No. See my reply to fyngyrz. Any tools capable of recognizing and displaying security flaws to a human no longer needs a human to puzzle over the flaws to figure out how to exploit them. All tools necessary to create the semi-automated VR hacking interfaces in cyberpunk added together can just as easily be made fully-automated.
Nonsense. The more dimensions you can manipulate at once, the more complex a user input you can provide. Up to the limits of your ability to handle complex motions. As a musician and a programmer for over four decades, I didn't perceive Gibson's ideas as unlikely or overwhelming or impossible at all. Raising the level of art required? Plausible. The next generation would simply rise to meet the challenge. Watch them learn video games if you don't know what I mean.
Okay. You're completely missing the point of why I consider VR hacking interfaces to be utterly magical nonsense.
Consider a firewall that you want to hack to get past. In a cyberpunk story, you'd be interacting visually with it as if it were a physical object to be prodded until you're through. That requires two things -- complete read-access to the application to determine the "shape" of it for presentation and a highly adaptable program capable of handling virtually any security application and interpreting them in a visual fashion. If you have both of these, and thus a tool capable of visually displaying security flaws, then you already have a program that knows how to get past security and which doesn't need YOU anymore. The puzzle-based GUI becomes superfluous at that point because your tool already has the solution before it can present the puzzle to you.
Plus, the way software penetration works in real life is not really capable of being abstracted in this fashion. If you have a known exploit, then you just push a button and run it. If you don't have a known exploit, then the process of finding one is slow, tedious, and easily detected on someone else's network if they have anti-intrusion tools. Wrapping the process up in a fancy GUI is just a waste of time. Fast hacking by GUI is nonsense.
And what military or government or corporation would not want serious deterrents to entry when the world is virtual?
So why do we have anti-virus software available in the commercial market if this is the case? I'm sorry, but I don't care what the government wants in this case -- the market will not bear implants that allow remote blackhats to kill you from a distance. The technology would be stillborn. Why would you willingly choose a dangerous model when you could have one that recognized deadly patterns of sensory input and shut them down? All of the mechanisms for killing remotely would be as recognizable as a virus is today. All such holes in the software are bugs and should be patched.
There's absolutely no reason to let such things by and every litigious liability law reason for a company to prevent it. Plus, can you imagine what terrorists could do with such a technology combined with hijacking a popular website? I'm sorry, but common sense dictates that protective measures would be required before such a tool could reach the mass-market use present in cyberpunk stories.
Yeah, but if something requires YOU to suspend, but not ME to suspend, then it's just you with the problem.:-)
And yet, you're the one that can't handle a story because of FTL drives.
Unscientific? Hardly. Socially unlikely? Perhaps, but that doesn't make it bad scientific speculation.
I say that it does. The social sciences are important too. No one would make a computer interface like the ones in cyberpunk, because they're abstracted to the point of inefficiency. If you have magical hacking tools that let you visualize hacking as manipulating a physical object, then you're wasting time with an interface that spends time interpreting data in a human-recognizable way that could've been spent just handling the intrusion. It's a waste of cycles that could be used to do something useful.
And who in their right minds wouldn't put safety locks on mind-machine interfaces to prevent any sort of direct damage? If enemy programs can trigger that sort of crap deliberately, then you can be danged sure that bugs could too. There's no way product liability law would allow such dangerous tools on the market, and the existence of programs to trigger fatal responses would immediately result in a public outcry against it. Who want to leave their brain vulnerable to killers at a distance?
If an invention requires a complete suspension of disbelief about human nature to be plausible, then it's fundamentally illogical and thus bad science.
Methinks you would enjoy SF more (hard or not) if your imagination was a little more informed around the edges.
Methinks you would read better literature if you didn't discount the human element entirely in your favored stories.
What t I think that he really missed was that the religions would get so loud once more.
Everyone did. Even the religions themselves. Growing up in the 80s, I can tell you that everyone was convinced that the church was dying -- most especially the churches themselves.
The 80s was truly an age of materialism. While the 60s & 70s represented an abandonment of traditional values in favor of new ones, they weren't an abandonment of spirituality. The 80s were, and its no surprise that nearly all speculative fiction from that time period posited a mostly atheist future. I can't think of really any SF from that time period that foresaw a resurgence of fanatical faith.
After all, our enemies were communists, not terrorists, and the Christian Coalition was still a bunch of easily ignored loonies. I think that times are going to swing that way (for the worse in my opinion). After all, the divide between mainstream Christians and mainstream liberals is the worst its ever been in history. As a religious liberal who find the two world-views inexorably linked, I find this to be the saddest development in modern times and the greatest sign that America's sickness will continue. But I digress.
Neuromancer was very well written, but utterly short-sighted (as all futurism is. Like Cory Doctorow said, futurists only create the present, just more of it). The world he created felt fake, plastic, and surreal.
Neuromancer is absolutely brilliant for what it is -- a dystopian critique of everything that was frightening about the 80's for those who had been adults in the 70's: Corporate mega-mergers; the captivating, numbing, spellbinding nature of television, the "Me generation," the dissolving bond of loyalty between company and employee, the increasing disregard of companies for the lives of citizens, drug use going from drugs for relaxation and communion to those for stimulation and frenzy, weakening government at the same time corporate power began to transcend borders, Japanese dominance of the markets, the transition away from natural folk music to synthetic and hard music, edgier and more aggressive fashion, body modification, alienation and the increasing fraying of social bonds, market booms and busts, the obsolescence of the average worker, etc., etc.
You're right that "futurists only create the present, just more of it," but if you think that the world of Neuromancer was "fake, plastic, and surreal," then that's there's nothing wrong with that. That's what it was supposed to be!
Early cyberpunk is nothing but the nightmare shadow the 1980s, and "fake, plastic, and surreal" was the dominant feeling of that era for a lot of people.
I would like to point out that cyberpunk's vision of cyberspace with its entirely abstract-GUI hacking and its death by security program is just as magically unscientific as warp drives and funny-foreheaded aliens. Anyone that kvetches about Star Trek not being science fiction shouldn't be all that much more sympathetic about Gibson's work either.
Heck, anyone willing to cut off nearly all TV SF is probably missing out on a lot of really awesome authors like Ellison and Bester due to their desire for hard science purity. Even David Brin's written some pretty wildly out there stuff like "Kiln People" (which I HIGHLY recommend).
You could use it as some sort of anti-captcha for a social networking sight meant to be only used by blind people. If you can make it through the sign-in form, you get to join.
Take THAT all you people that don't put alt tags on your images!
(By the way, does the "evil color" work on colorblind people?)
I mean, it's college, the point is to meet new people. But now my profile is locked down tighter than NORAD, because I have to worry that some zombie in HR is going to freak out that I had a beer once.
I was out of college by the time MySpace and Facebook got popular (so I still don't really *get* them), but I *have* seen employers do this. I saw a girl lose a position because someone found images of her posing topless with her sorority. Apparently the pic was pretty well known on Facebook. She almost certainly never knew why she got passed over, but having someone on the inside killed her job prospects.
The whole point of Facebook is that it's a "walled garden." "Walled gardens" are walled so that they are safe and trusted places. Sites like Facebook are no different. Not everybody is into full 100% exhibitionism, but many do want to have a place to advertise their lives to people they trust a little.
You know, I always thought sheeple was meant more for people who just went along with the flock and didn't make any protests about where they were being led. You know, kind of like people who blindly trust companies when companies put out statements saying that their products never hurt *anybody* and that you should trust them and keep buying from them.
At least one of HP's printers is listed in two different coulumns. It's 'above average but *may* be high'. So they list it in high as well. No further explanation, no reasoning, just FUD. Of course, people just automaticlly check the high column and don't read thst study or look at the others in detail.
Talking about yourself, I see. While I applaud you for actually tracking down the study and reading a bit or two of it, you obviously didn't do more than skim it if you you think there's "no further explanation" and "no reasoning."
It can also be seen that the same model of a printer (in this case the HP LaserJet 5) can act as either a non-emitter or a high emitter, and further investigation should be conducted for this phenomena.
They did studies in an indoor office environment as well as in a low-flow chamber. Some printers may have performed differently in the two different situations. Reread sections 2.1-2.3. Also, from section 3.3:
Further analysis conducted with the application of the K-S test showed that for particles with sizes ranging from 15 to 710 nm, there were statistically significant differences (p = 0.01) between printers, as well as between printing conditions (e.g., toner coverage and cartridge age). These results indicate that the particle emission characteristics are printer-type specific and are affected by printing conditions, such as toner coverage and cartridge age.
So there you go -- multiple test runs under differing conditions have different results that may make some printers PM-free under some conditions and horrible PM emitters under others. The researchers say that this requires further study and do *not* just arbitrarily lump a printer into one category or another but instead show that these printers fall under both in differing test runs.
Note that this is more of a glob than a regex. A regular expression would need some character before the * to denote what is repeated 0 or more times. Thus, you'd have.*ball instead of *ball, or [:lower:]*ball if you want to make sure to only match lower-case letters instead of looking like garbage.
I mean, if you're going to be pedantic, be sure to get it right!
(Besides, who says it was meant to represent multiple sports instead of using symbols to censor a word the poster considers obscene? Incidentally, I just found out that this is patented.)
The project is considered a failure due to the mass number of cowardly robots forgetting to fire their weapons, instead shouting "NO DISSEMBLE!!!" in the hopes they aren't turned into scrap metal.
Well, that's only to be expected when you let them loose in the White House press room.
Most likely places like this are all around you, but here's a website locator for a branch office nearest to you. Alternately, you can find a lot of the paperwork online.
Careful, though, the time commitment's been getting longer lately.
The irony is that he laughs about how some kid's head was blown apart but nearly cries about a dog they had to leave on a rooftop.
That's not really all that surprising or ironic if you frame the situation properly. It's a lot harder for most humans who are used to pets to hate a pet as much as another human being. Pets are often seen as ultimately innocent, whereas other humans can be enemies. Also, it seems from your description that he had a personal bond with the dog and not with the kid who died. That also makes a difference in a lot of people's capacity for empathy, especially in a heightened "us vs. them" situation like a war. Such situation strengthens the bonding with those who are "us" and make it easier to hate and be callous to those who are "them." It's just human instinct -- our adaptations for competition as a pack animal.
Lastly, it's worth noting that Hitler loved dogs and was a vegetarian (the irritating kind that liked to tell fellow diners how sausages they were eating were made) because he hated animal cruelty, and yet he presided over the genocide of an entire people. Not to Godwin the discussion, but it is a stark "contradiction" in his personality that many have a hard time reconciling until you frame it in terms of "enemies" and "innocents."
It's complex. Clearly, the language in the Constitution does not only restrict the actions of the US government against citizens. Due process, freedom of speech, religion, and press; freedom from illegal search and seizure, etc. are no limited in description to only belonging to US citizens, and since the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are phrased in the form of restrictions on government, it shouldn't matter.
However, the 14th Amendment does limit itself to talking about citizens when barring the individual states from creating laws that discriminate against citizens of the United States. Also, Supreme Court decisions have split hairs between the rights of citizens and non-citizens in the past. I wish I could name some cases off the top of my head, but racial policies and wartime policies have both left a pretty nasty scar on the freedoms espoused in the Bill of Rights. Dig around for the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld decision and read up on the previous decisions it references if you care.
Overall, though, non-citizens 99% of the legal protection of citizens in the US. Whether this status is protected from changes in law by the courts is another matter, however.
The internet is not killing music. It's only killing corporate dominance of music.
No, it's merely attacking corporate dominance of music -- which will end up stronger or weaker for it. My current money, based on trends in IP law, IP law enforcement, and the prominence of DRM and industry consolidation is on it ending up stronger for it.
I've found that excessive subservience and high tolerance to BS lead to good grades a lot more than being smart... something I didn't figure out until I was an adult.
<valley-girl>What-ever!</valley-girl>
It's not like high school was even remotely challenging. I did all my homework in the period before it was due, had plenty of time left to talk to friends during class, and I graduated as the valedictorian and got into the college of my choice (only to finally find out what it meant to have to study).
Anyone who had trouble with grades in high school either isn't the hot stuff they think they are or wasn't trying at all.
You've got your pronouns/inventors mixed up. Dean Kamen's Segway was known as "It." "They" is the legal name of the guy that invented ground-effect lighting and sunglasses with shades over them.
Not really. They were more popular than they are today, but athletes, pretty boys, soldiers, and politicians had their good share of attention too. Scientists who made something fascinated were well-liked, but your average smart guy who hadn't yet had a break was just as "boring" as any geek today.
Let's not forget that women of intellect weren't well valued either. Famous women scientists were considered a fascinating aberration but not the kind of girl you'd want to marry -- after all men were expected to be the heads of the family, and you wouldn't want too "headstrong" and "independent" of a woman.
Toxic fumes from nearly every type of mechanical combustion and any outdoor process that stirs up dust, now this... and yet the news is still soaked with how 'those eeevil smokers' are out to kill us all with their eeevil second-hand smoke.
So basically your argument boils down to the teenager's "Well everybody else is doing it, so why can't I?" Tch. Everybody thinking that way means that no one will do the right thing.
Slashdot Mirror
No. See my reply to fyngyrz. Any tools capable of recognizing and displaying security flaws to a human no longer needs a human to puzzle over the flaws to figure out how to exploit them. All tools necessary to create the semi-automated VR hacking interfaces in cyberpunk added together can just as easily be made fully-automated.
Nonsense. The more dimensions you can manipulate at once, the more complex a user input you can provide. Up to the limits of your ability to handle complex motions. As a musician and a programmer for over four decades, I didn't perceive Gibson's ideas as unlikely or overwhelming or impossible at all. Raising the level of art required? Plausible. The next generation would simply rise to meet the challenge. Watch them learn video games if you don't know what I mean.
:-)
Okay. You're completely missing the point of why I consider VR hacking interfaces to be utterly magical nonsense.
Consider a firewall that you want to hack to get past. In a cyberpunk story, you'd be interacting visually with it as if it were a physical object to be prodded until you're through. That requires two things -- complete read-access to the application to determine the "shape" of it for presentation and a highly adaptable program capable of handling virtually any security application and interpreting them in a visual fashion. If you have both of these, and thus a tool capable of visually displaying security flaws, then you already have a program that knows how to get past security and which doesn't need YOU anymore. The puzzle-based GUI becomes superfluous at that point because your tool already has the solution before it can present the puzzle to you.
Plus, the way software penetration works in real life is not really capable of being abstracted in this fashion. If you have a known exploit, then you just push a button and run it. If you don't have a known exploit, then the process of finding one is slow, tedious, and easily detected on someone else's network if they have anti-intrusion tools. Wrapping the process up in a fancy GUI is just a waste of time. Fast hacking by GUI is nonsense.
And what military or government or corporation would not want serious deterrents to entry when the world is virtual?
So why do we have anti-virus software available in the commercial market if this is the case? I'm sorry, but I don't care what the government wants in this case -- the market will not bear implants that allow remote blackhats to kill you from a distance. The technology would be stillborn. Why would you willingly choose a dangerous model when you could have one that recognized deadly patterns of sensory input and shut them down? All of the mechanisms for killing remotely would be as recognizable as a virus is today. All such holes in the software are bugs and should be patched.
There's absolutely no reason to let such things by and every litigious liability law reason for a company to prevent it. Plus, can you imagine what terrorists could do with such a technology combined with hijacking a popular website? I'm sorry, but common sense dictates that protective measures would be required before such a tool could reach the mass-market use present in cyberpunk stories.
Yeah, but if something requires YOU to suspend, but not ME to suspend, then it's just you with the problem.
And yet, you're the one that can't handle a story because of FTL drives.
Unscientific? Hardly. Socially unlikely? Perhaps, but that doesn't make it bad scientific speculation.
I say that it does. The social sciences are important too. No one would make a computer interface like the ones in cyberpunk, because they're abstracted to the point of inefficiency. If you have magical hacking tools that let you visualize hacking as manipulating a physical object, then you're wasting time with an interface that spends time interpreting data in a human-recognizable way that could've been spent just handling the intrusion. It's a waste of cycles that could be used to do something useful.
And who in their right minds wouldn't put safety locks on mind-machine interfaces to prevent any sort of direct damage? If enemy programs can trigger that sort of crap deliberately, then you can be danged sure that bugs could too. There's no way product liability law would allow such dangerous tools on the market, and the existence of programs to trigger fatal responses would immediately result in a public outcry against it. Who want to leave their brain vulnerable to killers at a distance?
If an invention requires a complete suspension of disbelief about human nature to be plausible, then it's fundamentally illogical and thus bad science.
Methinks you would enjoy SF more (hard or not) if your imagination was a little more informed around the edges.
Methinks you would read better literature if you didn't discount the human element entirely in your favored stories.
What t I think that he really missed was that the religions would get so loud once more.
Everyone did. Even the religions themselves. Growing up in the 80s, I can tell you that everyone was convinced that the church was dying -- most especially the churches themselves.
The 80s was truly an age of materialism. While the 60s & 70s represented an abandonment of traditional values in favor of new ones, they weren't an abandonment of spirituality. The 80s were, and its no surprise that nearly all speculative fiction from that time period posited a mostly atheist future. I can't think of really any SF from that time period that foresaw a resurgence of fanatical faith.
After all, our enemies were communists, not terrorists, and the Christian Coalition was still a bunch of easily ignored loonies. I think that times are going to swing that way (for the worse in my opinion). After all, the divide between mainstream Christians and mainstream liberals is the worst its ever been in history. As a religious liberal who find the two world-views inexorably linked, I find this to be the saddest development in modern times and the greatest sign that America's sickness will continue. But I digress.
...for a social networking sight...
Gah! Typo-pun totally not intended. I swear.
Neuromancer was very well written, but utterly short-sighted (as all futurism is. Like Cory Doctorow said, futurists only create the present, just more of it). The world he created felt fake, plastic, and surreal.
Neuromancer is absolutely brilliant for what it is -- a dystopian critique of everything that was frightening about the 80's for those who had been adults in the 70's: Corporate mega-mergers; the captivating, numbing, spellbinding nature of television, the "Me generation," the dissolving bond of loyalty between company and employee, the increasing disregard of companies for the lives of citizens, drug use going from drugs for relaxation and communion to those for stimulation and frenzy, weakening government at the same time corporate power began to transcend borders, Japanese dominance of the markets, the transition away from natural folk music to synthetic and hard music, edgier and more aggressive fashion, body modification, alienation and the increasing fraying of social bonds, market booms and busts, the obsolescence of the average worker, etc., etc.
You're right that "futurists only create the present, just more of it," but if you think that the world of Neuromancer was "fake, plastic, and surreal," then that's there's nothing wrong with that. That's what it was supposed to be!
Early cyberpunk is nothing but the nightmare shadow the 1980s, and "fake, plastic, and surreal" was the dominant feeling of that era for a lot of people.
I would like to point out that cyberpunk's vision of cyberspace with its entirely abstract-GUI hacking and its death by security program is just as magically unscientific as warp drives and funny-foreheaded aliens. Anyone that kvetches about Star Trek not being science fiction shouldn't be all that much more sympathetic about Gibson's work either.
Heck, anyone willing to cut off nearly all TV SF is probably missing out on a lot of really awesome authors like Ellison and Bester due to their desire for hard science purity. Even David Brin's written some pretty wildly out there stuff like "Kiln People" (which I HIGHLY recommend).
You could use it as some sort of anti-captcha for a social networking sight meant to be only used by blind people. If you can make it through the sign-in form, you get to join.
Take THAT all you people that don't put alt tags on your images!
(By the way, does the "evil color" work on colorblind people?)
So what part does a man possess that makes them exclusively qualified to work in IT?
I mean, it's college, the point is to meet new people. But now my profile is locked down tighter than NORAD, because I have to worry that some zombie in HR is going to freak out that I had a beer once.
I was out of college by the time MySpace and Facebook got popular (so I still don't really *get* them), but I *have* seen employers do this. I saw a girl lose a position because someone found images of her posing topless with her sorority. Apparently the pic was pretty well known on Facebook. She almost certainly never knew why she got passed over, but having someone on the inside killed her job prospects.
The whole point of Facebook is that it's a "walled garden." "Walled gardens" are walled so that they are safe and trusted places. Sites like Facebook are no different. Not everybody is into full 100% exhibitionism, but many do want to have a place to advertise their lives to people they trust a little.
You know, I always thought sheeple was meant more for people who just went along with the flock and didn't make any protests about where they were being led. You know, kind of like people who blindly trust companies when companies put out statements saying that their products never hurt *anybody* and that you should trust them and keep buying from them.
At least one of HP's printers is listed in two different coulumns. It's 'above average but *may* be high'. So they list it in high as well. No further explanation, no reasoning, just FUD. Of course, people just automaticlly check the high column and don't read thst study or look at the others in detail.
Talking about yourself, I see. While I applaud you for actually tracking down the study and reading a bit or two of it, you obviously didn't do more than skim it if you you think there's "no further explanation" and "no reasoning."
They did studies in an indoor office environment as well as in a low-flow chamber. Some printers may have performed differently in the two different situations. Reread sections 2.1-2.3. Also, from section 3.3:
So there you go -- multiple test runs under differing conditions have different results that may make some printers PM-free under some conditions and horrible PM emitters under others. The researchers say that this requires further study and do *not* just arbitrarily lump a printer into one category or another but instead show that these printers fall under both in differing test runs.
Note that this is more of a glob than a regex. A regular expression would need some character before the * to denote what is repeated 0 or more times. .*ball instead of *ball, or [:lower:]*ball if you want to make sure to only match lower-case letters instead of looking like garbage.
Thus, you'd have
I mean, if you're going to be pedantic, be sure to get it right!
(Besides, who says it was meant to represent multiple sports instead of using symbols to censor a word the poster considers obscene? Incidentally, I just found out that this is patented.)
The project is considered a failure due to the mass number of cowardly robots forgetting to fire their weapons, instead shouting "NO DISSEMBLE!!!" in the hopes they aren't turned into scrap metal.
Well, that's only to be expected when you let them loose in the White House press room.
Most likely places like this are all around you, but here's a website locator for a branch office nearest to you.
Alternately, you can find a lot of the paperwork online.
Careful, though, the time commitment's been getting longer lately.
The irony is that he laughs about how some kid's head was blown apart but nearly cries about a dog they had to leave on a rooftop.
That's not really all that surprising or ironic if you frame the situation properly. It's a lot harder for most humans who are used to pets to hate a pet as much as another human being. Pets are often seen as ultimately innocent, whereas other humans can be enemies. Also, it seems from your description that he had a personal bond with the dog and not with the kid who died. That also makes a difference in a lot of people's capacity for empathy, especially in a heightened "us vs. them" situation like a war. Such situation strengthens the bonding with those who are "us" and make it easier to hate and be callous to those who are "them." It's just human instinct -- our adaptations for competition as a pack animal.
Lastly, it's worth noting that Hitler loved dogs and was a vegetarian (the irritating kind that liked to tell fellow diners how sausages they were eating were made) because he hated animal cruelty, and yet he presided over the genocide of an entire people. Not to Godwin the discussion, but it is a stark "contradiction" in his personality that many have a hard time reconciling until you frame it in terms of "enemies" and "innocents."
It's complex. Clearly, the language in the Constitution does not only restrict the actions of the US government against citizens. Due process, freedom of speech, religion, and press; freedom from illegal search and seizure, etc. are no limited in description to only belonging to US citizens, and since the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are phrased in the form of restrictions on government, it shouldn't matter.
However, the 14th Amendment does limit itself to talking about citizens when barring the individual states from creating laws that discriminate against citizens of the United States. Also, Supreme Court decisions have split hairs between the rights of citizens and non-citizens in the past. I wish I could name some cases off the top of my head, but racial policies and wartime policies have both left a pretty nasty scar on the freedoms espoused in the Bill of Rights. Dig around for the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld decision and read up on the previous decisions it references if you care.
Overall, though, non-citizens 99% of the legal protection of citizens in the US. Whether this status is protected from changes in law by the courts is another matter, however.
Technically, that's a style and not a grammar issue, but...
I'll still concede to having been bested.
Before a ton of posts show up bitching about the last sentence, you should ask yourself, "Is grammar as big of an issue as you think?"
Fixed.
Wow! The image compression used by Microsoft's HD Photo format is so good that it can reduce any image down to 0 bits!
It's decompression that's always been the sticky part.
The internet is not killing music.
It's only killing corporate dominance of music.
No, it's merely attacking corporate dominance of music -- which will end up stronger or weaker for it.
My current money, based on trends in IP law, IP law enforcement, and the prominence of DRM and industry consolidation is on it ending up stronger for it.
I've found that excessive subservience and high tolerance to BS lead to good grades a lot more than being smart... something I didn't figure out until I was an adult.
<valley-girl>What-ever!</valley-girl>
It's not like high school was even remotely challenging. I did all my homework in the period before it was due, had plenty of time left to talk to friends during class, and I graduated as the valedictorian and got into the college of my choice (only to finally find out what it meant to have to study).
Anyone who had trouble with grades in high school either isn't the hot stuff they think they are or wasn't trying at all.
You've got your pronouns/inventors mixed up. Dean Kamen's Segway was known as "It." "They" is the legal name of the guy that invented ground-effect lighting and sunglasses with shades over them.
I remember him from an NPR interview.
Not really. They were more popular than they are today, but athletes, pretty boys, soldiers, and politicians had their good share of attention too. Scientists who made something fascinated were well-liked, but your average smart guy who hadn't yet had a break was just as "boring" as any geek today.
Let's not forget that women of intellect weren't well valued either. Famous women scientists were considered a fascinating aberration but not the kind of girl you'd want to marry -- after all men were expected to be the heads of the family, and you wouldn't want too "headstrong" and "independent" of a woman.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Think of it this way, if everyone was as smart as you and me, we would just be of average intelligence.
I could accept that. My ego's not more important than the effects of current mix on the democracy I live in.
Toxic fumes from nearly every type of mechanical combustion and any outdoor process that stirs up dust, now this... and yet the news is still soaked with how 'those eeevil smokers' are out to kill us all with their eeevil second-hand smoke.
So basically your argument boils down to the teenager's "Well everybody else is doing it, so why can't I?"
Tch. Everybody thinking that way means that no one will do the right thing.