While I was standing there playing at a (particularly violent) first person shoot-em-up, some kid (maybe 20 years old) pokes me in the back and says "You better watch where ya go when ya get outta here 'cuz I might just wanna shoot ya with my real piece." Great... I've just been threatened with death.
That reminds me of what happened to somebody from my high school. A few years into adulthood, he was driving down a street behind a car that turned into a parking lot without signaling. God only knows why, but he followed the car and got out and started cussing out the driver for doing it. The driver came out of his car, and they argued for a bit until the guy from my high school said, "You'd better leave, or I'll get my gun out of my car and take care of you". He didn't have a gun in his car. He was just trying to scare the guy.
At this point, the other guy took a gun out of his pocket and blew him away.
Why should your beliefs as a parent dictate to the rest of us what we watch, hear and see, or what our children watch, hear and see? Who are you that your beliefs should take precedence over mine or someone else's? What if the theory of evolution offends you too? Does that mean the state can't teach it to my kid?
You and your kind seem to want a bland homogenous conformist society of plastic people who adhere to the Lowest Common Denominator of Offensiveness while those who won't conform or can't conform are put behind a spite fence. You stand for enforced mediocrity and enslavement of the creators by the censors.
If you don't like the culture that's out there do the creative, alternative thing. Make your own and ally yourself with other creators who believe as you do. Don't expect to make people create what YOU want them to create for you. Quit being so lazy and do your own work.
The lawyers acting for the RIAA, MPAA, etc are only able to do what they do because a certain supposedly democratic institution that sits in the Capitol building in Washington DC has passed suitably bletcherous legislation that allows them to do it.
You're certainly right, but I've got to point out that most Congresscritters are lawyers... Which explains a lot, doesn't it?
the normal user is (sad to say )a damn soccer mom using aol, shopping at amazon, and logging on to bigbrother.com for 30 bucks a month
Come on. You can't possibly know what the "normal user" does and neither does anyone else, because no one's ever done an in-depth survey of 1000 people or so to see exactly what web pages they were visiting and why. So, 60% of internet time is spent at 14 companies. At least five of those companies have a bewildering array of subjects and content, not to mention links to the other 40%, which could be anywhere. No one, to my knowledge, has actually recorded (on paper, not a log), what these people were looking at - or how long they were looking at it. If I do a web search on Yahoo for Dickens and find David Copperfield and download it, mere web logging is going to show that I spent 50% of my "time" (actually connections) at Yahoo and 50% at Project Gutenberg. But whose content is going to occupy more of my time?
A new archetecture. No, we're just going to keep using the IBM-PC, with its IRQs and other funky crap that was invented in the early 80s and has to be hacked around to get today's computer working at a decent speed. Eventually, someone's going to have to take the plunge and reinvent the computer. Don't hold your breath.
> so many people just recognize it for the commercial side, but not the birth of Jesus Christ. What it originally was for.
What nonsense.
Yes, it ought to be perfectly obvious to anyone that it's to show off how affluent and spendthrift we are and how, at least once a year, we can wallow in material possessions with someone besides ourselves. Those who would claim that it's about a child being born in Bethlehem 2000 years ago are clearly delusional and taking advantage of our yearly celebaration of Mammon to spread dubious religious propaganda. Forget those barbarians - on with the potlatch!
Copyright didn't exist as a concept in biblical times, so how can there be a biblical prohibition on software copying? It's "thou shalt not steal" not "thou shalt not copy". Weren't the first Christians actively encouraged to copy their books? I wonder how far Christianity would have gone if the scriptures were copyrighted?
Bullshit. Linux-Mandrake [linux-mandrake.com] is amazingly easy to use,
Once you get it installed. I downloaded 8.1 - at the end of installing the files off the first CD, it hung up and refused to do anything else. I solved the problem by informing the install program that I had just one CD, figuring I'd install the other 2 CDs later.
My next problem was the package manager didn't want to install off my regular read CD. I put the CD into my Creative CDRW, and locked up my computer. A quick look at/etc/fstab revealed that it had identified my CDRW as a SCSI drive, not an IDE. I corrected this, and have been doing alright, although I still can't switch CDs when installing groups of programs.
I guess that wasn't too hard, seeing as I know what I'm doing. But "amazingly easy" for a newbie? No, it's not quite there yet.
Tolkein was no Shakespeare, no Chaucer, no Hemingway, no Faulkner, etc.
No, he wasn't, but then, few authors are. Tolkien's major relative failings are his prose style, which is servicible and clear, but rarely memorable, and his characterization, which is somewhat flat, without being too cliche'd. His strengths, however, put him among the greats of our century. If anyone has managed to create a complex world with a multi layered, epic mythology and married it seemlessly to a moving and relevant plot, it's escaped my attention. You've compared him to Malory, which is a good start - Malory takes the mishmash of Arturian myth and turns it into a... mishmash, baldly told, with little style. Moving on to Spenser, there's no doubt that Spenser's poetic and descriptive gifts are far above Tolkien's - when he's on. A good part of the Fairie Queen, however, is dull and lifeless, and if there's an overall plot to it, it got lost somewhere.
Moving on to Chretien DeTroyes, again, as far as I can tell in translation, he's a much better stylist, but his organizational skills were lacking. The Eddas and Sagas have a baldness of style that can be appealing but again, don't quite make a coherent whole. I could go on and on, hop, skipping and jumping in and out of the fantasy genre, but I'll save us some trouble by saying that I don't know of anyone in the field who's come up with a world of this kind of depth and integrated it so well into a meaningful story.
As far as the rest of modern literature is concerned, what are we comparing him to? SF novels? - not many can come close to him in that field, either. Mainstream literature? I don't suppose Tolkien had much to say about middle class angst in America or the joys of growing up in the ethnic subculture of the week, which seems to be what the modern novel has devolved into. There are a lot of good novelists around these days, but they have little to say that a lot of other good novelists aren't saying either. There were a lot of good novelists of the last century who aren't being read anymore. I can be fairly certain in 500 years that people will be reading Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner, and to a lesser extent Hemingway. And yes, they'll be reading Tolkien. He's already had an enormous influence on culture - not just in the fantasy genre, but in the concept of creating a fictional world so thoroughly that the reader/viewer has no choice but to be caught up in it totally. He was the one who showed the creators of Star Wars, Star Trek and Dune how it had to be done. Anyone who wants to create a unique place for his characters to interact with depth HAS to study Tolkien and how he did it. He had his weaknesses as a writer, none of them fatal, but in the matter of world-making, he was the master.
And the only reason it's classified as such is because the non-Asperger's people incorrectly consider themselves 'normal'. What we're seeing here is partly resentment of the way technically minded people have moved from being something of a joke to the people who invent and maintain the modern world.
There's something to be said for the neurologically typical (NT) having labelled the rest of the people "weird" or "geeky" or "autistic". I myself believed that my problems in life had been caused by people hating intelligent people or people who were academically successful. For 44 years, I could comfort myself with the thought that most people were locking out the more intelligent of us because they were acting on some kind of stupid animal instinct to oppress the "other". It was a convenient thing to think, as I didn't have to confront the other things going on, such as my underachieving compared to my potential, such as my not having more than one or two real friends at any time in my life, such as feeling like a stranger and an alien in the place I grew up in.
In the last 5 weeks or so, I've gotten the shock of my life.
My daughter is almost six and is currently going to a Preprimary Impaired program. At the first parent teacher conference, the school psychologist asked me if I had ever heard of Autism. I said, yeah, and mentioned Rainman... She explained that it was a spectrum disorder, meaning that it could range anywhere from being mild, to being like Rainman, to even worse. She described the symptoms - repeating words all the time, running away from people, failing to interact/play with peers, repetitious hand movements, etc. etc. We agreed that she seemed to be having a real problem communicating - she reads at a 1st or 2nd grade level and talks like a 2 year old. She is currently being scheduled for the observations necessary to certify her as being autistic.
That was one hell of a shock, to realize that my kid might never have a normal life, or become a self supporting adult. (I think she'll adjust to her condition, but I can't be sure.) I immediately started researching this online and at the library. Temple Grandin's book "Thinking in Pictures" was an excellent account by an autistic woman of how she percieves the world and how she has managed to adjust to it successfully. Donna William's "Nobody, Nowhere", "Somebody, Somewhere" and "Like Color to the Blind" are harrowing and deep accounts of how a woman gradually came to terms with her autism and the world around her. The best web resource is the "Oops, Wrong Planet Syndrome" webpage at http://www.isn.net/~jypsy, which has hundreds of links, including webpages written by those with autism or Asperger's Syndrome.
A week ago Sunday, I was at that page and having recalled that the school psychologist had mentioned Asperger's as another possibility as to what was going on with my daughter, so I decided to follow some links and read what the doctors and the patients had to say about it. As I read, interest turned to discomfort, and discomfort slowly turned to shock.
Asperger's Syndrome sufferers (Aspies) were often highly intelligent. Well, I'm highly intelligent, but... Aspies had trouble socializing with people beginning in childhood. Well, I had, but, you know, the people I went to school with were such jerks anyway... Apsies had poor communication skills with people, often sounding like "little professors" with odd, grating voices. Well, um, they had called me "Brainiac" in school. Aspies had some narrow, almost compulsive interests, which may stay the same, or change - one described his hobby of looking at maps for hours and hours and then spending more hours drawing maps of imaginary countries and cities. I gulped, remembering that I used to do the same thing. Aspies had few friends from childhood on and people thought they were rude and too direct. Well... I looked at the screen with tears in my eyes, recognizing myself.
I had Asperger's Syndrome.
Somehow, I'd managed to cope with it, enough to be able to hold a good job and have a family and stay sane. I'd even managed to mellow a little and get along a little better with people, although my general instinct is to avoid people whenever possible; if I want to talk about things with people, I can just go give myself a silly name like "Pyramid Termite" and go online to webboard like Slashdot. That's sort of relating. I guess.
Right now, I'm working up the nerve to talk to a psychologist. I wanted to, anyway, so I could understand my daughter's autism and how to deal with it, but now I need to understand my own.
So, alright, Slashdotters, it might be genetic, or pollution caused, or have something to do with the MMR vaccine. Hell, I don't know. I have some special abilities, but there are people who also have them who aren't on the autistic spectrum. If I'm the future of humanity or a member of the Master Race, let me tell you, I don't feel like it. I feel sad and scared and proud of myself and regretful that no one, least of all me, understood what I was going through until now. I can't tell you what it's like to be a high functioning autistic person because I don't know that for myself yet. It's going to take some time, and meanwhile, I've got to keep working at my job and guide my daughter through her problems.
It's said that 1/3 to 1/2 of Aspies go undiagnosed. If there's a problem in your life with alienation, never having any friends, relating poorly to people, etc., take a good look. Like me, you could have Apserger's or autism and not even know it.
A long time ago, the Orcish race was minding its own business in the mountains, playing with rocks and peacefully eating grubs and scorpions as is our wont. Without even the pretense of giving us beads or a piece of paper called a treaty, first the Dwarves, then the Elves and Men, invaded our caves and forced us out by swordpoint, all for the pretty little rocks they called gold and silver and mithril, none of which we ever cared about. Ever since then, our legitimate claims on our birthright have been ignored, while our people have been forced to stay in the reservations of Moria and Mordor, when once they claimed all of the Misty Mountains as their home. We are branded terrorists and evil by the Wise and their scrolls of wisdom while our true story goes untold. Tolkien, master propagandist for our oppressors, has told several blatant lies about our kind, leading the average LOTR reader to conclude that we were spontaneously generated out of Sauron's refuse heap somehow, and never have such things as women, children and families. He accuses us of senselss massacres and cannabilism, all the while ignoring the genocide and oppression our folk have suffered. The movie compounds the error by making us look green and slimy with mummified eyes, a gross racial stereotyping that would have the NAACP up in arms were it applied to people of color. Don't fall for the Elvish propaganda of Peter Jackson and J.R.R. Tolkien, but discover the truth for yourselves. We, like other 3rd Middle Earth peoples like the Trolls, the Balrogs, the Werewolves (Wargs, indeed - not once do you find in LOTR our Warg comrades being described as anything but howling animals), and the Great Spiders have been maligned by a baseless libel and demand that the record of history be set straight.
... against yesterday's pirates. Now, when anyone can just use a p2p program to share a program they've ripped, cracked or made an image file out of, why would warez groups follow the old model of distribution at all? Oh, so they can be 3l33t and stuff. Look, except for very expensive programs, all you need is a copy, a skilled cracker or two, and a p2p program and the net will take care of the rest.
By the way, if the feds let all the pirate groups copy their releases and the pirate groups distributed them to all others, how many warez owners are there who've just gotten a little extra from their government this year? Isn't this a lot like if the government grew pot, sold it to 50 people, let the 50 people sell it to all their friends and then got around to busting the 50? Ohh, they got 50 drug dealers! Wow! Meanwhile, a couple of thousand hippies are stumbling around high on government pot.
Makes you wonder how they're fighting the war on terror, doesn't it?
However, if the authorities start locking up everyone that tapes a copy of Survivor, you will hear a mass outcry.
I'd like to think so, but the authorities lock up everyone they catch who has some pot in their possession, potentially half the population at one time or another of their lives, and I haven't heard a mass outcry yet. The brutal truth is there's about 10 to 20% of the electorate who wants the government to oppress those they feel are freaks and corruptors of what they feel is "Americanism", whether it be hippies, atheists, druggies, hackers, or whatever. When some of the voters protest a cruel law being overenforced, they are offset by the ones who would gladly see a strongman government elected to crush everyone's liberties but those of "right thinking people".
The key is of course, the great apathetic middle. And as long as they can enjoy their current right under the law to tape a copy of Survivor, you won't hear a peep out of them.
The idea of a starving artist or musician who creates for the love of art or music is a lie. Everyone dreams of being famous and profiting from their works.
Where do you get off? I find your sweeping generalizations to be both offensively cynical and incorrect!
Me, too. I've mentioned this before, but as Allen Ginsberg said, artists don't have to make a living from their art and they don't have to create all the time. Shakespear didn't make a living writing, he made one acting. William Carlos Williams was a doctor and a poet and was very happy with that. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive because he realized he wasn't going to make any kind of living in literature, even though he was good. It didn't stop him from writing. Only an idiot starves in a garret somewhere; the rest of us work at what we can find, and often it enriches our art by doing so.
There's already too much information, code, hardware, people, you name it to keep track of. Your average feudal lord didn't have to keep track of a gazillion different people doing a gazillion different things. You don't need Sealand or Grenada to make an Island in the Net; all you really need is relative obscurity and the ability to quickly shut it down and set it up somewhere or somehow else. He makes the mistake of regarding anarchists as these in-your-face kind of people who are out on the streets raising hell, when I bet most of them are just quietly going about their business keeping a low profile. He also makes the mistake of regarding the spooks as these omnipotent, omnipresent gods; the events of 9/11 alone disproves that idea. High profile people like Dimitri and that Finnish kid get the heat while shadowy crackers and sharers continue on, barely being noticed by anyone. We've got a brand new spanking Homeland Sercuity department and a Justice Department that's wanting to wiretap and spy all over the country, but neither of them can stop that kid downloading MP3s or knocking off the corner liquor store. Remember the war on drugs? Last time I checked, drugs were winning.
If one looks at the technology and software that's out there, it can be easy to conclude that there's little real innovation out there. It would seem that we're in a period of small refinements to old hat stuff. But isn't it the social innovation that really makes the internet unique?
Part of the problem with science fiction writers is they tend to write novels where one person single-handedly saves the world or changes it in opposition to some monolithic oppressive entity. I'm afraid Sterling's fallen prey to that - he's looking at the people who want to be big players and what they're doing, while all the time, the bit actors are stealing the show by sheer force of numbers. Yeah, great, the government's going to have a number on everyone and observe everything they do - but how in the hell are they going to keep track of it all? How many words are created on the internet a day and how many people would you need to keep track of them all? People argue about anomynity all the time, but there's a simple truth - if you are one of millions, you are anomynous unless you do something very obvious to draw attention to yourself or get very unlucky.
What he's done here is the equivalent of judging the ocean by what he can see looking down on it. He sees the first few surface feet and meanwhile, 99.99% of the water goes uninspected.
Slashdot Mirror
While I was standing there playing at a (particularly violent) first person shoot-em-up, some kid (maybe 20 years old) pokes me in the back and says "You better watch where ya go when ya get outta here 'cuz I might just wanna shoot ya with my real piece." Great... I've just been threatened with death.
That reminds me of what happened to somebody from my high school. A few years into adulthood, he was driving down a street behind a car that turned into a parking lot without signaling. God only knows why, but he followed the car and got out and started cussing out the driver for doing it. The driver came out of his car, and they argued for a bit until the guy from my high school said, "You'd better leave, or I'll get my gun out of my car and take care of you". He didn't have a gun in his car. He was just trying to scare the guy.
At this point, the other guy took a gun out of his pocket and blew him away.
That kid in Indianapolis may meet a similar end.
Why should your beliefs as a parent dictate to the rest of us what we watch, hear and see, or what our children watch, hear and see? Who are you that your beliefs should take precedence over mine or someone else's? What if the theory of evolution offends you too? Does that mean the state can't teach it to my kid?
You and your kind seem to want a bland homogenous conformist society of plastic people who adhere to the Lowest Common Denominator of Offensiveness while those who won't conform or can't conform are put behind a spite fence. You stand for enforced mediocrity and enslavement of the creators by the censors.
If you don't like the culture that's out there do the creative, alternative thing. Make your own and ally yourself with other creators who believe as you do. Don't expect to make people create what YOU want them to create for you. Quit being so lazy and do your own work.
As a Canadian citizen, I am fully used to taking it up the ass
So, that's what they mean by back bacon.
Is there any way to prevent this little function from working correctly?
1. Pay cash for the drive.
2. Don't register the product. Of course, if they get physical possession of the drive, this won't work, but short of that, it's foolproof.
The US goverment (as all other goverments) is a big layzy beast, which does not move until is poked
Odd how sticks don't work as well for this as dollar bills do.
The lawyers acting for the RIAA, MPAA, etc are only able to do what they do because a certain supposedly democratic institution that sits in the Capitol building in Washington DC has passed suitably bletcherous legislation that allows them to do it.
... Which explains a lot, doesn't it?
You're certainly right, but I've got to point out that most Congresscritters are lawyers
the normal user is (sad to say )a damn soccer mom using aol, shopping at amazon, and logging on to bigbrother.com for 30 bucks a month
Come on. You can't possibly know what the "normal user" does and neither does anyone else, because no one's ever done an in-depth survey of 1000 people or so to see exactly what web pages they were visiting and why. So, 60% of internet time is spent at 14 companies. At least five of those companies have a bewildering array of subjects and content, not to mention links to the other 40%, which could be anywhere. No one, to my knowledge, has actually recorded (on paper, not a log), what these people were looking at - or how long they were looking at it. If I do a web search on Yahoo for Dickens and find David Copperfield and download it, mere web logging is going to show that I spent 50% of my "time" (actually connections) at Yahoo and 50% at Project Gutenberg. But whose content is going to occupy more of my time?
Nice post. I learned something from that. (shudders)
A new archetecture. No, we're just going to keep using the IBM-PC, with its IRQs and other funky crap that was invented in the early 80s and has to be hacked around to get today's computer working at a decent speed. Eventually, someone's going to have to take the plunge and reinvent the computer. Don't hold your breath.
> so many people just recognize it for the commercial side, but not the birth of Jesus Christ. What it originally was for.
What nonsense.
Yes, it ought to be perfectly obvious to anyone that it's to show off how affluent and spendthrift we are and how, at least once a year, we can wallow in material possessions with someone besides ourselves. Those who would claim that it's about a child being born in Bethlehem 2000 years ago are clearly delusional and taking advantage of our yearly celebaration of Mammon to spread dubious religious propaganda. Forget those barbarians - on with the potlatch!
This is a bunch of crap. Speeding does *not* kill people.
Yeah, it's those sudden stops that get you.
Those who are able to arrange things so they are rarely watched.
Copyright didn't exist as a concept in biblical times, so how can there be a biblical prohibition on software copying? It's "thou shalt not steal" not "thou shalt not copy". Weren't the first Christians actively encouraged to copy their books? I wonder how far Christianity would have gone if the scriptures were copyrighted?
These will be hacked easier than other forms of ID.
...
I can just see some "hacker" with an axe cutting off someone's hand to get new ID
Bullshit. Linux-Mandrake [linux-mandrake.com] is amazingly easy to use,
/etc/fstab revealed that it had identified my CDRW as a SCSI drive, not an IDE. I corrected this, and have been doing alright, although I still can't switch CDs when installing groups of programs.
Once you get it installed. I downloaded 8.1 - at the end of installing the files off the first CD, it hung up and refused to do anything else. I solved the problem by informing the install program that I had just one CD, figuring I'd install the other 2 CDs later.
My next problem was the package manager didn't want to install off my regular read CD. I put the CD into my Creative CDRW, and locked up my computer. A quick look at
I guess that wasn't too hard, seeing as I know what I'm doing. But "amazingly easy" for a newbie? No, it's not quite there yet.
Tolkein was no Shakespeare, no Chaucer, no Hemingway, no Faulkner, etc.
... mishmash, baldly told, with little style. Moving on to Spenser, there's no doubt that Spenser's poetic and descriptive gifts are far above Tolkien's - when he's on. A good part of the Fairie Queen, however, is dull and lifeless, and if there's an overall plot to it, it got lost somewhere.
No, he wasn't, but then, few authors are. Tolkien's major relative failings are his prose style, which is servicible and clear, but rarely memorable, and his characterization, which is somewhat flat, without being too cliche'd. His strengths, however, put him among the greats of our century. If anyone has managed to create a complex world with a multi layered, epic mythology and married it seemlessly to a moving and relevant plot, it's escaped my attention. You've compared him to Malory, which is a good start - Malory takes the mishmash of Arturian myth and turns it into a
Moving on to Chretien DeTroyes, again, as far as I can tell in translation, he's a much better stylist, but his organizational skills were lacking. The Eddas and Sagas have a baldness of style that can be appealing but again, don't quite make a coherent whole. I could go on and on, hop, skipping and jumping in and out of the fantasy genre, but I'll save us some trouble by saying that I don't know of anyone in the field who's come up with a world of this kind of depth and integrated it so well into a meaningful story.
As far as the rest of modern literature is concerned, what are we comparing him to? SF novels? - not many can come close to him in that field, either. Mainstream literature? I don't suppose Tolkien had much to say about middle class angst in America or the joys of growing up in the ethnic subculture of the week, which seems to be what the modern novel has devolved into. There are a lot of good novelists around these days, but they have little to say that a lot of other good novelists aren't saying either. There were a lot of good novelists of the last century who aren't being read anymore. I can be fairly certain in 500 years that people will be reading Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner, and to a lesser extent Hemingway. And yes, they'll be reading Tolkien. He's already had an enormous influence on culture - not just in the fantasy genre, but in the concept of creating a fictional world so thoroughly that the reader/viewer has no choice but to be caught up in it totally. He was the one who showed the creators of Star Wars, Star Trek and Dune how it had to be done. Anyone who wants to create a unique place for his characters to interact with depth HAS to study Tolkien and how he did it. He had his weaknesses as a writer, none of them fatal, but in the matter of world-making, he was the master.
Thanks for your post. Good advice; I'll be taking it.
And the only reason it's classified as such is because the non-Asperger's people incorrectly consider themselves 'normal'. What we're seeing here is partly resentment of the way technically minded people have moved from being something of a joke to the people who invent and maintain the modern world.
... She explained that it was a spectrum disorder, meaning that it could range anywhere from being mild, to being like Rainman, to even worse. She described the symptoms - repeating words all the time, running away from people, failing to interact/play with peers, repetitious hand movements, etc. etc. We agreed that she seemed to be having a real problem communicating - she reads at a 1st or 2nd grade level and talks like a 2 year old. She is currently being scheduled for the observations necessary to certify her as being autistic.
... Aspies had trouble socializing with people beginning in childhood. Well, I had, but, you know, the people I went to school with were such jerks anyway ... Apsies had poor communication skills with people, often sounding like "little professors" with odd, grating voices. Well, um, they had called me "Brainiac" in school. Aspies had some narrow, almost compulsive interests, which may stay the same, or change - one described his hobby of looking at maps for hours and hours and then spending more hours drawing maps of imaginary countries and cities. I gulped, remembering that I used to do the same thing. Aspies had few friends from childhood on and people thought they were rude and too direct. Well ... I looked at the screen with tears in my eyes, recognizing myself.
There's something to be said for the neurologically typical (NT) having labelled the rest of the people "weird" or "geeky" or "autistic". I myself believed that my problems in life had been caused by people hating intelligent people or people who were academically successful. For 44 years, I could comfort myself with the thought that most people were locking out the more intelligent of us because they were acting on some kind of stupid animal instinct to oppress the "other". It was a convenient thing to think, as I didn't have to confront the other things going on, such as my underachieving compared to my potential, such as my not having more than one or two real friends at any time in my life, such as feeling like a stranger and an alien in the place I grew up in.
In the last 5 weeks or so, I've gotten the shock of my life.
My daughter is almost six and is currently going to a Preprimary Impaired program. At the first parent teacher conference, the school psychologist asked me if I had ever heard of Autism. I said, yeah, and mentioned Rainman
That was one hell of a shock, to realize that my kid might never have a normal life, or become a self supporting adult. (I think she'll adjust to her condition, but I can't be sure.) I immediately started researching this online and at the library. Temple Grandin's book "Thinking in Pictures" was an excellent account by an autistic woman of how she percieves the world and how she has managed to adjust to it successfully. Donna William's "Nobody, Nowhere", "Somebody, Somewhere" and "Like Color to the Blind" are harrowing and deep accounts of how a woman gradually came to terms with her autism and the world around her. The best web resource is the "Oops, Wrong Planet Syndrome" webpage at http://www.isn.net/~jypsy, which has hundreds of links, including webpages written by those with autism or Asperger's Syndrome.
A week ago Sunday, I was at that page and having recalled that the school psychologist had mentioned Asperger's as another possibility as to what was going on with my daughter, so I decided to follow some links and read what the doctors and the patients had to say about it. As I read, interest turned to discomfort, and discomfort slowly turned to shock.
Asperger's Syndrome sufferers (Aspies) were often highly intelligent. Well, I'm highly intelligent, but
I had Asperger's Syndrome.
Somehow, I'd managed to cope with it, enough to be able to hold a good job and have a family and stay sane. I'd even managed to mellow a little and get along a little better with people, although my general instinct is to avoid people whenever possible; if I want to talk about things with people, I can just go give myself a silly name like "Pyramid Termite" and go online to webboard like Slashdot. That's sort of relating. I guess.
Right now, I'm working up the nerve to talk to a psychologist. I wanted to, anyway, so I could understand my daughter's autism and how to deal with it, but now I need to understand my own.
So, alright, Slashdotters, it might be genetic, or pollution caused, or have something to do with the MMR vaccine. Hell, I don't know. I have some special abilities, but there are people who also have them who aren't on the autistic spectrum. If I'm the future of humanity or a member of the Master Race, let me tell you, I don't feel like it. I feel sad and scared and proud of myself and regretful that no one, least of all me, understood what I was going through until now. I can't tell you what it's like to be a high functioning autistic person because I don't know that for myself yet. It's going to take some time, and meanwhile, I've got to keep working at my job and guide my daughter through her problems.
It's said that 1/3 to 1/2 of Aspies go undiagnosed. If there's a problem in your life with alienation, never having any friends, relating poorly to people, etc., take a good look. Like me, you could have Apserger's or autism and not even know it.
A long time ago, the Orcish race was minding its own business in the mountains, playing with rocks and peacefully eating grubs and scorpions as is our wont. Without even the pretense of giving us beads or a piece of paper called a treaty, first the Dwarves, then the Elves and Men, invaded our caves and forced us out by swordpoint, all for the pretty little rocks they called gold and silver and mithril, none of which we ever cared about. Ever since then, our legitimate claims on our birthright have been ignored, while our people have been forced to stay in the reservations of Moria and Mordor, when once they claimed all of the Misty Mountains as their home. We are branded terrorists and evil by the Wise and their scrolls of wisdom while our true story goes untold. Tolkien, master propagandist for our oppressors, has told several blatant lies about our kind, leading the average LOTR reader to conclude that we were spontaneously generated out of Sauron's refuse heap somehow, and never have such things as women, children and families. He accuses us of senselss massacres and cannabilism, all the while ignoring the genocide and oppression our folk have suffered. The movie compounds the error by making us look green and slimy with mummified eyes, a gross racial stereotyping that would have the NAACP up in arms were it applied to people of color. Don't fall for the Elvish propaganda of Peter Jackson and J.R.R. Tolkien, but discover the truth for yourselves. We, like other 3rd Middle Earth peoples like the Trolls, the Balrogs, the Werewolves (Wargs, indeed - not once do you find in LOTR our Warg comrades being described as anything but howling animals), and the Great Spiders have been maligned by a baseless libel and demand that the record of history be set straight.
Sincerely,
Gorbag,
The Orc Liberation Front
... against yesterday's pirates. Now, when anyone can just use a p2p program to share a program they've ripped, cracked or made an image file out of, why would warez groups follow the old model of distribution at all? Oh, so they can be 3l33t and stuff. Look, except for very expensive programs, all you need is a copy, a skilled cracker or two, and a p2p program and the net will take care of the rest.
By the way, if the feds let all the pirate groups copy their releases and the pirate groups distributed them to all others, how many warez owners are there who've just gotten a little extra from their government this year? Isn't this a lot like if the government grew pot, sold it to 50 people, let the 50 people sell it to all their friends and then got around to busting the 50? Ohh, they got 50 drug dealers! Wow! Meanwhile, a couple of thousand hippies are stumbling around high on government pot.
Makes you wonder how they're fighting the war on terror, doesn't it?
However, if the authorities start locking up everyone that tapes a copy of Survivor, you will hear a mass outcry.
I'd like to think so, but the authorities lock up everyone they catch who has some pot in their possession, potentially half the population at one time or another of their lives, and I haven't heard a mass outcry yet. The brutal truth is there's about 10 to 20% of the electorate who wants the government to oppress those they feel are freaks and corruptors of what they feel is "Americanism", whether it be hippies, atheists, druggies, hackers, or whatever. When some of the voters protest a cruel law being overenforced, they are offset by the ones who would gladly see a strongman government elected to crush everyone's liberties but those of "right thinking people".
The key is of course, the great apathetic middle. And as long as they can enjoy their current right under the law to tape a copy of Survivor, you won't hear a peep out of them.
How are you going to watch porn without the paper burning up?
The idea of a starving artist or musician who creates for the love of art or music is a lie. Everyone dreams of being famous and profiting from their works.
Where do you get off? I find your sweeping generalizations to be both offensively cynical and incorrect!
Me, too. I've mentioned this before, but as Allen Ginsberg said, artists don't have to make a living from their art and they don't have to create all the time. Shakespear didn't make a living writing, he made one acting. William Carlos Williams was a doctor and a poet and was very happy with that. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive because he realized he wasn't going to make any kind of living in literature, even though he was good. It didn't stop him from writing. Only an idiot starves in a garret somewhere; the rest of us work at what we can find, and often it enriches our art by doing so.
KPMG Morale and Puffery Manager - Alright, guys, that sounds really positive and great, we'll send you the check in the mail.
...
...
...
(leaves, whistling that godawful song)
Producer - Man, I'm glad that's over.
Studio musicians - Yeah, man. Dig it. Lame gig.
Studio owner - I've been listening to these backwards
Producer - Well, I
Studio owner - You've got Price Waterhouse's human resources department's number backward masked on the first verse. I hope they don't find out
Producer - I couldn't resist. Hours and hours of listening to that damn song! I'm only human, damn it!
There's already too much information, code, hardware, people, you name it to keep track of. Your average feudal lord didn't have to keep track of a gazillion different people doing a gazillion different things. You don't need Sealand or Grenada to make an Island in the Net; all you really need is relative obscurity and the ability to quickly shut it down and set it up somewhere or somehow else. He makes the mistake of regarding anarchists as these in-your-face kind of people who are out on the streets raising hell, when I bet most of them are just quietly going about their business keeping a low profile. He also makes the mistake of regarding the spooks as these omnipotent, omnipresent gods; the events of 9/11 alone disproves that idea. High profile people like Dimitri and that Finnish kid get the heat while shadowy crackers and sharers continue on, barely being noticed by anyone. We've got a brand new spanking Homeland Sercuity department and a Justice Department that's wanting to wiretap and spy all over the country, but neither of them can stop that kid downloading MP3s or knocking off the corner liquor store. Remember the war on drugs? Last time I checked, drugs were winning.
If one looks at the technology and software that's out there, it can be easy to conclude that there's little real innovation out there. It would seem that we're in a period of small refinements to old hat stuff. But isn't it the social innovation that really makes the internet unique?
Part of the problem with science fiction writers is they tend to write novels where one person single-handedly saves the world or changes it in opposition to some monolithic oppressive entity. I'm afraid Sterling's fallen prey to that - he's looking at the people who want to be big players and what they're doing, while all the time, the bit actors are stealing the show by sheer force of numbers. Yeah, great, the government's going to have a number on everyone and observe everything they do - but how in the hell are they going to keep track of it all? How many words are created on the internet a day and how many people would you need to keep track of them all? People argue about anomynity all the time, but there's a simple truth - if you are one of millions, you are anomynous unless you do something very obvious to draw attention to yourself or get very unlucky.
What he's done here is the equivalent of judging the ocean by what he can see looking down on it. He sees the first few surface feet and meanwhile, 99.99% of the water goes uninspected.