong about it in the first place: that there is no universal underlying order of constituents, but rather that human language structure are restrained to a subset of all valid ways of organising information linearly, and that those constraints are biological.
This means that any real machine translation requires us first to make real progress in understanding how humans process and store linguistic information. This field is in its infancy.
There's no real technical information on the website, and no evidence at all that a linguist is actually participating in this project. It sounds like a bunch of computer scientists who think they understand language.
Actually, the only real data they offer suggests that they are recreating the work Anna Wierzbicka was doing in the 80's with her ad-hoc theory of semantics. She ultimately showed why it wouldn't work, and now criticises the idea of using controlled language at all for machine understanding.
No, these people don't seem to have any idea what they've gotten themselves into. This kind of thing was what I did graduate work on. Controlled language is a useful idea, but a very limited one, and using pivot languages for translation will only take you about as far as Systrans' system (the one used in Babelfish.)
There are much more sophisticated efforts going on elsewhere, and even those are getting bogged down in the ugly reality of natural language. This will languish and go nowhere. With some luck, some more realistic project, like some of the automatic text summary projects and natural language to knowlege base projects will eventually produce a usable product, but this UN university effort sounds like a waste of time.
Alright, "junk" is perhaps a bit harsh, but really, how useful were Plato's insights? Or Aristotle's? Science is certainly no longer based on axiomatic reasoning, nor is Plato's view of humanity particularly well received anywhere. (Full disclosure: I suspect Plato of being a crank. Aristotle tried his best, but when was the last time anyone quoted him in a serious context?)
How should one construct a philosophical system when everyone in history who has claimed to be right on any basis other than empiricism has ultimately proven to be horribly, horribly wrong?
The only conclusion I can draw is that any attempt to devise such a philosophy would probably lead to anarchic confusion as each party was forced to investigate their own prejudices before attempting to make sense of phenomena - which strikes me as the perfect description of postmodernism.
Literary criticism, or even cultural analysis, lends itself poorly to empirical analysis. Postmodernism has served literary studies fairly well. It is broad-based, tolerant, and evades the fallacy of objectivism that haunted the incredibly useless structuralism that preceded it. I'm still very fond of Bakhtin (bless his Trotskyist heart), even when I don't agree with him. Foucault is reasonable when he's awake. Saussure is often claimed by postmodernists (I wonder what he would think of that) as is Roman Jakobson, and both are, IMHO, rightly well regarded for very scientific analyses of language as well as somewhat more amorphous analyses of semiotics.
Cultural studies are nearly impossible when someone believes their world view to be so right that anyone else's is just silly native superstition. This was what the cultural wing of the postmodernist camp was rebelling against. When you can't ever objectively look at another society, what options do you have outside of some sort of crypto-postmodernism?
Now, the wrong conclusion to draw form this is that reality itself is a product of how you think about it. That is bunk, and some postmodernists do press that point of view. That is antithetical to the scientific method.
Science does have a way of resolving its conflicts, but the humanites and some of the social sciences never really have, and in that context postmodernism makes a lot of sense, in broad outlines if not specifics. I rail against scum like Latour and Lacan as hard as the next guy when they pass of a lot of nonsense as wisdom, and they are usually at their worst when they talk about the sciences. But I can't quite go from the Typhoid Marys of the French Disease to saying that pomo is essentially anti-science. That Latour is, sure.
But who among the structuralists, or their 19th century predecessors was doing better? Nietzsche? Marx (who would probably have hated the pomos)? Hegel? The era's largely forgotten French philosophers? Confusius? Calvin (please, dear God, don't let Calvinism become fashionable)? Each had their own version of absolute truth that was completely unable to stand the test of empiricism. At best, their systems were axiomatic and therefore of no importance.
There are some classics of philosophy that are worth the trouble of understanding, I don't mean to reject the previous 4000 years of thought, but those are not usually the things people disagree about. I can't remember that last time I heard an argument over Cartesiansim outside of linguistics. The existence of God is something of a nonsequiter. Human liberty and political science is just as ill-suited to empiricism. Economics has its own problems. No, the postmodernists are dealing with a confusing world at least as well as their predecessors, in part by admitting that it's confusing.
The pomos are pretty harmless and occaisionally, when sufficiently modest and aware of their limitations, make important observations. Like every other movement in history, they have plenty of tenured cranks and extremists, and they are embarassed by them, but the replacement of postmoderism by one of its predecessors is unlikely at best, and I suspect undesireable.
The Diamond Age described a future that has gone back, sort of, to an earlier set of values. However, this too is revealed to be a lot less than utopian, and not always a good idea. I already put far more of my time than I like in a cubicle, working for a company with no vested interest in my well being, it would be worse to be forced to spend time in the company church and put my children in the company school in order to keep my privileges. The Neo-Victorians struck me as a very unpleasant society to live in. They didn't strike me as having much at all to do with common sense, rather they were the expression of a society tired of having to think about what values they ought to have and whether other people had the right to their own values. Instead, they substituted a complex social structure that was no more than a cultural invention, not because it was right but because they thought they needed to believe in something, even if they didn't know what.
I am reminded of a remark in Stephenson's online essay ("In the beginning there was the comand line" - I'm too lazy to look it up). Paraphrasing: people still believe there is an absolute right and wrong, even if they think that they have to tolerate other people's ideas of right and wrong to survive. That may well be true, but it doesn't make one set of values right and another wrong. It means that people have to have a sense of right and wrong, even if there is no way of objectively determining who is right against some absolute set of values.
That idea doesn't seem to me to contradict any of the non-lunatic parts of the postmodern world. Indeed, it seems to validate many of them.
If I may paraphrase Friedman here, somewhere there may be two postmodernists who agree with each other, but I am not one of them.
/. readers (and at least some pomos are honest enough to admit it.)
/., or suggest that perhaps key escrow encryption isn't a sign of the coming apocalypse. Few people will respond with well reasoned rhetoric.
/.'er has noted in their sig, in any large group of people most will be idiots.
Actually, I wouldn't characterise myself as especially postmodern either, just as someone who thinks that the junk that preceded the postmodernists wasn't any more useful. Going back to more rigourous philosophies would be an interesting trick, since I am unaware of any well defined philosophy that would genuinely qualify itself as rigourous (the sole exception being objectivism, which I can only qualify as a sick, twisted joke.)
Pomos aren't well described using simple declarative sentences. To say that postmodernism *is* something is almost always false, which seems to be exactly how most pomos like it. That can be frustrating, and it certainly makes it nearly impossible to say what postmodernism is, but then the same can be said of most philosophy and ALL literary criticism. To characterise it as anti-science (at least, as anymore anti-science than, say, the US Department of Defence) isn't really accurate. Ignorant of science, I might agree with that, but then so are probably the majority of
Certainly saying that pomos "object violently to those who disagree with them, because [they] despair of being able to resolve differences rationally" is a stereotyped canard. Have you ever seen rational arguments in any university department (the hard sciences NOT excluded)?
Reason has little to do with debate at the best of times. Try arguing that Linux is anything less than the greatest thing since sliced bread here on
Here's another important point you make: 'The postmodernists don't believe in "truth" or "reason", so how can you "reason" with someone with a different "belief system"?'
Do scientists believe in truth? In an absolute sense, the answer is a resounding NO. All science is tentative and subject to review. High-energy physics (my old line of work) takes for granted that someone, someday, somewhere will blow the whole apparatus of quantum theory and relativity out of the water.
Do scientists believe in reason? In the old Kantian sense, NO. Pure reason can't accomplish anything - there is no substitute for an instance of empirical results. Experiment and simple observation trump reason every time and arguments predicated on reason alone are viewed with deep suspicion. Hunches, on the other hand, are often quite well regarded, although they can never substitute for experimental results.
Stephenson is not ahead of the curve here. Ahead of the curve might have been noting modern trends in academia for what they are, a mixture of frauds looking for tenure and sincere researchers who, like most people, can't always get ahead of their prejudices. This is as true in a physics or economics department as in sociology or ethnic studies. (Actually, I'd say it was most true in economics - I have never seen more intolerance than in an Ivy League Econ department.) Slagging academia is behind the curve - Sokal was there five years ago and he at was attacking those who were plainly frauds instead of painting whole bodies of thought as intolerant.
This is not said to provide any comfort to those who treat Lacan as anything but a fraud, or who expect much out of Derrida other than that he share his drugs. I don't think highly of postmodern theory, but I got there by trying to find out what the principles had actually said (when they were comprehensible at all). And there is much to be admired and considered there, as well as a lot of crap. And, as another
Britain was the last big EU holdout for encryption controls. With some luck, this will mean a European directive on the subject that won't be encumbered by reservations about some states wanting escrow.
Whoever's in charge in Washington won't be happy though. I remember how they got the EC to kill encrypted digital cellular phones way back in 89 or 90.
I'm about 2/3 of the way through Cryptonomicon (so please don't spoil it for me!) and I'd really like to recommend this book, but I can't. Not that it's a terrible read. I'll take Cryptonomicon over Tom Clancy's latest piece of trash any day. (That doesn't say much, I'll read the nutritional information on the side of a bag of M&M's over a Tom Clancy novel.) The characters aren't badly drawn although they can get a little too cliche. The scenes are fairly well set and the book doesn't bog down too much. And, as in all of Stephenson's novels, there's a brief section of pure humour to be found somewhere in it. In Snow Crash, it was the toilet paper memo, in Interface, the "Prince of Darkness" chapter, and in Cryptonomicon, it's the e-mail from Randy describing his adventure in the Phillipines. I read it out loud to my girlfriend and had her on the floor laughing.
What's missing seems to be a subtext. Snow Crash has a brilliant assault on the libertarian anti-utopia. Diamond Age attacks the 20th century's whole idea of cultural progress, suggesting it's an illusion altogether. Interface slags the process of packaging candidates and selling them like underarm deodorant, adding a few very 90's tricks to this otherwise kind of tired topic. Even Zodiac trashes the softer minded part of the environmental movement. But what is the subtext of Cryptonomicon? I don't know. I hope it's not his weak and insipid attacks on postmodernism. I know, it can be fun, but flamming a pomo is like eating Chinese food: at first you're satisfied, but a few minutes later you want another one. Honestly, we've all been there, and Alan Sokal did it better.
If I want to read WWII historical fiction, I can read a Mitchner novel, and the world of high-tech start-ups is already a little too heavily chronicled. So what is this book for? What does this book have to say that takes 900 pages? At page 650, I have yet to figure it out.
I don't feel that I wasted my $25 getting this book, but I learned little, and I can't say it's made me think. The book may be a commercial sucess, but I can't call it an artistic one. It's well crafted so far, which is pretty good for the Stephenson who seemed to have such a hard time bringing the Diamond Age to a satisfying close.
I really like Stephenson, I have since I bought Zodiac on a lark in train station years ago. He's going where others aren't, and I appreciate that. But he's not Pynchon, at least not yet.
This interview didn't seem to cover any new ground either, except to confirm that he has a background in tech. Salon is a big enough deal that they should be able to keep his attention long enough for a good interview.
I'm on about page 650. Root comes back to life? **groan**
I found the typos appalling to. My best guess is an proofreader who was paying a lot less attention toward the middle of the book than at the beginning.
Yes, it's pretty hypocritical of the frogs (je suis grenouille, moi, et j'en suis fier), but it's pretty hypocritical of the gringos too, as a pretty perfunctionary check of the literature would reveal.
What makes this different is that for the last 20 years, the US, among others, has been pushing for all manner of global trade rules so that US firms could feel secure in Europe and Asia, and, unsurprisingly, those Europeans and Asians have demanded the same kind of treatment here. A lot of global trade rules can be summarised in one statement: you can't do to foreign companies what you don't do to your own.
Now, back in the Cold War, spying on the Russian or Chinese governments and their interests wasn't seen as any big deal. After all, it's hard to imagine the KGB suing in federal court for it's right to privacy. And of course, the shoe went on the other foot. If the USSR stole some commercial technology from Boeing or IBM, there wasn't any way they could go to market and compete with them. There might be patents, or not, either way the USSR wasn't going to pay any attention to them.
Now we have the odd sight of companies suing foreign governments in their own courts for violating their privacy. After all, civil law in the US recognises companies as persons and accords them rights. If the US subsidiary of Bull-Thompson can show it's been damaged by the NSA snooping on their faxes without a warrant, the law makes no distinction between them and somebody like Apple Computers.
Yes, the NSA spies. That's what they get paid for, but allowing them to spy on behalf of US firms introduces a lot of issues of conflict of interests. The US has agreed, in treaty after treaty, to honour the rights of foreign commercial interests in the USA. Whether or not that's a very good idea is a different issue, those treaties are presently US law.
Unfortunately, US law tolerates the government doing all manner of otherwise illegal things in the name of "national security." The US is nominally forbidden from spying on Canadians, Australians, NZ'ers, and UK citizens (but is well known to have done so on at least a few occasions - Gerhard Bull's case comes to mind) but can spy on Japan or France to their hearts content. EU countries aren't supposed to be allowed to spy on each other. This has lead to the UK asking the US to spy on French and German companies on behalf of British firms. (At least it's fairy credibly rumoured that this happens - it certainly isn't a surprise.)
If the dogma of free trade is to be preserved, you can't use government to spy on your competitors, even foreign ones. The French do certainly do it, and the US does, and in all likelihood every country with a foreign espionage service does it at least sometimes. (Neatly excluding Canada - a country that really doesn't seem to take its economic security too seriously.)
But it is also quite clearly illegal and something that you can sue for. What is to happen if a federal judge subpeonas the CIA to testify about espionage against foreign companies, or the NSA to describe in court its signal intelligence operations? The US recently dropped a case against the owner of the pharmaceuticals factory in Sudan that Clinton bombed last year, after he sued in US federal court. In this case, it was probably because the US didn't actually have any evidence against the guy, but the Justice department claimed that it was better to drop the case than "reveal its espionage sources." Is this a precedent for things to come? If so, the US might as well get out of the commercial espionage business altogether,or else it'll be tied up in court in perpetuity, settling espionage claims.