The title says it all: how much would it suck to have your headphones anchored to your wrist? Imagine the tangling, tripping, and yanking. Imagine putting a coat on, or taking it off. Imagine riding a bike and signalling. Imagine smoking. Imagine typing at a keyboard. Imagine carrying a briefcase, or adjusting a knapsack's straps. Damn, would that ever suck.
Hold's the world's record for manmade lightning generation
Invented the radio
Invented AC
Invented a form of X10 for telephony and remote device control
Was terrified of the number "3" and human hair
He's the man.
Science fiction != science tutorial
on
The Timekeeper
·
· Score: 2
The principle difference between futurism and (most) science fiction is that science fiction is allegorical, while futurism is predictive.
Orwell never pretended to be writing predictions about the future of technology and civilisation: he was writing allegory about the betrayal of the Revolution by Stalin and his cronies. 1984 is an anagram for 1948 the year in which the events that most disturbed Orwell took place.
By the same token, Wells' time machine was, as Katz notes, "a blistering attack on class structure." It wasn't about predicting the future at all, it was about using the future as a setting for a burleque that lampooned the social order of the day.
Disney, on the other hand, has always taken the tack that they are predicting the future (in fact, this is an occupational hazard of dark-rides and themeparks going back to the Futurama at the 1939 World's Fair).
The disconnect that Katz sees between Wells' novels and Disney's interpretations can be explained by this key difference: prediction is an inevitably goofy exercise that lays bare the predictor's agenda, while allegory is a subtler undertaking.
Like a man once said, "Reading science fiction to learn about science is like reading romance novels to learn about love."
The flaw in your argument is that monsanto has nothing close to a monopoly.
I never used the word "monopoly." This is about dirty tricks. People who lived in coal towns nominally had the ability to buy their drygoods somewhere other than in the company store, but in practice, no one ever did. The homogeniety of choice for them lead to de facto indentured servitude.
If Monsanto requires large capital outlays for "complimentary" products for people hoping to plant their seeds, farmers will be in the position of not being able to afford to reinvest in nonspecific products for use with another company's seed.
While it's true that "progress brings dependence on technology," Monsanto's strategy is all about making farmers dependent on Monsanto.
The strategy of requiring Monsanto-patented adjuncts (fertilizers, pesticides) for use with Monsanto-patented seeds is the worst kind of dirty pool. It's like Microsoft's (aborted) strategy of making it nearly impossible to install another company's browser as well as MSIE.
Regardless of how good, bad or dangerous the tech is, the fact remains that Monsanto's business practices represent a real threat to farmers and those economic interests that depend on agribusiness.
OTOH, Monsanto sure knows how to build a nice oversized wheel of gouda.
I live in Toronto. It's a good geek town, and here's why:
There are lots of geeks. I mean, duh -- there are tons of people here who you can talk shop with, consult for, hire, and learn from.
It's the most important city in Canada. Saying this is an invitation to get slapped by Montrealers or Vancouverites, but really, it's not disputable. All of the banks are headquartered here. Almost every Canadian software company has a large campus, and foreign software companies also keep offices in town.
It's multicultural. The next best thing to vacation-time spent trekking around the world is having the cuisine of the world delivered to you, and not just quotidian pan-Asian food, but African, Salvadoran, Sri Lankhan, Carribean, Polish, Hungarian, etc etc etc. Multicultural cities have a hybrid vigour, an energy that mirrors the Internet. When you live near an all-night kung-fu movie house adjascent to a Hindu shrine up the street from an Eritrean after-hours club, the Internet's globe-shrinking effects are easier to understand.
It's got a lake. Admittedly, it's not the cleanest lake, but it's big, and it's got beaches.
It's got weather. We freeze all winter and stew in our juices come summer; come spring everyone rushes outdoors and spends as much time drinking on patios as they can; fall is a miracle of colours.
It's safe. Basically, no one has guns. I didn't even see a real gun until I was 23, except for service weapons on cops. I've never seen a handgun in Canada that wasn't strapped to a uniformed cop.
It's got a downtown. The downtown core in Toronto is big, healthy and fun. You can walk, you can cycle, you can take cheap and efficient subways or streetcars. The suburbs suck, but don't they always?
It's close to the USA Lots of services aren't available to Canadians (like HandsSpring Visors). But Toronto is 1.5h from Niagara Falls, NY, and it's easy to get a PO box there to have your nerd toys shipped to.
It's got international cred. From film festivals to big touring concerts to museum displays, Toronto is the one guaranteed Canadian stop on any cultural event of import.
Socialised medecine. What's there to say? You can walk out of one job and into another, and not worry that you're going to be bankrupted by an auto accident on the way. For all that, I may be moving to SV in the next year. My company is getting some venture cap there, and we may have to relocate the head office.
...but I'd think that nowadays the life-time of patents is much too long.
It's important to recognise that patents are awarded to alogrithms and conceptual models, not to specific code implementations.
It may seem that 20 years is a computational eternity, and indeed it is, if we're talking about code. The sole certainty about today's computational platforms is that they'll be obsolete in a couple decades.
But the Google patent is for the concept of peer-review for evaluating relevance. And while computational platforms are prone to instant obsalescence, the concepts that drive them have proven longevity:
Windowing systems
Side-scrolling video games
Public-key crypto
And so on.
These technologies have all persisted for longer than 20 years, and show every indication of staying with us for the next century. These are the computational equivalent of Phillips screwdrivers or adjustable wrenches, and deserve the same protection as their forebears.
I did a piece last month for a magazine that shall remain nameless on the best of home automation systems.
This is the ultimate geek hobby. The price-to-play is surpsisingly cheap (you can get simple controllers and applications modules from X10 for miniscule sums of money, but as you catch the bug, you can scale all the way up to Crestron's high-sex-factor touchscreens.
Home automation scales. Start with setting up a couple of controllers that call switch on or kill all your houselights from the bedroom; and you'll find yourself scaling up rapidly to astronomical clock-driven blinds-controllers that open and shut individual slats of your vertical blinds to cut off monitor glare while simultaneously flooding the room with lights. Many of the controllers are IP aware, so you can have your doorbell send email to your pager.
But there's another element that defines postcpunk fiction: a technological grounding.
The cyberpunk classics, with the exception of Rucker's work, were written by nontechnological personnel. The computer stuff, cyberspace, black ice, etc, were metaphors for modern communications infrastructure: network TV, telephones. Gibson's confessions about his nontechnical status (he typed Neuromancer on a manual typewriter and didn't know what the floppy drive was on his MacPlus) are now legendary.
With the advent of programmer/writers like Stephenson and the new, improved self-trained techno Sterling, we're seeing credible SF written about computers, cyberspace and cracking.
Gibson's work is just as smart and sexy as ever, but it's dating rather quickly. Viz Idoru, in which the plotline revolves around a mystical, drug-inspired ability to make oracular predictions based on playing with a browser. Gibson still isn't into technology, and it shows.
The New Wave of sf was often about writing sf where the science was bent to tell the story (in contrast with hard sf, where the story is constructed around a scientific conceit). Cyberpunk is often considered antithetical to New Wave in that it is "post-humanist" -- stories about social constructs without much regard for believable characters.
Post-cyberpunk sf is technologically literate, and grounded in the science of the day (it's received wisdom that the 'Net is to the 90s what rocketry was to the 50s). It is also very humanist, even sentimental: Cryptonomicon, in particular, was as maudlin as any John Varley story. In this way, it is a return to pre-cyberpunk sf: the golden age hard stuff blended with the New Wave humanism and style.
Perhaps Post-cyberpunk sf doesn't have anything to do with cyberpunk in any literary sense. If you believe that the modern Internet evolved from the technological vision of cyberpunk, and that the postcpunk writers are Internet savvy, then perhaps their debt to cyberpunk isn't literary, but technological: cyberpunk gave rise to the real-world technologies that postcpunk writers dote on.
Slashdot Mirror
The title says it all: how much would it suck to have your headphones anchored to your wrist? Imagine the tangling, tripping, and yanking. Imagine putting a coat on, or taking it off. Imagine riding a bike and signalling. Imagine smoking. Imagine typing at a keyboard. Imagine carrying a briefcase, or adjusting a knapsack's straps. Damn, would that ever suck.
- Built a motor out of bugs and sticks
- Hold's the world's record for manmade lightning generation
- Invented the radio
- Invented AC
- Invented a form of X10 for telephony and remote device control
- Was terrified of the number "3" and human hair
He's the man.Orwell never pretended to be writing predictions about the future of technology and civilisation: he was writing allegory about the betrayal of the Revolution by Stalin and his cronies. 1984 is an anagram for 1948 the year in which the events that most disturbed Orwell took place.
By the same token, Wells' time machine was, as Katz notes, "a blistering attack on class structure." It wasn't about predicting the future at all, it was about using the future as a setting for a burleque that lampooned the social order of the day.
Disney, on the other hand, has always taken the tack that they are predicting the future (in fact, this is an occupational hazard of dark-rides and themeparks going back to the Futurama at the 1939 World's Fair).
The disconnect that Katz sees between Wells' novels and Disney's interpretations can be explained by this key difference: prediction is an inevitably goofy exercise that lays bare the predictor's agenda, while allegory is a subtler undertaking.
Like a man once said, "Reading science fiction to learn about science is like reading romance novels to learn about love."
I never used the word "monopoly." This is about dirty tricks. People who lived in coal towns nominally had the ability to buy their drygoods somewhere other than in the company store, but in practice, no one ever did. The homogeniety of choice for them lead to de facto indentured servitude.
If Monsanto requires large capital outlays for "complimentary" products for people hoping to plant their seeds, farmers will be in the position of not being able to afford to reinvest in nonspecific products for use with another company's seed.
The strategy of requiring Monsanto-patented adjuncts (fertilizers, pesticides) for use with Monsanto-patented seeds is the worst kind of dirty pool. It's like Microsoft's (aborted) strategy of making it nearly impossible to install another company's browser as well as MSIE.
Regardless of how good, bad or dangerous the tech is, the fact remains that Monsanto's business practices represent a real threat to farmers and those economic interests that depend on agribusiness.
OTOH, Monsanto sure knows how to build a nice oversized wheel of gouda.
I mean, duh -- there are tons of people here who you can talk shop with, consult for, hire, and learn from.
Saying this is an invitation to get slapped by Montrealers or Vancouverites, but really, it's not disputable. All of the banks are headquartered here. Almost every Canadian software company has a large campus, and foreign software companies also keep offices in town.
The next best thing to vacation-time spent trekking around the world is having the cuisine of the world delivered to you, and not just quotidian pan-Asian food, but African, Salvadoran, Sri Lankhan, Carribean, Polish, Hungarian, etc etc etc. Multicultural cities have a hybrid vigour, an energy that mirrors the Internet. When you live near an all-night kung-fu movie house adjascent to a Hindu shrine up the street from an Eritrean after-hours club, the Internet's globe-shrinking effects are easier to understand.
Admittedly, it's not the cleanest lake, but it's big, and it's got beaches.
We freeze all winter and stew in our juices come summer; come spring everyone rushes outdoors and spends as much time drinking on patios as they can; fall is a miracle of colours.
Basically, no one has guns. I didn't even see a real gun until I was 23, except for service weapons on cops. I've never seen a handgun in Canada that wasn't strapped to a uniformed cop.
The downtown core in Toronto is big, healthy and fun. You can walk, you can cycle, you can take cheap and efficient subways or streetcars. The suburbs suck, but don't they always?
Lots of services aren't available to Canadians (like HandsSpring Visors). But Toronto is 1.5h from Niagara Falls, NY, and it's easy to get a PO box there to have your nerd toys shipped to.
From film festivals to big touring concerts to museum displays, Toronto is the one guaranteed Canadian stop on any cultural event of import.
What's there to say? You can walk out of one job and into another, and not worry that you're going to be bankrupted by an auto accident on the way. For all that, I may be moving to SV in the next year. My company is getting some venture cap there, and we may have to relocate the head office.
I'm gonna miss my awesome apartment.
It's important to recognise that patents are awarded to alogrithms and conceptual models, not to specific code implementations.
It may seem that 20 years is a computational eternity, and indeed it is, if we're talking about code. The sole certainty about today's computational platforms is that they'll be obsolete in a couple decades.
But the Google patent is for the concept of peer-review for evaluating relevance. And while computational platforms are prone to instant obsalescence, the concepts that drive them have proven longevity:
- Windowing systems
- Side-scrolling video games
- Public-key crypto
And so on.These technologies have all persisted for longer than 20 years, and show every indication of staying with us for the next century. These are the computational equivalent of Phillips screwdrivers or adjustable wrenches, and deserve the same protection as their forebears.
This is the ultimate geek hobby. The price-to-play is surpsisingly cheap (you can get simple controllers and applications modules from X10 for miniscule sums of money, but as you catch the bug, you can scale all the way up to Crestron's high-sex-factor touchscreens.
Home automation scales. Start with setting up a couple of controllers that call switch on or kill all your houselights from the bedroom; and you'll find yourself scaling up rapidly to astronomical clock-driven blinds-controllers that open and shut individual slats of your vertical blinds to cut off monitor glare while simultaneously flooding the room with lights. Many of the controllers are IP aware, so you can have your doorbell send email to your pager.
But there's another element that defines postcpunk fiction: a technological grounding.
The cyberpunk classics, with the exception of Rucker's work, were written by nontechnological personnel. The computer stuff, cyberspace, black ice, etc, were metaphors for modern communications infrastructure: network TV, telephones. Gibson's confessions about his nontechnical status (he typed Neuromancer on a manual typewriter and didn't know what the floppy drive was on his MacPlus) are now legendary.
With the advent of programmer/writers like Stephenson and the new, improved self-trained techno Sterling, we're seeing credible SF written about computers, cyberspace and cracking.
Gibson's work is just as smart and sexy as ever, but it's dating rather quickly. Viz Idoru, in which the plotline revolves around a mystical, drug-inspired ability to make oracular predictions based on playing with a browser. Gibson still isn't into technology, and it shows.
The New Wave of sf was often about writing sf where the science was bent to tell the story (in contrast with hard sf, where the story is constructed around a scientific conceit). Cyberpunk is often considered antithetical to New Wave in that it is "post-humanist" -- stories about social constructs without much regard for believable characters.
Post-cyberpunk sf is technologically literate, and grounded in the science of the day (it's received wisdom that the 'Net is to the 90s what rocketry was to the 50s). It is also very humanist, even sentimental: Cryptonomicon, in particular, was as maudlin as any John Varley story. In this way, it is a return to pre-cyberpunk sf: the golden age hard stuff blended with the New Wave humanism and style.
Perhaps Post-cyberpunk sf doesn't have anything to do with cyberpunk in any literary sense. If you believe that the modern Internet evolved from the technological vision of cyberpunk, and that the postcpunk writers are Internet savvy, then perhaps their debt to cyberpunk isn't literary, but technological: cyberpunk gave rise to the real-world technologies that postcpunk writers dote on.
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:5806895&dq=c
Russ Mitchell, the author, was my editor when I was writing features for Wired, and he's got a pretty solid handle on west-coast/SOMA geek culture.