The majority of his article did not revolve around advocating *nix over Windows
Correct. I gave one clear, obvious example of a questionable conclusion he reached by drawing all of his "great hackers" from a very small and non-representative sample of the working programmers on Earth. This is why I prefaced the example with the phrase, "for example". Because it was an example. See?
Perhaps the phrase "platform advocacy" was ill-chosen; perhaps I should have said "platform and/or language and/or tool and/or whatever advocacy". Hell, I could've gone on for a whole paragraph clarifying a point which was painfully clear to anybody who'd read the essay.
You probably didn't notice that another of his points had to do with saying that cool programmers don't like Java. That's understandable. After all, how could could you possibly have noticed a little thing like that, in the middle of 1000+ Slashdot posts about precisely that aspect of his essay? Whether it caught your attention or not, it is, once again, platform and/or tool and/or language and/or blah blah blah advocacy.
Bottom line: He says that smart people all like the same stuff he does, and anybody who makes different choices is an idiot, and that's an important part of what he's saying. This is often called "platform advocacy". It's more often called "bullshit", but that term was too general for my purposes. There's a wealth of bullshit in Graham's essay, and I wanted to be clear about which particular steaming pile I was asking the reader to sniff.
First, I've read Graham's essay, and his definition of "Great Hacker" is on the vague side, and consists largely of platform advocacy. It turns out that his "great hackers" are all people he knows. Fair enough: He can't really judge anybody else. But that leaves him with such a small and selective set of data that his conclusions are meaningless. For example: He claims that all "great hackers" refuse to work on Windows. He works at companies developing software for UN*X. Not surprisingly, most of the programmers he knows are UN*X people, who don't work on Windows. So what? This proves nothing at all. He has merely suggested (however plausibly) that Windows developers tend not to develop for UN*X and vice versa, which is tautological. Dennis M. Ritchie has a Windows box on his desk these days, but Graham doesn't know Ritchie personally, so Ritchie's not considered. Graham's working from a thin set of anecdotes.
Secondly (and this has been said before), Graham's "great hackers" are prima donnas who refuse to deal with practical problems outside some very limited set of problems that they enjoy. I remember a story about Richard Feynman helping paint the walls at Thinking Machines when he worked there; I guess Feynman wasn't a "great hacker".
Finally, I often hear from Java advocates that the memory-lebensraum problem and the speed problem are due to programmers not understanding the internals well enough to work around their flaws. This is not said to be true of any other programming language on Earth, as far as I know.
It all sounds like a crock to me. Knowing the tools better will always help, but if only an expert can write usable code -- not great, but merely usable -- the language is junk, or at best the implementation is junk.
...which completely omitted any mention of the Polish success in cracking an earlier version of Enigma between the wars. That initial Polish work was indispensible to everything done by the Brits w/r/t Enigma during the war. The movie was called Enigma, IIRC. The only Pole in the movie turned out to be a spy for the Germans (not out of ideological conviction, mind you, but because he hated the Soviets even more, over the Katyn Massacre thing).
Maybe everybody has national pride, eh? Maybe all movies made for the purpose of entertainment and tend to rewrite complicated reality into a simple story?
Just maybe?
It also strikes me that Americans have been hearing quite a bit for the past thirty years about how badly we got clobbered in Vietnam. Oceans of ink have been spilled in hand-wringing about our competitiveness in international markets, our educational system, our number of math and science grads compared to eleventeen other nations, Japanese ownership of US companies and real estate (big, big topic before the Japanese economy faltered after the 1980s), etc. etc. etc. Back in the 1980s there was an entire genre of books about how much better the Japanese were at doing business than we were.
For every example, there is a counter-example. Sounds like you're selectively representing reality for the sake of a simple and compelling narrative arc, yourself.
There have been times and places in history when you could advise people to panic and lash out, and it was just good common sense, but more often it's simple demagoguery.
In an "unprecedented" desperate emergency, desperate measures are justified, yes? After all, when you're fighting a last-ditch battle to save the Constitution, struggling to preserve the very soul of our nation, literally defending yourself and the body politic against the greatest threat to liberty it has ever faced... isn't it a bit silly to quibble over a few petty legalities around the edges? Can we really AFFORD to make nice ethical distinctions, when the slightest weakness or hesitation could give the Enemy the advantage they need to crush us forever? Do YOU want to be the one who allowed the last flicker of freedom to be extinguished, merely because you lacked the moral courage to use harsh measures against the megacorps and their lackeys? Of course not!
Naturally, if this weren't quite such a catastrophic situation, if the future of the nation and indeed the world weren't balanced on quite such a fine knife edge between justice on the one hand and an endless hellish abyss of slavery and war on the other... well, in less desperate times, we would certainly be scrupulous about our actions. You must understand, we do these terrible things only out of necessity! The Evil Ones have forced our hand -- and besides, George Bush is doing it too, so that makes it okay.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. So said a great and beloved icon of social, racial, and economic justice, back in that desperate and decisive year 1964... Er, wait, no, that was Barry Goldwater. Same difference, really.
Once you get people properly scared, you can point them at a scapegoat ("capital", "megacorps", "neocons", "com-symp fellow travellers", immigrants with dark complexions -- take your pick). It helps a lot if they're a bit scared to begin with. The Inflation helped Hitler, for example. It's easiest to motivate young people this way. They're more insecure, more emotional, and they have less to lose. They're full of energy and they haven't seen enough of the world to begin to suspect that there never is a simple, violent, and decisive solution to most problems (lots of older people don't "get it" either, of course, and some young people do -- this is a sort of actuarial view, here). Look at the Cultural Revolution: Mao didn't bother trying to motivate middle-aged shopkeepers to roam around the countryside beating people up. He went for young people.
Is the administration really trying to panic the population into acting foolishly? And succeeding? Mebbe so, though it's not seelf-evident. My impression is that most people aren't taking the terrorist threat level stuff very seriously, but maybe that's just the people I happen to know in Boston. Maybe they're quivering in their boots out in Waukegan. On the other hand, let's also remember that the threat is not wholly imaginary. For every voice complaining about Tom Ridge's warnings, there's one complaining about the lack of warnings pre-9/11, and in some delightful cases it's the same voice. Back in the 1990s, some folks ridiculed the Clinton administration's mild concern about al Qaeda as an attempt to stir up fear for demagogic purposes.
Finally, let's ask ourselves: Is left-wing demagoguery a significant threat to our precious liberty? Must we STAMP THEM OUT like they want to stamp out the GOP? Fuck, no! I've just compared their mentality to those of Mao and Hitler; surely this indicates that they must be absolutely identical to Mao and Hitler, yes? Well, actually, once again, fuck, no! They don't have the kind of resources Mao and Hitler had. My personal belief is that if, by some magic miracle, the radical undergraduate Left gained power in this country, they'd do pre
Only about 50% of women in the field seem to be competent. Compare that to about 85% of men in the field knowing what they're doing
I have no idea what percentage of the women are competent; I haven't run into enough of 'em to hazard a guess.
But I can sure as hell tell you that at most 20% of the men know what they're doing. About 50% are grossly, laughably incompetent, even now, years after the "hire any warm body" days came to a welcome end and most of the dot-com crowd have gone back to delivering pizzas.
This field is full of idiots. With Y chromosomes. People with real jobs on their resumes, who can't sit down in an interview and ace a simple quiz about pointer arithmetic and the like. It's a fucking nightmare.
Terrorists like it. Otherwise, they wouldn't stay in business, would they?
Personally, I think it's a really serious case of something closely akin to Undergraduate Political Extremism Syndrome: Some people don't know who they are, or why they're breathing, or why they matter. They feel like their lives are more meaningful, interesting, and significant if they're engaged in a millenial life-and-death struggle for the soul of humanity and the future of Planet Earth, toe-to-toe with Absolute Evil in the form of, you know, Starbucks or people who wear leather shoes or whatever. Or communism, or capitalism, or the Jews. Whoever's handy.
The bottom line is, the undergraduate extremist mind is neither subtle nor patient, and favors pathological oversimplification of both problems and solutions. They love conspiracy theories: All the world's problems are due to one small group of evil people -- kill 'em and all our problems will vanish!
Did he object to even foreign Muslims visiting Mecca, really?
Erm, "foreigners" was the wrong word. "Infidels". Non-muslims. "Them" as opposed to "us", for bin Laden's own personal definitions of "them" and "us".
My impression is that the Arab word conventionally translated into English as "nation" doesn't exactly mean "nation state" as we in the West understand it. Sometimes it seems to mean "the Arab race", sometimes "the Islamic world", sometimes... whatever. Are multiple distinct Arabic words all being translated as "nation", perhaps by different translators? I often wonder just how deep the semantic divide is between the two cultures.
If [Basque separatists] want to separate from Spain, they're brain damaged. Who would give them fat paychecks of regional aid?
The EU, perhaps? Heh heh.
Anyhow, nationalism and irredentism ain't necessarily logical. Similar economic arguments applied to the Irish Free State in the 1930s, and they pried themselves loose from England anyway. It's generally true that people would rather be governed by an "us" than by a "them", and are often willing to risk a pay cut for the sake of establishing such a government. They usually also tell themselves that unimaginable prosperity will follow hard on the heels of the Revolution, but that's just because people (all of 'em) are dumbasses.
Last I heard, the US military was out of Saudi entirely. And al Qaeda is still killing civilians there.
Hello? Bin Laden objects to non-Muslims being permitted to set foot in Saudi. They're not defending their homeland from foreign military adventurers; they're persecuting foreigners, like the KKK.
Basques, by the way, still do not have full autonomy. That's not just splitting hairs; would the US have settled for less than full autonomy from England?
The insurance companies are just adopting the same "guilty until proven innocent" mentality...
Last I heard, insurance companies often tend to use actuarial tables to decide things. That's because they're in business to make money.
In some US states, of course (e.g. Massachusetts), there are all kinds of wacky laws controlling what insurance companies can do. Much like government-mandated smoking bans in restaurants and bars, these laws would be unnecessary if they weren't at odds with reality: If there were a market for non-smoking bars, they would succeed on their own. In the absence of a ban, non-smoking bars are scarce as hen's teeth. QED, baby. QED.
Well, that's what we get for living in Cotton Mather's back yard.
So I wouldn't start hiding under the bed just yet, however repulsive this may be. And I would be more concerned about the inevitable irrational behavior of state legislatures than about the merely probable irrational behavior of people who do, after all, have to show a profit every quarter.
And while we're on the subject of presumption of guilt, notice the alarming number of posters in this discussion who seem to assume that speeding causes accidents. Personally, I doubt that. It's the comatose morons ambling along at 70 mph in the left lane who aren't paying attention to their fucking surroundings. If idiots like that didn't exist, there'd be no need for responsible drivers like me to do dangerous things like tailgate them at high speed, pass them on the right while throwing shit at 'em out the window, etc. Sometimes the only answer is to shoot the dumb bastard. Gunfire on public roads is not safe; those who leave me no choice but to open fire have a lot to answer for.
95% of the noise on Slashdot about this is from people who aren't following the story other than by reading the comments of other Slashdotters who -- surprise! -- aren't following the fucking story either. Just a lot of dumbasses jumping to random conclusions in accordance with random preconceptions and whipping each other into a mindless frenzy. Nothing new there, eh?
Nobody is seriously trying to pretend that the lawyer didn't make any threats. Tarbox claims, on her site, that the lawyer did not make these threats on her (Tarbox's) instructions. She may not be telling the truth about that, but is there any EVIDENCE that she's not telling the truth? Is Tarbox even employing the lawyer? She says not.
Jones is quoting the LAWYER, not Tarbox. The lawyer is clearly a swine. And lawyers have run amok before.
Comparing DVD to video cassettes is comparing apples to oranges...
Care to clarify that? VHS cassettes got most of their usage in movie rentals. Same for DVDs. Sure, VHS tapes were read/write, but if that had been their "killer feature", people would've just stuck with VHS rather than switching to DVDs. If more people had been able to figure out the timer features on their VCRs so they could record stupid TV shows when they weren't home, it might've been different. But it wasn't different.
There is no possible way crippled and more expensive disks and crippled and more expensive players can compete in a free market against a better and cheaper alternative.
Read my lips: Network externalities. At this point, people already own the hardware and the stores already carry the disks. DRM-damaged DVDs do have compelling advantages over VHS tapes, but from the average consumer's point of view, a CSS-free equivalent of DVDs doesn't have any such advantage over DVDs. The inconveniences are not sufficiently inconvenient. Most people never notice them. Slashdotters give a damn. My mom doesn't.
The Conspiracy may have gotten the format in the door, but nowadays, the fact that it's established gives it merits, in practical terms, that a brand-new competitor wouldn't have.
You may well be right that a non-crippled format would've stomped DVD in the marketplace if it'd actually happened -- the same way Windows never succeeded in the marketplace against Macs (uhhh, waitaminute...) -- but it's a more open question than you're willing to admit. I'll say it again: The technical deficiencies of the DVD format are below the radar screens of most of its users. The matter would've been decided on other issues. What sort of issues? Good question! Show me the spec and I'll hazard a guess. But there is no spec. You're telling me that a hypothetical format, for which no specification was ever written, is clearly superior in most (if not all) respects to the DVD format. Well, sure: It's easy to brag about the perfection of a design that never even got designed, much less released. The reality, however, is that no work of mortal engineers is ever perfect, and some of them (you know much about MIDI?) are a real mess, in spite of having been designed by bright people with good intentions. Your ghost format might have been great, but there's no guarantee. The only feature guaranteed to be superior is the absence of CSS, but that's tautological. There's also the fact that the owners of the content, even without a powerful industry association restraining trade, would have been more reluctant to release stuff on a format that lacked even a halfassed attempt at DRM. Many studios would've hung back for a year (which is not an eternity; DVD takeup was fast, but not instantaneous) until DVD was ready to go. Movies, like music, aren't really a commodity. You can't buy "the same thing" from the other guy. Besides, VHS may at that point have been doomed, but it sure wasn't dead. They were still selling their movies to the same market on those stupid tapes.
Yes, you may be right, but it's not a certainty. Your certainty is built out of assumptions, and enough of those assumptions are optimistic to call the whole thing into serious question.
The parent was complaining about the sound quality. He was barking up the wrong tree. As long as the sound quality is good enough to tell two songs apart, it won't be bad enough to matter to the average consumer.
That's a fact.
You can quibble about definitions all you like, if that's what makes you happy. We can parse the parent post character by character like lit-crits yammering about Hamlet's motivations (I've always been partial to Eliot's Gordian solution; how 'bout you?), but here's a good first approximation: If the either the parent poster or I had been talking about issues other than sound quality, one or the other of us probably would've mentioned them. We didn't. So simmer down.
The only crippled format that has ever "succeeded" was DVD, and that was only through a total absence of competition. It didn't succeed, it was imposed through monopoly power.
Um. Wow. Just in case you were actually serious, let's think about it for a moment: People like DVDs. Video stores converted to DVDs because they tried a few, the customers rented them, they tried a few more, the customers rented those, etc. If nobody had rented DVDs, I guarantee you that the neighborhood video store would not have shitcanned all the stock that the customers did want, and replaced it with stuff the customers did not want. Or are you under the impression that ZOG came along in the black helicopters and made 'em do it at gunpoint? Did the black helicopters come to your house, guns drawn, and force you to buy or rent DVDs? Is that what happened? Or was it more of an alien-abduction/anal-probe sort of thing?
With all due respect, I believe that the aliens who abducted you have your best interests at heart, and you should probably use whatever format they suggest. I'm in touch with the secret CIA monitoring station concealed in your neighbor's basement, and they tell me that the tinfoil you put on the windows is working fine. You've foiled (no pun intended) their best efforts! They haven't been able to insert any voices into your head for weeks now. I assure you, any voice you may still hear in your head is, provably, that of your dog. And your dog wants what's best for you. He didn't tell you to kill those people for no reason, did he? Of course not! He's got this all figured out. He knows who's really a dangerous alien in disguise, and who's merely a harmless mechanical automaton put here to fool you. He's immune to their Fear Transmitters and their Potassium Confusion Rays. Trust him and you'll be fine.
"Total absence of competition", you say? Nope! They competed against VHS, and against that ridiculous DivX thing (the other DivX, the Circuit City one). And DVDs won handily, because they sucked significantly less than the other two. Would it have been nice if there'd been a digital format without no arbitrary restrictions at all? Sure. But that misfeature didn't inconvenience enough customers have much effect on sales.
I solemnly pledge that I am not an employee of ATF, FEMA, NSA, Mossad, CIA, MI5, FBI, KGB, OSS, SAC, UMMO, the Bilderbergers, the Mukhabarat (any Mukhabarat), or OGPU, and that I am telling you the truth. I PROMISE!
When will Sony (and other companies) realise that people don't want weird, crippled formats?
128kbps MP3s are weird and crippled, but kids love 'em. Cassette tapes are weird and crippled, too, and they were popular for many years. Lots of people seem to think VHS was weird and crippled compared to Betamax (PS: VHS won).
The average consumer will tolerate weird and crippled formats if they're not too weird, and not too crippled. You can degrade the signal quality to a remarkable degree before the average listener (or viewer) will care.
Who cares what the WSJ thinks? They're not the target market for this device. The kids at whom the it is aimed may make purchasing decisions based on a lot of factors, some more rational than others (e.g. what their friends bought, etc.), but "it sounds like ass" is not necessarily on their radar screen. Ass sounds fine to them. As long as they can tell which song is playing, that's good enough.
No, quite the opposite. A monopoly is when the supply for a given demand is controlled by a minority (e.g. Microsoft); I advocate freedom: The people make the decisions for themselves, based on an educated understanding of their own interests.
You see if there is any chance of competition then companies need those "free thinking" individuals to compete.
Be that as it may, as long as corporations control education and the media, there won't be very many free-thinking individuals; that's the topic of this entire discussion. Those few free-thinking individuals who slip through the cracks won't be very interested in indentured servitude to corporations. This is the case even now: Show me somebody who doesn't own a TV, and I'll show you somebody who knows better than to be fooled by corporatism. Rare exceptions aside, capitalism and television correlate very nearly 100%.
This is the fundamental flaw in neo-liberalism: Capitalism rewards short-sighted, unplanned behavior. That sort of random, blind trial-and-error just can't compete with intelligent planning. It's stupefyingly inefficient and staggeringly wasteful. If the effort now wasted on non-productive competition -- which benefits only the very rich -- were instead devoted to useful ends, or even spent on enjoyable and harmless pursuits, human quality of life would be immeasurably enhanced. Think about it: Something like half of your working hours are spent on this nonsense. We often have three or more corporations producing essentially the same product, but where is the money going? Advertising (read: competition), redundant R&D (due to competition, and to corporate-designed IP law), and all manner of other madness. Take R&D alone: Once you've designed a workable airplane, for example, it's a bizarre waste of time and effort for the guy down the street to design one that does essentially the same thing. If the designers of the second airplane just took a few months off from work and went fishing, greater social benefit would surely accrue. Then of course you've got redundant factories, when a single factory of greater capacity could produce just as much, with considerably greater econmies of scale. Everybody wins -- except the corporations.
Since we are in a global market place they also need to compete with other countries.
The cutting edge of resistance to corporatism is resistance to globalization. Now you know why. As long as people are reduced to animals or automatons, "competing" for meaningless prizes, nothing useful or worthwhile will be accomplished. It's the old "divide and conquer" routine. You're telling me that to fix things, we need to devote more time and energy to establish more firmly the root cause of the very problems we're trying to solve. No thanks.
Industry may need workers, but the workers don't need to think, because a corporation can always spend some of its ill-gotten profits hiring somebody to think for their employees, so nobody on the payroll actually needs to think at all.
Leaving aside the quasi-libertarian dogma, the only solution to the problems described in the book is a series of well-considered government programs designed to address what's really wrong. I'm sorry, but you simply can't trust private enterprise to solve these things, because they are driven by incentives, rather than ethics and laws. With the proper legal structure, government programs must, by definition, achieve their goals. The only indispensible requirement is that the lawmakers be ethical people, and that's easily achieved once you have a properly educated electorate. The people can be trusted to make the right decisions, once they understand the issues. Fostering a full and proper understanding in the voters will indeed require us first to break the back of corporate media and replace it with something consistently objective, but this is not insurmountable.
You can see a program taking shape here: First, a free media, out from under the thumb of corporate ideology. Once the corporations aren't drowning the public in their own version of reality, their power will evaporate and their very existence will sooner or later follow.
has anybody thought about applying this community development towards the creation of some sort of mechanical device.
Yep, people have been jabbering about that idea on Slashdot for quite a few years now: "Huh huh, open source space ships, huh huh!" I thought that stuff went out of style around the time the Beowulf cluster joke got stale, but perhaps I was wrong.
My thoughts? Something like this: "Beavis, you're a dumbass..."
Let us not obfuscate the issue with false analogies to Christopher Columbus...
Van Allen is wrong here. The analogy to Christopher Columbus is spot-on in one very important way:
Space travel, like the "Age of Exploration", is a matter of wealthy white men helping themselves to an unreasonable portion of the Earth's resources, without concern for the harm they do to the rest of the human race.
The billions of dollars spent on space didn't spring into being from nothing. This is wealth that the "first world" has and the "third world" doesn't have. Why the disparity? Is the first world "naturally" wealthier? Were all those white people born smarter or more productive? No, absolutely not. All men are created equal. Inequality is, by definition, always an unnatural and artificially imposed condition.
When Nike spends US$0.50 making a US$80.00 pair of sneakers in a third-world country, that's US$79.50 in wealth transferred from the third world to the first world. That is the template for the world economy these days. You can call it "colonialism", or you can call it the "world economy", or you can call it anything you like, but the bottom line is that somebody's paying those folks in the third world a hell of a lot less than their labor is worth, and they're powerless to do anything about it.
Even leaving aside the staggering and unprecedented environmental damage done by the rockets themselves, the human damage of colonialism far outweighs whatever microscopic worth the entire enterprise may have. And without colonialism, there would be no space programs at all. Only colonialism can produce such massive concentrations of wealth in such a tiny set of hands.
The International Space Station is no less an assault on racial and social justice than the conquest of the Americas was.
I understand the fine poetry of exploration, but the reality is a brutal nightmare, and it's the reality that we have to live with here on Earth.
You, sir, disregard what the great social critic Alan Sokal described as "counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities." I couldn't have said it better myself.
...the authors have systematically refused to answer, or selectively answered with further vague or absurd statements.
Could it be that the authors are simply not interested in employing the hierarchical male-dominated "conflict" paradigm of scientific discourse, but insist rather on a more culturally inclusive paradigm of multiple and divergent truths, realities, modes of existence? Could it be that their truth simply differs from that of their critics, and cannot therefore be profitably discussed on sci.physics.research?
To suggest that Western male physics applies equally in the more authentic nations of the world is a self-evident absurdity. To suggest that it has any relevance to pre-spacetime thermodynamic equilibrium is a characteristically arrogant assumption of the hegemonic mind. Get real, folks!
The fundamental evaluative condition of any paper in the field of theoretical physics is not whether it satisfies some arbitrary, imposed standard of so-called "objective" so-called "truth", but rather whether it is true for the author. High-energy physics, by its very definition, is a purely personal and subjective undertaking. No physical law can possibly be applicable to all observers.
I find it rather pathetic and sad that referees of publications in the physical sciences so often insist on printing only those constructions of "truth" which agree with so-called "experimental evidence", as if such "evidence" (mere columns of numbers) were in some way relevant to the aspirations of marginalized peoples (e.g. the "three meters per second per second" dogma, which has been passed down unchanged, unquestioned, by generations of white male physicists -- don't you think the time has come to abandon that hoary old shibboleth and replace it with something of more vibrant cultural relevance to the developing world?).
Next thing we know there will be SF without evolution and SF with 7 day creation bits in it.
You should read Inferno by Niven and Pournelle. The premise (hard SF generally starts with an assumption about how the physical world works, and then proceeds to explore its implications) is that God is quite real, and Hell, as described by Dante, is quite real as well. The novel proceeds to explore the implications thereof. This is called "hard science fiction".
I have no doubt that there is good hard SF out there starting with just the assumptions you mention, and doing something genuinely interesting and worthwhile with them. Hey, what about Heinlein's Job? If I recall correctly, it makes just those very assumptions (among others), and it's not a bad book at all. Of course, Heinlein didn't believe a word of that stuff: He just chose it as an arbitrary assumption about reality which looked like he could wring a good story out of it.
As an atheist of long standing and firm conviction, I'd love to see a good writer do some serious hard SF starting with the assumption that Genesis is a dead-accurate historical document. It's an interesting assumption. It's a fun idea. Somebody with some verve and imagination could do a lot with it. Of course, as is always the case with SF, the reader is required to have some imagination of his own. Sorry about that. Have you tried romance novels?
You've probably watched a lot of Star Trek and gotten the idea that SF is horse-opera with lasers, a time-killer for idiots. Well, that's not true of any SF worth reading. Star Trek is crap; it's the Donnie and Marie show with rubber masks. The good stuff is about ideas as well as about character, neither of which have ever gotten in the door over at Star Trek Franchise HQ. Their business is to sell soap and Pepsi. You're demanding an unchallenging regurgitation of things you're already familiar with and comfortable with. You want the same old answers on a tape loop, not a box of new questions. Well, that's boring. Deadly, deadly boring.
If you drop the paranoia and accept the fact that there's much entertainment in any good mind playing interesting and unexpected games with any reasonably self-consistent idea, you may someday start to develop an understanding of what SF is about.
But I hope you'll forgive me if I don't hold my breath.
...the first dune book was a complex book, a wonderful book, but the basic story is a (quite banal) coming-of-age defeat-the-badguy story.
"Banal, schmanal", I say! Heinlein used to say that there are only six or so plots out there, so everything's stolen anyway. I don't know who he stole that thought from, but I have no doubt he stole it along with his plots (ha ha ha).
I don't mind an essentially banal plot, when the execution's as good as it is in Dune. Seriously good writing and a fertile imagination can save any plot; no plot can survive bad writing and imaginative poverty. What's interesting to me about the first couple of Dune sequels is the degeneration caused not by prescience particularly, but by the fact that once you've conquered the whole galaxy, there's nothing left to push against. There's nothing to keep you sharp. You get fat and decadent. Unfortunately, once the grand (and IMHO gripping) conflict in Dune is dispensed with, Herbert's got nothing to replace it that captures my imagination at all -- and furthermore, having read those books, I doubt that what he came up with captured his imagination either. To my eyes, the books look just as fat and decadent as the regime does, and for the same reason. The whole downhill slide culminates in the one with the robotic superhero Duncan Idaho clone (or was it one of the other guys? It's been many years, sorry). That one held my interest better than the others did, but it's just ridiculous. It's completely over the top. It's like a musician smashing his guitar because he can't get your attention by playing it (...rather than smashing it because he's got you so rivetted that smashing a guitar becomes, in some indecipherable musical/theatrical way, necessary).
You're right: Thematically, Dune itself is less sophisticated than the others. In terms of most of the (relatively) quantifiable "literary" stuff I used to namecheck in essays back when I was an Eng. Lit. major, Dune's a bit primitive. But so what? All myths are simple at their core; this is not a bad thing. It's got zoom. It eats read meat. It's indelible. It's got a great mythic drive and strangeness to it that always leaves me feeling awed and humbled. That weapons-grade aesthetic experience is what makes the novel matter, and the lack of it is what cripples the rest of the series. (IMHO, IANAL, blah blah blah.)
What is worse, being greedy or being pathetic? I do not deride B.Herbert. I pity him.
I refuse to pity him. Pity is the cruelest form of loathing. I'll pity him if he keys my car, but until then I'll have enough compassion to consider him annoying rather than sad.
I do think you're right about it not being greed, now that you mention it -- or should I say, it's not greed for money. So, in the lad's defense, at least his reach exceeds his grasp.
But "some publishers are scum" is no great news either...
That's the one. Thanks. 'T' for "Turtledove" is right near 'V' for "Vance"; I always look to see if anything by Jack Vance is back in print (there's also a remote but tantalizing possibility that we'll see another new one from him before he passes on... or is he gone already?) but all I ever see is a phalanx of these Turtledove monstrosities and some Vinge (more Vernor than Joan these days, I think, but I don't pay too close attention to either). 'V' is for van Vogt, too, and IIRC there's a second Slan novel that I don't have, but van Vogt's not exactly well represented either.
As for The Diamond Age, Stephenson has been fluttering around the edge of competence for his whole career. When he's good, he's good, but even at his best he has a real weakness for giving in and going for something cheap, obvious, and amateurish at just the wrong moment. Too many of his characters are cartoons or strawmen. Too much of it panders to the reader. He's good sometimes, but he's never great.
Oh, and of course they need to devote three feet of shelf space to nine different editions of LotR, eight volumes of Tolkien's laundry lists and phone bills, and a dozen slabs of semi-related cash-in detritus that Tolkien didn't even write. The original trilogy is selling like hotcakes, naturally; too bad nobody actually reads it... If they did, they might begin to suspect that it's a bit overrated. Wonderful imagination, Tolkien, absolutely spectacular; there's nobody like him... too bad about the prose, though.
Dune was one hell of a novel. Frank Herbert's subsequent Dune novels got worse and worse. Now his relatives are milking the franchise for all it's worth, and the brand equity of a franchise like Dune is worth a great deal.
This has nothing to do with writing good science fiction novels. It's got everything to do with somebody wanting a new Mercedes -- and with the semi-literate droolers who buy what passes for "science fiction" nowadays. Something is very wrong when the alleged "science fiction" section in your local bookstore is dominated by franchises (Star Trek, Star Wars, some alternate history bonehead whose name escapes me, but who publishes books at too great a rate to be writing them himself, yada yada yada, the list goes on). When most of those franchises are derived from mainstream-mass-market cheap imitation SF movies and TV shows (when, in other words, the tapeworms crawl out of the gut and seize power), something is worse than just "very wrong".
Yeah, well. You can't win 'em all. In the end, of course, the morons always drown in their own waste products, which is just what they deserve. The field has recovered from worse slumps in decades past. It will recover again. After all, SF even at its worst is no worse than the rest of the publishing industry at its best: Just look at the drivel John Updike gets away with.
Social justice would reduce the cost considerably.
on
Antimatter Space Drive
·
· Score: 5, Funny
In a just society, where the wants of the underprivileged are not left unattended-to, in a truly accepting and broad-minded multicultural community where spiritual values and emotional resonance are cherished and rewarded, it's clear that the hierarchically-constrained "male physics" which enforces today's high antimatter prices would cease to obtain.
I invite you all to contemplate the joys and rewards of a non-judgemental, people-centered physics, which takes emotional and spiritual considerations are factored into every equation. With such a "physics of the heart" taught as a scientifically acceptable and morally rewarding alternate truth -- for there are always many mutually exclusive and identically valid truths, especially in matters of radiation -- adequate supplies of antimatter would be within the reach of all! Imagine every child having enough antimatter to dream and to grow, to achieve his or her full creative potential as an individual, regardless of his or her astrological sign!
Is it truly so radical, to contemplate making science the servant of humanistic values, rather than their enemy? Is it really necessary for antimatter, like the so-called "Western literary canon", to be the exclusive province of dead white males? I think not.
Slashdot Mirror
The majority of his article did not revolve around advocating *nix over Windows
Correct. I gave one clear, obvious example of a questionable conclusion he reached by drawing all of his "great hackers" from a very small and non-representative sample of the working programmers on Earth. This is why I prefaced the example with the phrase, "for example". Because it was an example. See?
Perhaps the phrase "platform advocacy" was ill-chosen; perhaps I should have said "platform and/or language and/or tool and/or whatever advocacy". Hell, I could've gone on for a whole paragraph clarifying a point which was painfully clear to anybody who'd read the essay.
You probably didn't notice that another of his points had to do with saying that cool programmers don't like Java. That's understandable. After all, how could could you possibly have noticed a little thing like that, in the middle of 1000+ Slashdot posts about precisely that aspect of his essay? Whether it caught your attention or not, it is, once again, platform and/or tool and/or language and/or blah blah blah advocacy.
Bottom line: He says that smart people all like the same stuff he does, and anybody who makes different choices is an idiot, and that's an important part of what he's saying. This is often called "platform advocacy". It's more often called "bullshit", but that term was too general for my purposes. There's a wealth of bullshit in Graham's essay, and I wanted to be clear about which particular steaming pile I was asking the reader to sniff.
First, I've read Graham's essay, and his definition of "Great Hacker" is on the vague side, and consists largely of platform advocacy. It turns out that his "great hackers" are all people he knows. Fair enough: He can't really judge anybody else. But that leaves him with such a small and selective set of data that his conclusions are meaningless. For example: He claims that all "great hackers" refuse to work on Windows. He works at companies developing software for UN*X. Not surprisingly, most of the programmers he knows are UN*X people, who don't work on Windows. So what? This proves nothing at all. He has merely suggested (however plausibly) that Windows developers tend not to develop for UN*X and vice versa, which is tautological. Dennis M. Ritchie has a Windows box on his desk these days, but Graham doesn't know Ritchie personally, so Ritchie's not considered. Graham's working from a thin set of anecdotes.
Secondly (and this has been said before), Graham's "great hackers" are prima donnas who refuse to deal with practical problems outside some very limited set of problems that they enjoy. I remember a story about Richard Feynman helping paint the walls at Thinking Machines when he worked there; I guess Feynman wasn't a "great hacker".
Finally, I often hear from Java advocates that the memory-lebensraum problem and the speed problem are due to programmers not understanding the internals well enough to work around their flaws. This is not said to be true of any other programming language on Earth, as far as I know.
It all sounds like a crock to me. Knowing the tools better will always help, but if only an expert can write usable code -- not great, but merely usable -- the language is junk, or at best the implementation is junk.
...but at least he wasn't American.
You have to keep these things in perspective.
...which completely omitted any mention of the Polish success in cracking an earlier version of Enigma between the wars. That initial Polish work was indispensible to everything done by the Brits w/r/t Enigma during the war. The movie was called Enigma, IIRC. The only Pole in the movie turned out to be a spy for the Germans (not out of ideological conviction, mind you, but because he hated the Soviets even more, over the Katyn Massacre thing).
Maybe everybody has national pride, eh? Maybe all movies made for the purpose of entertainment and tend to rewrite complicated reality into a simple story?
Just maybe?
It also strikes me that Americans have been hearing quite a bit for the past thirty years about how badly we got clobbered in Vietnam. Oceans of ink have been spilled in hand-wringing about our competitiveness in international markets, our educational system, our number of math and science grads compared to eleventeen other nations, Japanese ownership of US companies and real estate (big, big topic before the Japanese economy faltered after the 1980s), etc. etc. etc. Back in the 1980s there was an entire genre of books about how much better the Japanese were at doing business than we were.
For every example, there is a counter-example. Sounds like you're selectively representing reality for the sake of a simple and compelling narrative arc, yourself.
There have been times and places in history when you could advise people to panic and lash out, and it was just good common sense, but more often it's simple demagoguery.
In an "unprecedented" desperate emergency, desperate measures are justified, yes? After all, when you're fighting a last-ditch battle to save the Constitution, struggling to preserve the very soul of our nation, literally defending yourself and the body politic against the greatest threat to liberty it has ever faced... isn't it a bit silly to quibble over a few petty legalities around the edges? Can we really AFFORD to make nice ethical distinctions, when the slightest weakness or hesitation could give the Enemy the advantage they need to crush us forever? Do YOU want to be the one who allowed the last flicker of freedom to be extinguished, merely because you lacked the moral courage to use harsh measures against the megacorps and their lackeys? Of course not!
Naturally, if this weren't quite such a catastrophic situation, if the future of the nation and indeed the world weren't balanced on quite such a fine knife edge between justice on the one hand and an endless hellish abyss of slavery and war on the other... well, in less desperate times, we would certainly be scrupulous about our actions. You must understand, we do these terrible things only out of necessity! The Evil Ones have forced our hand -- and besides, George Bush is doing it too, so that makes it okay.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. So said a great and beloved icon of social, racial, and economic justice, back in that desperate and decisive year 1964... Er, wait, no, that was Barry Goldwater. Same difference, really.
Once you get people properly scared, you can point them at a scapegoat ("capital", "megacorps", "neocons", "com-symp fellow travellers", immigrants with dark complexions -- take your pick). It helps a lot if they're a bit scared to begin with. The Inflation helped Hitler, for example. It's easiest to motivate young people this way. They're more insecure, more emotional, and they have less to lose. They're full of energy and they haven't seen enough of the world to begin to suspect that there never is a simple, violent, and decisive solution to most problems (lots of older people don't "get it" either, of course, and some young people do -- this is a sort of actuarial view, here). Look at the Cultural Revolution: Mao didn't bother trying to motivate middle-aged shopkeepers to roam around the countryside beating people up. He went for young people.
Is the administration really trying to panic the population into acting foolishly? And succeeding? Mebbe so, though it's not seelf-evident. My impression is that most people aren't taking the terrorist threat level stuff very seriously, but maybe that's just the people I happen to know in Boston. Maybe they're quivering in their boots out in Waukegan. On the other hand, let's also remember that the threat is not wholly imaginary. For every voice complaining about Tom Ridge's warnings, there's one complaining about the lack of warnings pre-9/11, and in some delightful cases it's the same voice. Back in the 1990s, some folks ridiculed the Clinton administration's mild concern about al Qaeda as an attempt to stir up fear for demagogic purposes.
Finally, let's ask ourselves: Is left-wing demagoguery a significant threat to our precious liberty? Must we STAMP THEM OUT like they want to stamp out the GOP? Fuck, no! I've just compared their mentality to those of Mao and Hitler; surely this indicates that they must be absolutely identical to Mao and Hitler, yes? Well, actually, once again, fuck, no! They don't have the kind of resources Mao and Hitler had. My personal belief is that if, by some magic miracle, the radical undergraduate Left gained power in this country, they'd do pre
Only about 50% of women in the field seem to be competent. Compare that to about 85% of men in the field knowing what they're doing
I have no idea what percentage of the women are competent; I haven't run into enough of 'em to hazard a guess.
But I can sure as hell tell you that at most 20% of the men know what they're doing. About 50% are grossly, laughably incompetent, even now, years after the "hire any warm body" days came to a welcome end and most of the dot-com crowd have gone back to delivering pizzas.
This field is full of idiots. With Y chromosomes. People with real jobs on their resumes, who can't sit down in an interview and ace a simple quiz about pointer arithmetic and the like. It's a fucking nightmare.
Terrorists like it. Otherwise, they wouldn't stay in business, would they?
Personally, I think it's a really serious case of something closely akin to Undergraduate Political Extremism Syndrome: Some people don't know who they are, or why they're breathing, or why they matter. They feel like their lives are more meaningful, interesting, and significant if they're engaged in a millenial life-and-death struggle for the soul of humanity and the future of Planet Earth, toe-to-toe with Absolute Evil in the form of, you know, Starbucks or people who wear leather shoes or whatever. Or communism, or capitalism, or the Jews. Whoever's handy.
The bottom line is, the undergraduate extremist mind is neither subtle nor patient, and favors pathological oversimplification of both problems and solutions. They love conspiracy theories: All the world's problems are due to one small group of evil people -- kill 'em and all our problems will vanish!
Did he object to even foreign Muslims visiting Mecca, really?
Erm, "foreigners" was the wrong word. "Infidels". Non-muslims. "Them" as opposed to "us", for bin Laden's own personal definitions of "them" and "us".
My impression is that the Arab word conventionally translated into English as "nation" doesn't exactly mean "nation state" as we in the West understand it. Sometimes it seems to mean "the Arab race", sometimes "the Islamic world", sometimes... whatever. Are multiple distinct Arabic words all being translated as "nation", perhaps by different translators? I often wonder just how deep the semantic divide is between the two cultures.
If [Basque separatists] want to separate from Spain, they're brain damaged. Who would give them fat paychecks of regional aid?
The EU, perhaps? Heh heh.
Anyhow, nationalism and irredentism ain't necessarily logical. Similar economic arguments applied to the Irish Free State in the 1930s, and they pried themselves loose from England anyway. It's generally true that people would rather be governed by an "us" than by a "them", and are often willing to risk a pay cut for the sake of establishing such a government. They usually also tell themselves that unimaginable prosperity will follow hard on the heels of the Revolution, but that's just because people (all of 'em) are dumbasses.
Last I heard, the US military was out of Saudi entirely. And al Qaeda is still killing civilians there.
Hello? Bin Laden objects to non-Muslims being permitted to set foot in Saudi. They're not defending their homeland from foreign military adventurers; they're persecuting foreigners, like the KKK.
Basques, by the way, still do not have full autonomy. That's not just splitting hairs; would the US have settled for less than full autonomy from England?
Let's not forget another Canadian technological triumph, the Avro Arrow.
According to the most reliable sources I've been able to find, the Avro Arrow...
The insurance companies are just adopting the same "guilty until proven innocent" mentality...
Last I heard, insurance companies often tend to use actuarial tables to decide things. That's because they're in business to make money.
In some US states, of course (e.g. Massachusetts), there are all kinds of wacky laws controlling what insurance companies can do. Much like government-mandated smoking bans in restaurants and bars, these laws would be unnecessary if they weren't at odds with reality: If there were a market for non-smoking bars, they would succeed on their own. In the absence of a ban, non-smoking bars are scarce as hen's teeth. QED, baby. QED.
Well, that's what we get for living in Cotton Mather's back yard.
So I wouldn't start hiding under the bed just yet, however repulsive this may be. And I would be more concerned about the inevitable irrational behavior of state legislatures than about the merely probable irrational behavior of people who do, after all, have to show a profit every quarter.
And while we're on the subject of presumption of guilt, notice the alarming number of posters in this discussion who seem to assume that speeding causes accidents. Personally, I doubt that. It's the comatose morons ambling along at 70 mph in the left lane who aren't paying attention to their fucking surroundings. If idiots like that didn't exist, there'd be no need for responsible drivers like me to do dangerous things like tailgate them at high speed, pass them on the right while throwing shit at 'em out the window, etc. Sometimes the only answer is to shoot the dumb bastard. Gunfire on public roads is not safe; those who leave me no choice but to open fire have a lot to answer for.
95% of the noise on Slashdot about this is from people who aren't following the story other than by reading the comments of other Slashdotters who -- surprise! -- aren't following the fucking story either. Just a lot of dumbasses jumping to random conclusions in accordance with random preconceptions and whipping each other into a mindless frenzy. Nothing new there, eh?
Nobody is seriously trying to pretend that the lawyer didn't make any threats. Tarbox claims, on her site, that the lawyer did not make these threats on her (Tarbox's) instructions. She may not be telling the truth about that, but is there any EVIDENCE that she's not telling the truth? Is Tarbox even employing the lawyer? She says not.
Jones is quoting the LAWYER, not Tarbox. The lawyer is clearly a swine. And lawyers have run amok before.
Comparing DVD to video cassettes is comparing apples to oranges...
Care to clarify that? VHS cassettes got most of their usage in movie rentals. Same for DVDs. Sure, VHS tapes were read/write, but if that had been their "killer feature", people would've just stuck with VHS rather than switching to DVDs. If more people had been able to figure out the timer features on their VCRs so they could record stupid TV shows when they weren't home, it might've been different. But it wasn't different.
There is no possible way crippled and more expensive disks and crippled and more expensive players can compete in a free market against a better and cheaper alternative.
Read my lips: Network externalities. At this point, people already own the hardware and the stores already carry the disks. DRM-damaged DVDs do have compelling advantages over VHS tapes, but from the average consumer's point of view, a CSS-free equivalent of DVDs doesn't have any such advantage over DVDs. The inconveniences are not sufficiently inconvenient. Most people never notice them. Slashdotters give a damn. My mom doesn't.
The Conspiracy may have gotten the format in the door, but nowadays, the fact that it's established gives it merits, in practical terms, that a brand-new competitor wouldn't have.
You may well be right that a non-crippled format would've stomped DVD in the marketplace if it'd actually happened -- the same way Windows never succeeded in the marketplace against Macs (uhhh, waitaminute...) -- but it's a more open question than you're willing to admit. I'll say it again: The technical deficiencies of the DVD format are below the radar screens of most of its users. The matter would've been decided on other issues. What sort of issues? Good question! Show me the spec and I'll hazard a guess. But there is no spec. You're telling me that a hypothetical format, for which no specification was ever written, is clearly superior in most (if not all) respects to the DVD format. Well, sure: It's easy to brag about the perfection of a design that never even got designed, much less released. The reality, however, is that no work of mortal engineers is ever perfect, and some of them (you know much about MIDI?) are a real mess, in spite of having been designed by bright people with good intentions. Your ghost format might have been great, but there's no guarantee. The only feature guaranteed to be superior is the absence of CSS, but that's tautological. There's also the fact that the owners of the content, even without a powerful industry association restraining trade, would have been more reluctant to release stuff on a format that lacked even a halfassed attempt at DRM. Many studios would've hung back for a year (which is not an eternity; DVD takeup was fast, but not instantaneous) until DVD was ready to go. Movies, like music, aren't really a commodity. You can't buy "the same thing" from the other guy. Besides, VHS may at that point have been doomed, but it sure wasn't dead. They were still selling their movies to the same market on those stupid tapes.
Yes, you may be right, but it's not a certainty. Your certainty is built out of assumptions, and enough of those assumptions are optimistic to call the whole thing into serious question.
The parent was complaining about the sound quality. He was barking up the wrong tree. As long as the sound quality is good enough to tell two songs apart, it won't be bad enough to matter to the average consumer.
That's a fact.
You can quibble about definitions all you like, if that's what makes you happy. We can parse the parent post character by character like lit-crits yammering about Hamlet's motivations (I've always been partial to Eliot's Gordian solution; how 'bout you?), but here's a good first approximation: If the either the parent poster or I had been talking about issues other than sound quality, one or the other of us probably would've mentioned them. We didn't. So simmer down.
The only crippled format that has ever "succeeded" was DVD, and that was only through a total absence of competition. It didn't succeed, it was imposed through monopoly power.
Um. Wow. Just in case you were actually serious, let's think about it for a moment: People like DVDs. Video stores converted to DVDs because they tried a few, the customers rented them, they tried a few more, the customers rented those, etc. If nobody had rented DVDs, I guarantee you that the neighborhood video store would not have shitcanned all the stock that the customers did want, and replaced it with stuff the customers did not want. Or are you under the impression that ZOG came along in the black helicopters and made 'em do it at gunpoint? Did the black helicopters come to your house, guns drawn, and force you to buy or rent DVDs? Is that what happened? Or was it more of an alien-abduction/anal-probe sort of thing?
With all due respect, I believe that the aliens who abducted you have your best interests at heart, and you should probably use whatever format they suggest. I'm in touch with the secret CIA monitoring station concealed in your neighbor's basement, and they tell me that the tinfoil you put on the windows is working fine. You've foiled (no pun intended) their best efforts! They haven't been able to insert any voices into your head for weeks now. I assure you, any voice you may still hear in your head is, provably, that of your dog. And your dog wants what's best for you. He didn't tell you to kill those people for no reason, did he? Of course not! He's got this all figured out. He knows who's really a dangerous alien in disguise, and who's merely a harmless mechanical automaton put here to fool you. He's immune to their Fear Transmitters and their Potassium Confusion Rays. Trust him and you'll be fine.
"Total absence of competition", you say? Nope! They competed against VHS, and against that ridiculous DivX thing (the other DivX, the Circuit City one). And DVDs won handily, because they sucked significantly less than the other two. Would it have been nice if there'd been a digital format without no arbitrary restrictions at all? Sure. But that misfeature didn't inconvenience enough customers have much effect on sales.
I solemnly pledge that I am not an employee of ATF, FEMA, NSA, Mossad, CIA, MI5, FBI, KGB, OSS, SAC, UMMO, the Bilderbergers, the Mukhabarat (any Mukhabarat), or OGPU, and that I am telling you the truth. I PROMISE!
When will Sony (and other companies) realise that people don't want weird, crippled formats?
128kbps MP3s are weird and crippled, but kids love 'em. Cassette tapes are weird and crippled, too, and they were popular for many years. Lots of people seem to think VHS was weird and crippled compared to Betamax (PS: VHS won).
The average consumer will tolerate weird and crippled formats if they're not too weird, and not too crippled. You can degrade the signal quality to a remarkable degree before the average listener (or viewer) will care.
Who cares what the WSJ thinks? They're not the target market for this device. The kids at whom the it is aimed may make purchasing decisions based on a lot of factors, some more rational than others (e.g. what their friends bought, etc.), but "it sounds like ass" is not necessarily on their radar screen. Ass sounds fine to them. As long as they can tell which song is playing, that's good enough.
So everything would be a monopoly then?
No, quite the opposite. A monopoly is when the supply for a given demand is controlled by a minority (e.g. Microsoft); I advocate freedom: The people make the decisions for themselves, based on an educated understanding of their own interests.
You see if there is any chance of competition then companies need those "free thinking" individuals to compete.
Be that as it may, as long as corporations control education and the media, there won't be very many free-thinking individuals; that's the topic of this entire discussion. Those few free-thinking individuals who slip through the cracks won't be very interested in indentured servitude to corporations. This is the case even now: Show me somebody who doesn't own a TV, and I'll show you somebody who knows better than to be fooled by corporatism. Rare exceptions aside, capitalism and television correlate very nearly 100%.
This is the fundamental flaw in neo-liberalism: Capitalism rewards short-sighted, unplanned behavior. That sort of random, blind trial-and-error just can't compete with intelligent planning. It's stupefyingly inefficient and staggeringly wasteful. If the effort now wasted on non-productive competition -- which benefits only the very rich -- were instead devoted to useful ends, or even spent on enjoyable and harmless pursuits, human quality of life would be immeasurably enhanced. Think about it: Something like half of your working hours are spent on this nonsense. We often have three or more corporations producing essentially the same product, but where is the money going? Advertising (read: competition), redundant R&D (due to competition, and to corporate-designed IP law), and all manner of other madness. Take R&D alone: Once you've designed a workable airplane, for example, it's a bizarre waste of time and effort for the guy down the street to design one that does essentially the same thing. If the designers of the second airplane just took a few months off from work and went fishing, greater social benefit would surely accrue. Then of course you've got redundant factories, when a single factory of greater capacity could produce just as much, with considerably greater econmies of scale. Everybody wins -- except the corporations.
Since we are in a global market place they also need to compete with other countries.
The cutting edge of resistance to corporatism is resistance to globalization. Now you know why. As long as people are reduced to animals or automatons, "competing" for meaningless prizes, nothing useful or worthwhile will be accomplished. It's the old "divide and conquer" routine. You're telling me that to fix things, we need to devote more time and energy to establish more firmly the root cause of the very problems we're trying to solve. No thanks.
Industry may need workers, but the workers don't need to think, because a corporation can always spend some of its ill-gotten profits hiring somebody to think for their employees, so nobody on the payroll actually needs to think at all.
Leaving aside the quasi-libertarian dogma, the only solution to the problems described in the book is a series of well-considered government programs designed to address what's really wrong. I'm sorry, but you simply can't trust private enterprise to solve these things, because they are driven by incentives, rather than ethics and laws. With the proper legal structure, government programs must, by definition, achieve their goals. The only indispensible requirement is that the lawmakers be ethical people, and that's easily achieved once you have a properly educated electorate. The people can be trusted to make the right decisions, once they understand the issues. Fostering a full and proper understanding in the voters will indeed require us first to break the back of corporate media and replace it with something consistently objective, but this is not insurmountable.
You can see a program taking shape here: First, a free media, out from under the thumb of corporate ideology. Once the corporations aren't drowning the public in their own version of reality, their power will evaporate and their very existence will sooner or later follow.
has anybody thought about applying this community development towards the creation of some sort of mechanical device.
Yep, people have been jabbering about that idea on Slashdot for quite a few years now: "Huh huh, open source space ships, huh huh!" I thought that stuff went out of style around the time the Beowulf cluster joke got stale, but perhaps I was wrong.
My thoughts? Something like this: "Beavis, you're a dumbass..."
Let us not obfuscate the issue with false analogies to Christopher Columbus...
Van Allen is wrong here. The analogy to Christopher Columbus is spot-on in one very important way:
Space travel, like the "Age of Exploration", is a matter of wealthy white men helping themselves to an unreasonable portion of the Earth's resources, without concern for the harm they do to the rest of the human race.
The billions of dollars spent on space didn't spring into being from nothing. This is wealth that the "first world" has and the "third world" doesn't have. Why the disparity? Is the first world "naturally" wealthier? Were all those white people born smarter or more productive? No, absolutely not. All men are created equal. Inequality is, by definition, always an unnatural and artificially imposed condition.
When Nike spends US$0.50 making a US$80.00 pair of sneakers in a third-world country, that's US$79.50 in wealth transferred from the third world to the first world. That is the template for the world economy these days. You can call it "colonialism", or you can call it the "world economy", or you can call it anything you like, but the bottom line is that somebody's paying those folks in the third world a hell of a lot less than their labor is worth, and they're powerless to do anything about it.
Even leaving aside the staggering and unprecedented environmental damage done by the rockets themselves, the human damage of colonialism far outweighs whatever microscopic worth the entire enterprise may have. And without colonialism, there would be no space programs at all. Only colonialism can produce such massive concentrations of wealth in such a tiny set of hands.
The International Space Station is no less an assault on racial and social justice than the conquest of the Americas was.
I understand the fine poetry of exploration, but the reality is a brutal nightmare, and it's the reality that we have to live with here on Earth.
You, sir, disregard what the great social critic Alan Sokal described as "counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities." I couldn't have said it better myself.
Could it be that the authors are simply not interested in employing the hierarchical male-dominated "conflict" paradigm of scientific discourse, but insist rather on a more culturally inclusive paradigm of multiple and divergent truths, realities, modes of existence? Could it be that their truth simply differs from that of their critics, and cannot therefore be profitably discussed on sci.physics.research?
To suggest that Western male physics applies equally in the more authentic nations of the world is a self-evident absurdity. To suggest that it has any relevance to pre-spacetime thermodynamic equilibrium is a characteristically arrogant assumption of the hegemonic mind. Get real, folks!
The fundamental evaluative condition of any paper in the field of theoretical physics is not whether it satisfies some arbitrary, imposed standard of so-called "objective" so-called "truth", but rather whether it is true for the author. High-energy physics, by its very definition, is a purely personal and subjective undertaking. No physical law can possibly be applicable to all observers.
I find it rather pathetic and sad that referees of publications in the physical sciences so often insist on printing only those constructions of "truth" which agree with so-called "experimental evidence", as if such "evidence" (mere columns of numbers) were in some way relevant to the aspirations of marginalized peoples (e.g. the "three meters per second per second" dogma, which has been passed down unchanged, unquestioned, by generations of white male physicists -- don't you think the time has come to abandon that hoary old shibboleth and replace it with something of more vibrant cultural relevance to the developing world?).
Next thing we know there will be SF without evolution and SF with 7 day creation bits in it.
You should read Inferno by Niven and Pournelle. The premise (hard SF generally starts with an assumption about how the physical world works, and then proceeds to explore its implications) is that God is quite real, and Hell, as described by Dante, is quite real as well. The novel proceeds to explore the implications thereof. This is called "hard science fiction".
I have no doubt that there is good hard SF out there starting with just the assumptions you mention, and doing something genuinely interesting and worthwhile with them. Hey, what about Heinlein's Job? If I recall correctly, it makes just those very assumptions (among others), and it's not a bad book at all. Of course, Heinlein didn't believe a word of that stuff: He just chose it as an arbitrary assumption about reality which looked like he could wring a good story out of it.
As an atheist of long standing and firm conviction, I'd love to see a good writer do some serious hard SF starting with the assumption that Genesis is a dead-accurate historical document. It's an interesting assumption. It's a fun idea. Somebody with some verve and imagination could do a lot with it. Of course, as is always the case with SF, the reader is required to have some imagination of his own. Sorry about that. Have you tried romance novels?
You've probably watched a lot of Star Trek and gotten the idea that SF is horse-opera with lasers, a time-killer for idiots. Well, that's not true of any SF worth reading. Star Trek is crap; it's the Donnie and Marie show with rubber masks. The good stuff is about ideas as well as about character, neither of which have ever gotten in the door over at Star Trek Franchise HQ. Their business is to sell soap and Pepsi. You're demanding an unchallenging regurgitation of things you're already familiar with and comfortable with. You want the same old answers on a tape loop, not a box of new questions. Well, that's boring. Deadly, deadly boring.
If you drop the paranoia and accept the fact that there's much entertainment in any good mind playing interesting and unexpected games with any reasonably self-consistent idea, you may someday start to develop an understanding of what SF is about.
But I hope you'll forgive me if I don't hold my breath.
"Banal, schmanal", I say! Heinlein used to say that there are only six or so plots out there, so everything's stolen anyway. I don't know who he stole that thought from, but I have no doubt he stole it along with his plots (ha ha ha).
I don't mind an essentially banal plot, when the execution's as good as it is in Dune. Seriously good writing and a fertile imagination can save any plot; no plot can survive bad writing and imaginative poverty. What's interesting to me about the first couple of Dune sequels is the degeneration caused not by prescience particularly, but by the fact that once you've conquered the whole galaxy, there's nothing left to push against. There's nothing to keep you sharp. You get fat and decadent. Unfortunately, once the grand (and IMHO gripping) conflict in Dune is dispensed with, Herbert's got nothing to replace it that captures my imagination at all -- and furthermore, having read those books, I doubt that what he came up with captured his imagination either. To my eyes, the books look just as fat and decadent as the regime does, and for the same reason. The whole downhill slide culminates in the one with the robotic superhero Duncan Idaho clone (or was it one of the other guys? It's been many years, sorry). That one held my interest better than the others did, but it's just ridiculous. It's completely over the top. It's like a musician smashing his guitar because he can't get your attention by playing it (...rather than smashing it because he's got you so rivetted that smashing a guitar becomes, in some indecipherable musical/theatrical way, necessary).
You're right: Thematically, Dune itself is less sophisticated than the others. In terms of most of the (relatively) quantifiable "literary" stuff I used to namecheck in essays back when I was an Eng. Lit. major, Dune's a bit primitive. But so what? All myths are simple at their core; this is not a bad thing. It's got zoom. It eats read meat. It's indelible. It's got a great mythic drive and strangeness to it that always leaves me feeling awed and humbled. That weapons-grade aesthetic experience is what makes the novel matter, and the lack of it is what cripples the rest of the series. (IMHO, IANAL, blah blah blah.)
What is worse, being greedy or being pathetic? I do not deride B.Herbert. I pity him.
I refuse to pity him. Pity is the cruelest form of loathing. I'll pity him if he keys my car, but until then I'll have enough compassion to consider him annoying rather than sad.
I do think you're right about it not being greed, now that you mention it -- or should I say, it's not greed for money. So, in the lad's defense, at least his reach exceeds his grasp.
But "some publishers are scum" is no great news either ...
AAAA-MEN! Sing it, brother.
That's the one. Thanks. 'T' for "Turtledove" is right near 'V' for "Vance"; I always look to see if anything by Jack Vance is back in print (there's also a remote but tantalizing possibility that we'll see another new one from him before he passes on... or is he gone already?) but all I ever see is a phalanx of these Turtledove monstrosities and some Vinge (more Vernor than Joan these days, I think, but I don't pay too close attention to either). 'V' is for van Vogt, too, and IIRC there's a second Slan novel that I don't have, but van Vogt's not exactly well represented either.
As for The Diamond Age, Stephenson has been fluttering around the edge of competence for his whole career. When he's good, he's good, but even at his best he has a real weakness for giving in and going for something cheap, obvious, and amateurish at just the wrong moment. Too many of his characters are cartoons or strawmen. Too much of it panders to the reader. He's good sometimes, but he's never great.
Oh, and of course they need to devote three feet of shelf space to nine different editions of LotR, eight volumes of Tolkien's laundry lists and phone bills, and a dozen slabs of semi-related cash-in detritus that Tolkien didn't even write. The original trilogy is selling like hotcakes, naturally; too bad nobody actually reads it... If they did, they might begin to suspect that it's a bit overrated. Wonderful imagination, Tolkien, absolutely spectacular; there's nobody like him... too bad about the prose, though.
Dune was one hell of a novel. Frank Herbert's subsequent Dune novels got worse and worse. Now his relatives are milking the franchise for all it's worth, and the brand equity of a franchise like Dune is worth a great deal.
This has nothing to do with writing good science fiction novels. It's got everything to do with somebody wanting a new Mercedes -- and with the semi-literate droolers who buy what passes for "science fiction" nowadays. Something is very wrong when the alleged "science fiction" section in your local bookstore is dominated by franchises (Star Trek, Star Wars, some alternate history bonehead whose name escapes me, but who publishes books at too great a rate to be writing them himself, yada yada yada, the list goes on). When most of those franchises are derived from mainstream-mass-market cheap imitation SF movies and TV shows (when, in other words, the tapeworms crawl out of the gut and seize power), something is worse than just "very wrong".
Yeah, well. You can't win 'em all. In the end, of course, the morons always drown in their own waste products, which is just what they deserve. The field has recovered from worse slumps in decades past. It will recover again. After all, SF even at its worst is no worse than the rest of the publishing industry at its best: Just look at the drivel John Updike gets away with.
In a just society, where the wants of the underprivileged are not left unattended-to, in a truly accepting and broad-minded multicultural community where spiritual values and emotional resonance are cherished and rewarded, it's clear that the hierarchically-constrained "male physics" which enforces today's high antimatter prices would cease to obtain.
I invite you all to contemplate the joys and rewards of a non-judgemental, people-centered physics, which takes emotional and spiritual considerations are factored into every equation. With such a "physics of the heart" taught as a scientifically acceptable and morally rewarding alternate truth -- for there are always many mutually exclusive and identically valid truths, especially in matters of radiation -- adequate supplies of antimatter would be within the reach of all! Imagine every child having enough antimatter to dream and to grow, to achieve his or her full creative potential as an individual, regardless of his or her astrological sign!
Is it truly so radical, to contemplate making science the servant of humanistic values, rather than their enemy? Is it really necessary for antimatter, like the so-called "Western literary canon", to be the exclusive province of dead white males? I think not.
10/21/2002: Netscape innaugurates Mozilla open source project!
10/20/2002: Windows NT 4.0 released!
10/19/2002: DEC changes name to Digital, and/or vice versa!
10/18/2002: Altair home computer released!
10/17/2002: New "Multics" project aims to revolutionize operating systems!
10/16/2002: New "high level" programming language Fortran promises to revolutionize number-crunching!
10/15/2002: This just in: Renowned mathematician Alan Turing found dead!
10/14/2002: HITLER INVADES CZECHOSLOVAKIA!
10/13/2002: Council of Trent adjourns!
10/12/2002: EMPEROR DIOCLETIAN ACCEDES TO THRONE!
10/11/2002: Orgmph discover fire! Fire good! Cook meat!