I was reading the article and found it all fascinating. However by the end of it the only thing that came to mind were the lyrics to an old Tom Paxton song...
"I'll sing of Spiro Agnew and all the things he's done."
That was the whole song and only people alive when Nixon was president or people who enjoy political history will find that amusing, but I thought I would share anyway.
True, we live in a time where information talks. But, do we have to be a slave to it?
As much as I don't like the idea of utilities like HailStorm, the burden of maintaining privacy is the job of society as a whole. Those who feel comfortable divulging extremely personal information can and those of us who wish not to can remain, for all intents and purposes, anonymous to Microsoft. So, we'll at least have the freedom to choose.
As a society I think we prize ease and convience over privacy and that is sad, but people don't understand what giving away that much information is opening them up to. Only recently have people had their identities stolen because they used their credit card at a restaurant or similar. People are hard headed and don't learn easily. They have to get screwed over before they learn not to do something again.
So, let those who are unwise and unwary get sucked in and you and I can stay safely out of the way.
I am not particularly hard core about 'living anonymously', but I do steer clear of excessive doling out of my SSN and such. However, if you have become sufficiently paranoid you can check out this privacy guide
to learn some sweet tricks on how to fall between the cracks.
Er....water soluble in this case is good. The alchohol will dissolve in the water and leave you with a few drunk fish. And we all know what crude oil does in water so I don't have to go into details there.
If I had the choice of being dipped in alcohol or crude oil I would definately pick the former.
I agree that Japan has it's issues. They are horrible about respecting endangerd species, they are definately only now coming up to speed on some societal issues.
But, even with all that being true, I think that missed the point. Why is Japan perfect for the cyberpunk genre? Because it is the technology and the fashion that we see and hear about. Because it is romantized for those things. Now, as a culture to model ours after, sure it falls short.
Just like we romantize knights in shining armor and the chilvary of the medieval era without taking a good look at historical documention about the role of farmers under fuedal lords, and the visciousness of the battles, and the unsanitary way they lived. But it makes for great stories!
Same with Japan and the cyberpunk genre, it may not be all it's cracked up to be, but it sure makes a great story!
I am not sure there is too much to say in response to this, but I did find the article a great read.
I have long been a fan of Gibson and cyberpunk and even ran a cpunk MUD. In order to do the latter I learned what I could about Japanese culture, even reading stuff like Shogun which is set at the time England first stumbled across the island gem.
What I learned makes me agree with what Gibson says. The Japanese have an extrodinary ability to use another cultures advances as a template to make something really great (ie the car). They haven't in the past done much for the innovation side, but they are able to run with fresh ideas and churn out some neat stuff.
I think that Japan is a better setting than many Western cultures because as a westener I feel that was have a lot of angst as well as fear toward technology. A whole world of knowledge opened up to us with the advent of the public accessible web and right off the bat there are stampedes to regulate it. But, the Japanese are unfraid of what lies ahead and just keep running forward.
The Japanese have also had some really cool toys for awhile that we have only recently seen, for instance, the Izone camera from Polaroid. About 10 years ago the Japanese had a similar camera and over the years have made nearly credit card sized versions.
I do think that something was left out of the article, and that is that Gibson's first major novel, Neuromancer was published in 1984. This was the beginning of a Japanese fascination (though not always good) in America. Remember songs like "Eastern boys and Western girls" and "I'm turning Japanese" and "Kung-fu Fighting"? The cyberpunk genre came out of the 80's an embodies much about that time, including how influenctial Japan was on out society at the time.
So why Japan? Because while we stand around quibbling about if the future is safe for our children or not, they will doing some fantasic things that will bring us into a cyber era.
Oh sure!
Lots....during my tenure as lab tech I saw lots of C and Fortran problems with no bugs. But to get there I saw CS majors working 40 hours a week on them, some code only 75 lines long!
You CAN get bugless code! But, you have to put solid code as top priority, over the deadlines, over the bottom line. You aren't going to see much in corporate and even scientific america because the deadline has become the all important factor.
Also, the fewer people who work on the code the better. I believe the best set up is tandem coding, two people working together and checking each other. More than that and you get committees designing giraffes.
Looking into The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks and Refactoring by Martin Fowler for ideas on how to better your code.
I missed the first posting about ArsDigita U., but I read over their web pages and it got me thinking.
In the promotional paragraph they mention that it is a one year (albeit intense) undergraduate program. In the News section they mention a thanks to Oracle for their donation. These coupled with the fact that they have lost funding during the hightech landslide brings up a question; Is ArsDigita really the scholastic wave of the furture, striving to produce competent and innovative CS mjors who will help us take the great leap into the technology era, or is it just a mill for the big companies to churn out drones for the cubilcle farms?
And just because Stallman gave a lecture there doesn't, in my opnion, prove that they are the former. I am all for educating toward technological tolerance and ease as we will need it in the years to come. I just hope that it will be the need for knowledge and not the need for revenue that wins out.
Slashdot Mirror
I was reading the article and found it all fascinating. However by the end of it the only thing that came to mind were the lyrics to an old Tom Paxton song...
"I'll sing of Spiro Agnew and all the things he's done."
That was the whole song and only people alive when Nixon was president or people who enjoy political history will find that amusing, but I thought I would share anyway.
True, we live in a time where information talks. But, do we have to be a slave to it?
As much as I don't like the idea of utilities like HailStorm, the burden of maintaining privacy is the job of society as a whole. Those who feel comfortable divulging extremely personal information can and those of us who wish not to can remain, for all intents and purposes, anonymous to Microsoft. So, we'll at least have the freedom to choose.
As a society I think we prize ease and convience over privacy and that is sad, but people don't understand what giving away that much information is opening them up to. Only recently have people had their identities stolen because they used their credit card at a restaurant or similar. People are hard headed and don't learn easily. They have to get screwed over before they learn not to do something again.
So, let those who are unwise and unwary get sucked in and you and I can stay safely out of the way.
I am not particularly hard core about 'living anonymously', but I do steer clear of excessive doling out of my SSN and such. However, if you have become sufficiently paranoid you can check out this privacy guide to learn some sweet tricks on how to fall between the cracks.
Cpunkgrrl
Er....water soluble in this case is good. The alchohol will dissolve in the water and leave you with a few drunk fish. And we all know what crude oil does in water so I don't have to go into details there.
If I had the choice of being dipped in alcohol or crude oil I would definately pick the former.
I agree that Japan has it's issues. They are horrible about respecting endangerd species, they are definately only now coming up to speed on some societal issues.
But, even with all that being true, I think that missed the point. Why is Japan perfect for the cyberpunk genre? Because it is the technology and the fashion that we see and hear about. Because it is romantized for those things. Now, as a culture to model ours after, sure it falls short.
Just like we romantize knights in shining armor and the chilvary of the medieval era without taking a good look at historical documention about the role of farmers under fuedal lords, and the visciousness of the battles, and the unsanitary way they lived. But it makes for great stories!
Same with Japan and the cyberpunk genre, it may not be all it's cracked up to be, but it sure makes a great story!
I am not sure there is too much to say in response to this, but I did find the article a great read.
I have long been a fan of Gibson and cyberpunk and even ran a cpunk MUD. In order to do the latter I learned what I could about Japanese culture, even reading stuff like Shogun which is set at the time England first stumbled across the island gem.
What I learned makes me agree with what Gibson says. The Japanese have an extrodinary ability to use another cultures advances as a template to make something really great (ie the car). They haven't in the past done much for the innovation side, but they are able to run with fresh ideas and churn out some neat stuff.
I think that Japan is a better setting than many Western cultures because as a westener I feel that was have a lot of angst as well as fear toward technology. A whole world of knowledge opened up to us with the advent of the public accessible web and right off the bat there are stampedes to regulate it. But, the Japanese are unfraid of what lies ahead and just keep running forward.
The Japanese have also had some really cool toys for awhile that we have only recently seen, for instance, the Izone camera from Polaroid. About 10 years ago the Japanese had a similar camera and over the years have made nearly credit card sized versions.
I do think that something was left out of the article, and that is that Gibson's first major novel, Neuromancer was published in 1984. This was the beginning of a Japanese fascination (though not always good) in America. Remember songs like "Eastern boys and Western girls" and "I'm turning Japanese" and "Kung-fu Fighting"? The cyberpunk genre came out of the 80's an embodies much about that time, including how influenctial Japan was on out society at the time.
So why Japan? Because while we stand around quibbling about if the future is safe for our children or not, they will doing some fantasic things that will bring us into a cyber era.
Oh sure!
Lots....during my tenure as lab tech I saw lots of C and Fortran problems with no bugs. But to get there I saw CS majors working 40 hours a week on them, some code only 75 lines long!
You CAN get bugless code! But, you have to put solid code as top priority, over the deadlines, over the bottom line. You aren't going to see much in corporate and even scientific america because the deadline has become the all important factor.
Also, the fewer people who work on the code the better. I believe the best set up is tandem coding, two people working together and checking each other. More than that and you get committees designing giraffes.
Looking into The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks and Refactoring by Martin Fowler for ideas on how to better your code.
I missed the first posting about ArsDigita U., but I read over their web pages and it got me thinking.
In the promotional paragraph they mention that it is a one year (albeit intense) undergraduate program. In the News section they mention a thanks to Oracle for their donation. These coupled with the fact that they have lost funding during the hightech landslide brings up a question; Is ArsDigita really the scholastic wave of the furture, striving to produce competent and innovative CS mjors who will help us take the great leap into the technology era, or is it just a mill for the big companies to churn out drones for the cubilcle farms?
And just because Stallman gave a lecture there doesn't, in my opnion, prove that they are the former. I am all for educating toward technological tolerance and ease as we will need it in the years to come. I just hope that it will be the need for knowledge and not the need for revenue that wins out.