Depending on the contestants, in my opinion, the most likely last contestant will be a woman.
All she would have to do is sleep with the guys and that would guarantee that she would not be voted out most likely. Then all she has to do is get them to turn on each other one by one.
Hey AC, let's do lunch sometime, and pitch this to the Spice Channel! Or maybe WB.
Respectfully, I disagree. I think there will be large publicly traded companies for some time, particularly capital intensive ones.
What private company is going to challenge GM, or Ford, or DaimlerChrysler? How do you make an open source challenge to GM, do you have one gal running a lathe in her basement making one camshaft a week, a guy laying up one fiberglass body a month in his garage? For the near future, the only entities that can make affordable automobiles will be large publicly held companies,or even government sponsored companies, and even these will get fewer and fewer.
Take the commercial aircraft industry. There's only three major contenders that I can think of, Boeing, Airbus and McDonnell-Douglas-whomever-else-they-merged-with. Airbus requires a whole continent for financial backing, Bill Gates would be sorely pressed to consider buying Boeing. Is some stealthy private company going to rise up in the next 10 years to challenge them?
Maybe Sterling's hypothesis makes sense in knowledge intensive industries, where the only barrier to entry is a $2000 PC. But in the world of making and moving material things, I don't think things are going to change that much.
One caveat, if nanotechnology were to really take off, it probably would be the end of massive publicly held companies. And electricity would be so cheap, there would be no need to meter it.
I had a Victorinox, lost is skiing and looked at Victorinox and Wenger models to replace it. The Wenger won by a hair, I thought the scissors were slightly better.
Or how about the college students who flunk out of school because of internet addiction? Without the internet, these students probably would've still been in school.
Absolutely. I attended college from 1984-1989, and while email and usenet were around, they were not well known. So, I had absolutely no friends drop out of school because of internet abuse. I did know some people that had scholastic troubles and even dropped out of school, but I'm sure it wasn't related to alcohol or drug abuse, or freedom from parents, or too much role playing games, or hacking on the computers, or being disenchanted with collegiate life, or not being sufficiently motivated...
Not to be too harsh, but students have been dropping out of college for a long time, the internet is just the latest reason.
George
Re:No need to be out of print
on
The Big U
·
· Score: 2
With new technologies it's possible to print books one copy at a time...
New? Only if you consider a 9 year old high speed printer new, such as the Xerox DocuTech. Of course, it's prohibitively expensive, but if I ever win about $50 million on a lottery I'd consider one.
First I have a work email and a home email, admittedly a weak subterfuge.
Then, if someone corners me about an old post, I'll look it over, with a puzzled expression on my face, and finally say.
"Dude, I wrote that? I must have been blitzed on some serious 'cid at the time, whoa!"
George
Re:Where is the OCR'ed version?
on
The Big U
·
· Score: 2
, it would take a rather long time to sit in front of a scanner flipping pages.
If I had a spare copy, I could cut the binding off and through it into the 23 ppm duplex scanner I have access to. Maybe I'll practice first with a Gutenberg bible.
Not to mention it'd be illegal to freely distribute the contents of this book.
Doh! So are illegal drugs, mp3's of released music for non personal use, warez, bootlegs, etc.
Just consider it a thought question.
George
Where is the OCR'ed version?
on
The Big U
·
· Score: 2
Since this is impossible to find for a reasonable price, and it hasn't been reprinted yet (though Stephenson hinted they might just to shut everybody up, though dang it if I can't find the link), where is the OCR'ed version?
Come on, someone must have scanned, OCR'ed and put it up somewhere by now?
Until then, I'll keep scouring garage sales for two copies, one for myself to reread ( I first read my roommates in college in the 80's), and one to sell for $500.
George
Re:Good, but too derivative of Mars
on
Antarctica
·
· Score: 1
Interestingly, there is a forthcoming book called White Mars written by Brian Aldiss, which is supposedly his response to the Robinson Mars trilogy.
Did I mention the Mars based science fiction novel I'm writing. In the future, Mars is such a desolate, unpleasant place, it's populated like Australia was, with criminals. Hence the name
Superbowl XXXIV was almost in the history books. Doug Flutie was driving the Bills deep into Rams territory with 1:52 to go in the game, striving to add to the 24 point lead and finally win one for the Bills.
At that point, the ceiling of the Georgia Dome cracked open, and Jesus Christ floated down on a pillar of blinding, radiant light, returning for his second coming.
"I'm sorry I was late, I forgot to check my PC for Y2K, and it took this long to get my PIM up and running again." replied Jesus, when asked about his timing. "I've had enough of Windows, though, and that's all I'll say until Judgement Day."
"Well, we need to convene the rules committee, there's no precedent for a second coming interrupting the Super Bowl, but Superbowl XXXIV may have be to in limbo for eternity" said Paul Tagliabue. NFL commissioner. "But off the record, the Bills may be denied again."
In Buffalo, fan's were a little depressed, but cautiously upbeat about the Stanley Cup finals. "Come on, we have Satan on our side, how can we lose." said an unidentified fan.
Of KSR's first series, I only read "The Gold Coast" and "The Wild Shore", I never read "Pacific Edge".
I liked "The Gold Coast" a lot, though there wasn't alot of science fiction in it, substitute computer driven cars for today's freeway and you have a novel of modern LA, sort of a kinder, more detailed "Less Than Zero", though that's faint praise.
I didn't get into "The Wild Shore", it was an adequate alternative history, but I prefer my alternative histories in the "Mad Max" vein, the schlumping around in the dirt dreaming of past glories bored me.
I also like KSR's "Escape from Kathmandu", he should have taken some of that humor and leavened Antartica and Mars with it, though the sandwhich paragraph was funny, in a biting way.
"Way, way in the future our society becomes rich enough to put oil and raw materials back into the earth. Recognizing that society could collapse and that it could never recover without all the natural resources we've used, we do put the oil and metal back. Putting it back as it we found it might be a bit silly. Perhaps we will just provide storehouses, but we can't make things too accessible, or the developing society will use all the resources too quickly and never develop the tech to use solar or fusion power and mine the solar system.
"The idea that future civilizations could not rise due to the lack of natural resources was first noted by Niven in the Ringworld series as far as I can tell... I think I sort of remember something like that much earlier from Clark in "Children of the Stars."
and from above
A small revision to the comment that was quoted above about the development of civilizations in places without natural resources:
I looked it up, and I was wrong about that concept first appearing in Clark's _Children of the Stars_. It first appeared (as far as I have read) in Heinlein's _Orphans of the Sky_. This is a pretty good story about life after civilization collapses on a multi-generation starship.
This is also dealt with in detail in Niven and Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." Technology is locked up in impenetrable musuems, guarded by combination locks requiring a knowledge of orbital mechanics, so that a recovering civilization can jump start itself once they have enough knowledge to open the museum.
George
Good, but too derivative of Mars
on
Antarctica
·
· Score: 3
I liked Antartica, rereading it right after I finished reading it the first time, but I found too many plot elements derivative of the Mars Trilogy (which I also reread right after finishing it).
The Ferals: Ok, we got people living low impact close to the environment lives on Mars, we get them in Antartica. Cute, but not sustainable for huge amounts of populations.
The "cut off from authority for x hours" device. In Mars, they blow the elevator to cut themselves off from Earth's authority. In Antartica, a convenient storm keeps the US Navy away until the NSF, eco-tuers and contract workers can all hammer out an agreement.
The "we're too busy too sleep, we'll work for 100 hours straight". Granted that it is science fiction, but I've been up for about 60 hours straight and was pretty nonfunctional by the 60 hours. I have trouble believing all these people (X, Wade, Frank, Nadia) would be perky, and skillfully handling heavy equipment after after being up so long. Then again, I didn't try amphetamines.
The "wacky Russian". In Mars, it was Arkady, who was very entertaining, KSR shouldn't have killed him off. In Antartica, it was the Russian ice sailing dude.
The "long dangerous trek in a harsh environment". In Mars, it was Ann, Frank, Maya, et all escaping from the dome in the stealth rover, in Antartica it was Wade, Val, X et all escaping in the hovercraft.
All in all, a good read, but I wonder if KSR used too much sed to write it.
I'm also finding KSR's characterizations not as good as they used to be, I found the characters in "The Gold Coast" a lot more human.
Hey, I should write a review of "The Gold Coast", though it's not very/., it's a near future science fiction that doesn't even mention cyberspace.
Don't know about the FBI, but I've always suspected that the real hackers use the script kiddies to test out some of their alledged exploits, especially if testing it out yourself could be dangerous.
Further, if you are jacked in, and have a microcam built-in, and ICQ or IM, and of course with the cellphone built in your location will be known, if anything happened to you response could be swift. The muggers would leave you alone.
I'm curious, have you ever called the police? The last time I called 911, about midnight, after coming home and finding our house burgled but not knowing if the burglar was still inside, it took them about 20 minutes to arrive.
This also assumes that the muggers are acting rational and have done a risk analysis on how long it takes for a gargoyle to summon police versus how quickly they can run/bike away.
What you really need to do is hook up an EKG to the serial port, so if you get shot or stabbed, the ambulance gets paged, and if you don't get a response in 3 minutes, the coroner's office gets paged.
I've had to do the cell phone/beeper thing as part of my job, and when I see someone with one I pity them.
A beeper hasn't been a status symbol for 10 years. The only reason I would carry one now would be if I wanted to trigger my disconnect one to get out of a social situation.
A cell phone hasn't been a status symbol for 5 years. To me, it's just a sign that you're a lackey and the man has you on a very short leash. A geek might be impressed by an Iridium phone, but a non-geek would think you have a very old cell phone and can't afford a spiffy tiny one.
Palm Pilots are still a status symbol, but I doubt they're chick magnets.
If you must have a chick magnet status symbol, go for the old, reliable penis compensator, I mean Porsche.
I hope it doesn't end. I'm always happy when I see the human race going forward. With all the stupid things that go on (war, politics, spending money on stupid goverment programs), its always a nice breath of fresh air when we can become more technolized. I think we need to section of this earth, the dumb people who want to be un computerized and can sit around and make new laws for themselves every day and find new programs to spend their money on that will better the kids, and then the other half which are the computer people, who don't waste time on Stock markets, War, Politics.. they just sit around and get things done and enjoy their inventions. Eventually the non computer side will try to regulate the compute side, and we'll use the technology to kill them all, and end up with a race of smart people who don't do stupid human tricks.
Uggh. Where to begin.
Try not to think of politics as something non-geeks do to pass the time and control the world, try to think of it as hacking wetware and soft engineering to control the world. If you got a huge amount of geeks together in their own isolated enclave, eventually geeks that were better at manipulating, prodding, compelling and impelling others to fulfill their agenda would control the enclave. Eventually they would spend all their time hacking wetware and not computers, they would be politicians. The political leaders would have geek backgrounds (wasn't there a US President who was a nuclear engineer?), but they would still be politicians.
Don't think of war as a stupid, lizard brain reflex, think of it as the tail case of a political policy. Thinking that war is stupid and shouldn't be studied tends to remove your genes from the gene pool. Besides, "Eventually the non computer side will try to regulate the compute side, and we'll use the technology to kill them all, and end up with a race of smart people who don't do stupid human tricks. " this certainly sounds like war to me, your geek enclave better learn awful fast about war when it confronts a larger, experienced enemy.
There's always been exciting new technologies that are understood only be the geeks, it was internal combustion engines at in the 1900's, airplanes after that, radios, telephones. There has been geeks who thought they could control the world by controlling those technologies. There have been quasi-geeks who attempted to see how those technologies would influence the world, and wanted to work as an interface between geeks and the world. Does New York City get it's electricity from Con-Tesla or Con-Ed?
Reread the Cryptonomicon and see how Randy goes from geek to quasi-geek.
Think how many hotties are going to be turned off by someone constantly wearing one of these, even if you explain how you have the entire illustrated Kama Sutra available, as well as links to four different chat rooms where you can ask real time advice when having sex.
A-and even if a computer wearing geek gets a hottie in bed, what happens when you get a BSOD?
"That felt good, why did you stop?" "My OS crashed, I don't know what to do next."
And soon enough, we'll have web pages like www.nakedgirlsnextdoorwearingcomputers.com .
I kind of agree with Stephenson here, people who end up using these things constantly and in social environments are going to be rude, boring and shunned, gargoyles indeed.
Count me out of society based on wearables, if you please. Just because I can change a tire doesn't mean I'm going to walk around with a jack hanging from my belt, just because I like music doesn't mean I always have a walkman/discman on, and just because I like computers doesn't mean I want to wear one all the time.
1) I switched from a mouse to trackball, this helped a lot.
2) I ordered a pair of lycra gloves (at the time it was from Mega-Tex, but now you have go to Handware. They seemed to help a lot.
3) Position your mouse/trackball and keyboard to minimize stress.
4) Stop chatting, or change your chatting habits. My wrists hurt the most when I chat the most, so I use voice recognition software to chat now, though it does get embarassing in those intimate chats.
Slashdot Mirror
I should have read more clearly, you were talking about companies that focused on intellectual property.
I was responding more to Sterling's thesis.
George
Depending on the contestants, in my opinion, the most likely last contestant will be a woman.
All she would have to do is sleep with the guys and that would guarantee that she would not be voted out most likely. Then all she has to do is get them to turn on each other one by one.
Hey AC, let's do lunch sometime, and pitch this to the Spice Channel! Or maybe WB.
George
Respectfully, I disagree. I think there will be large publicly traded companies for some time, particularly capital intensive ones.
What private company is going to challenge GM, or Ford, or DaimlerChrysler? How do you make an open source challenge to GM, do you have one gal running a lathe in her basement making one camshaft a week, a guy laying up one fiberglass body a month in his garage? For the near future, the only entities that can make affordable automobiles will be large publicly held companies,or even government sponsored companies, and even these will get fewer and fewer.
Take the commercial aircraft industry. There's only three major contenders that I can think of, Boeing, Airbus and McDonnell-Douglas-whomever-else-they-merged-with. Airbus requires a whole continent for financial backing, Bill Gates would be sorely pressed to consider buying Boeing. Is some stealthy private company going to rise up in the next 10 years to challenge them?
Maybe Sterling's hypothesis makes sense in knowledge intensive industries, where the only barrier to entry is a $2000 PC. But in the world of making and moving material things, I don't think things are going to change that much.
One caveat, if nanotechnology were to really take off, it probably would be the end of massive publicly held companies. And electricity would be so cheap, there would be no need to meter it.
George
I had a Victorinox, lost is skiing and looked at Victorinox and Wenger models to replace it. The Wenger won by a hair, I thought the scissors were slightly better.
George
Or how about the college students who flunk out of school because of internet addiction? Without the internet, these students probably would've still been in school.
Absolutely. I attended college from 1984-1989, and while email and usenet were around, they were not well known. So, I had absolutely no friends drop out of school because of internet abuse. I did know some people that had scholastic troubles and even dropped out of school, but I'm sure it wasn't related to alcohol or drug abuse, or freedom from parents, or too much role playing games, or hacking on the computers, or being disenchanted with collegiate life, or not being sufficiently motivated...
Not to be too harsh, but students have been dropping out of college for a long time, the internet is just the latest reason.
George
With new technologies it's possible to print books one copy at a time...
New? Only if you consider a 9 year old high speed printer new, such as the Xerox DocuTech. Of course, it's prohibitively expensive, but if I ever win about $50 million on a lottery I'd consider one.
George
First I have a work email and a home email, admittedly a weak subterfuge.
Then, if someone corners me about an old post, I'll look it over, with a puzzled expression on my face, and finally say.
"Dude, I wrote that? I must have been blitzed on some serious 'cid at the time, whoa!"
George
, it would take a rather long time to sit in front of a scanner flipping pages.
If I had a spare copy, I could cut the binding off and through it into the 23 ppm duplex scanner I have access to. Maybe I'll practice first with a Gutenberg bible.
Not to mention it'd be illegal to freely distribute the contents of this book.
Doh! So are illegal drugs, mp3's of released music for non personal use, warez, bootlegs, etc.
Just consider it a thought question.
George
Since this is impossible to find for a reasonable price, and it hasn't been reprinted yet (though Stephenson hinted they might just to shut everybody up, though dang it if I can't find the link), where is the OCR'ed version?
Come on, someone must have scanned, OCR'ed and put it up somewhere by now?
Until then, I'll keep scouring garage sales for two copies, one for myself to reread ( I first read my roommates in college in the 80's), and one to sell for $500.
George
Interestingly, there is a forthcoming book called White Mars written by Brian Aldiss, which is supposedly his response to the Robinson Mars trilogy.
Did I mention the Mars based science fiction novel I'm writing. In the future, Mars is such a desolate, unpleasant place, it's populated like Australia was, with criminals. Hence the name
"Mars Bars"
George
January 30, 2000, Atlanta
Superbowl XXXIV was almost in the history books. Doug Flutie was driving the Bills deep into Rams territory with 1:52 to go in the game, striving to add to the 24 point lead and finally win one for the Bills.
At that point, the ceiling of the Georgia Dome cracked open, and Jesus Christ floated down on a pillar of blinding, radiant light, returning for his second coming.
"I'm sorry I was late, I forgot to check my PC for Y2K, and it took this long to get my PIM up and running again." replied Jesus, when asked about his timing. "I've had enough of Windows, though, and that's all I'll say until Judgement Day."
"Well, we need to convene the rules committee, there's no precedent for a second coming interrupting the Super Bowl, but Superbowl XXXIV may have be to in limbo for eternity" said Paul Tagliabue. NFL commissioner. "But off the record, the Bills may be denied again."
In Buffalo, fan's were a little depressed, but cautiously upbeat about the Stanley Cup finals. "Come on, we have Satan on our side, how can we lose." said an unidentified fan.
George
Of KSR's first series, I only read "The Gold Coast" and "The Wild Shore", I never read "Pacific Edge".
I liked "The Gold Coast" a lot, though there wasn't alot of science fiction in it, substitute computer driven cars for today's freeway and you have a novel of modern LA, sort of a kinder, more detailed "Less Than Zero", though that's faint praise.
I didn't get into "The Wild Shore", it was an adequate alternative history, but I prefer my alternative histories in the "Mad Max" vein, the schlumping around in the dirt dreaming of past glories bored me.
I also like KSR's "Escape from Kathmandu", he should have taken some of that humor and leavened Antartica and Mars with it, though the sandwhich paragraph was funny, in a biting way.
George
From Katz's article
"Way, way in the future our society becomes rich enough to put oil and raw materials back into the earth. Recognizing that society could collapse and that it could never recover without all the natural resources we've used, we do put the oil and metal back. Putting it back as it we found it might be a bit silly. Perhaps we will just provide storehouses, but we can't make things too accessible, or the developing society will use all the resources too quickly and never develop the tech to use solar or fusion power and mine the solar system.
"The idea that future civilizations could not rise due to the lack of natural resources was first noted by Niven in the Ringworld series as far as I can tell... I think I sort of remember something like that much earlier from Clark in "Children of the Stars."
and from above
A small revision to the comment that was quoted above about the development of civilizations in places without natural resources:
I looked it up, and I was wrong about that concept first appearing in Clark's _Children of the Stars_. It first appeared (as far as I have read) in Heinlein's _Orphans of the Sky_. This is a pretty good story about life after civilization collapses on a multi-generation starship.
This is also dealt with in detail in Niven and Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." Technology is locked up in impenetrable musuems, guarded by combination locks requiring a knowledge of orbital mechanics, so that a recovering civilization can jump start itself once they have enough knowledge to open the museum.
George
I liked Antartica, rereading it right after I finished reading it the first time, but I found too many plot elements derivative of the Mars Trilogy (which I also reread right after finishing it).
/., it's a near future science fiction that doesn't even mention cyberspace.
The Ferals: Ok, we got people living low impact close to the environment lives on Mars, we get them in Antartica. Cute, but not sustainable for huge amounts of populations.
The "cut off from authority for x hours" device. In Mars, they blow the elevator to cut themselves off from Earth's authority. In Antartica, a convenient storm keeps the US Navy away until the NSF, eco-tuers and contract workers can all hammer out an agreement.
The "we're too busy too sleep, we'll work for 100 hours straight". Granted that it is science fiction, but I've been up for about 60 hours straight and was pretty nonfunctional by the 60 hours. I have trouble believing all these people (X, Wade, Frank, Nadia) would be perky, and skillfully handling heavy equipment after after being up so long. Then again, I didn't try amphetamines.
The "wacky Russian". In Mars, it was Arkady, who was very entertaining, KSR shouldn't have killed him off. In Antartica, it was the Russian ice sailing dude.
The "long dangerous trek in a harsh environment". In Mars, it was Ann, Frank, Maya, et all escaping from the dome in the stealth rover, in Antartica it was Wade, Val, X et all escaping in the hovercraft.
All in all, a good read, but I wonder if KSR used too much sed to write it.
I'm also finding KSR's characterizations not as good as they used to be, I found the characters in "The Gold Coast" a lot more human.
Hey, I should write a review of "The Gold Coast", though it's not very
George
Don't know about the FBI, but I've always suspected that the real hackers use the script kiddies to test out some of their alledged exploits, especially if testing it out yourself could be dangerous.
Hey Bobby,
Two-A-Day and Ihad a big laugh over this,
Lucas
Cerenkov radiation maybe?
If the reactor is in water, you could get a cool blue glow as the neutrons hit the water exceeding the speed of light.
George
I stoled my last one from Douglas Adams, don't tell him.
George
It will not be a war, it will be a slaughter. In wars people die on each side. In this war the techs will just destroy the stupid in one fail swoop.
Three years later the tech society was destroyed by a plague caused by an unsanitized telephone handset.
George
Further, if you are jacked in, and have a microcam built-in, and ICQ or IM, and of course with the cellphone built in your location will be known, if anything happened to you response could be swift. The muggers would leave you alone.
I'm curious, have you ever called the police? The last time I called 911, about midnight, after coming home and finding our house burgled but not knowing if the burglar was still inside, it took them about 20 minutes to arrive.
This also assumes that the muggers are acting rational and have done a risk analysis on how long it takes for a gargoyle to summon police versus how quickly they can run/bike away.
What you really need to do is hook up an EKG to the serial port, so if you get shot or stabbed, the ambulance gets paged, and if you don't get a response in 3 minutes, the coroner's office gets paged.
George
'scue me for posting too quickly.
Question: Has any chick been turned off because you wear a beeper?
Yes, my wife, because it might beep anytime and ruin the moment.
Question: Has any chick been turned off because you wear a cell phone?
Yes my wife, because a customer might call at any time and ruin the moment.
Though it's only a data point of one.
George
I'm not a chick, but I live with a few.
I've had to do the cell phone/beeper thing as part of my job, and when I see someone with one I pity them.
A beeper hasn't been a status symbol for 10 years. The only reason I would carry one now would be if I wanted to trigger my disconnect one to get out of a social situation.
A cell phone hasn't been a status symbol for 5 years. To me, it's just a sign that you're a lackey and the man has you on a very short leash. A geek might be impressed by an Iridium phone, but a non-geek would think you have a very old cell phone and can't afford a spiffy tiny one.
Palm Pilots are still a status symbol, but I doubt they're chick magnets.
If you must have a chick magnet status symbol, go for the old, reliable penis compensator, I mean Porsche.
George
I hope it doesn't end. I'm always happy when I see the human race going forward. With all the stupid things that go on (war, politics, spending money on stupid goverment programs), its always a nice breath of fresh air when we can become more technolized.
I think we need to section of this earth, the dumb people who want to be un computerized and can sit around and make new laws for themselves every day and find new programs to spend their money on that will better the kids, and then the other half which are the computer people, who don't waste time on Stock markets, War, Politics.. they just sit around and get things done and enjoy their inventions. Eventually the non computer side will try to regulate the compute side, and we'll use the technology to kill them all, and end up with a race of smart people who don't do stupid human tricks.
Uggh. Where to begin.
Try not to think of politics as something non-geeks do to pass the time and control the world, try to think of it as hacking wetware and soft engineering to control the world. If you got a huge amount of geeks together in their own isolated enclave, eventually geeks that were better at manipulating, prodding, compelling and impelling others to fulfill their agenda would control the enclave. Eventually they would spend all their time hacking wetware and not computers, they would be politicians. The political leaders would have geek backgrounds (wasn't there a US President who was a nuclear engineer?), but they would still be politicians.
Don't think of war as a stupid, lizard brain reflex, think of it as the tail case of a political policy. Thinking that war is stupid and shouldn't be studied tends to remove your genes from the gene pool. Besides, "Eventually the non computer side will try to regulate the compute side, and we'll use the technology to kill them all, and end up with a race of smart people who don't do stupid human tricks. " this certainly sounds like war to me, your geek enclave better learn awful fast about war when it confronts a larger, experienced enemy.
There's always been exciting new technologies that are understood only be the geeks, it was internal combustion engines at in the 1900's, airplanes after that, radios, telephones. There has been geeks who thought they could control the world by controlling those technologies. There have been quasi-geeks who attempted to see how those technologies would influence the world, and wanted to work as an interface between geeks and the world. Does New York City get it's electricity from Con-Tesla or Con-Ed?
Reread the Cryptonomicon and see how Randy goes from geek to quasi-geek.
George
Think how many hotties are going to be turned off by someone constantly wearing one of these, even if you explain how you have the entire illustrated Kama Sutra available, as well as links to four different chat rooms where you can ask real time advice when having sex.
A-and even if a computer wearing geek gets a hottie in bed, what happens when you get a BSOD?
"That felt good, why did you stop?"
"My OS crashed, I don't know what to do next."
And soon enough, we'll have web pages like www.nakedgirlsnextdoorwearingcomputers.com .
I kind of agree with Stephenson here, people who end up using these things constantly and in social environments are going to be rude, boring and shunned, gargoyles indeed.
Count me out of society based on wearables, if you please. Just because I can change a tire doesn't mean I'm going to walk around with a jack hanging from my belt, just because I like music doesn't mean I always have a walkman/discman on, and just because I like computers doesn't mean I want to wear one all the time.
George
From page 2 of the article
Jonathan Katz, an astronomer at Washington University in St. Louis, thinks he's worked out where the rest of the push is coming from.
George
1) I switched from a mouse to trackball, this helped a lot.
2) I ordered a pair of lycra gloves (at the time it was from Mega-Tex, but now you have go to Handware. They seemed to help a lot.
3) Position your mouse/trackball and keyboard to minimize stress.
4) Stop chatting, or change your chatting habits. My wrists hurt the most when I chat the most, so I use voice recognition software to chat now, though it does get embarassing in those intimate chats.
George