Sure but that just flies in the face of reality. I was trying to stick with the previous observation that people cover a wide range with many being well below average, but thinking they are above. This could be if the previously-calculated average didn't take into account one really sucky person.
That's a lot more likely than everyone being identical, except for one person.:)
One other thing that should be remembered is that the ISS was partly an experiment in how to construct stuff from multiple modules to be assembled in space. The lesson learned was basically: don't do it. Skylab had approximately the same capabilities as the ISS, maybe a bit less power available, and fewer docking ports, but it was built, launched and operated on a total cost of less than a fourtieth of the cost of the ISS. If you've got the right launch vehicle, a space station does not have to be hugely expensive.
Or at least, "Don't do it with the Space Shuttle". Because lest we forget the ISS was also partly an experiment in justifying the Shuttle's existence.
Also I'd like to think the point of an experiment in in-orbit construction is not that it should be cheap right off the bat, because you're learning how to do it, and future construction could be cheaper especially if developed as a general capability. At the very least, it's the only way to go beyond what we've done before. We're not going to get anything much bigger than Skylab if we have to lift it in one shot.
It's orders of magnitude more expensive to put something into lunar transfer than into LEO, and the ISS is at the lower edge of LEO
That's only true if you're comparing a trip from the earth surface to LEO, to a trip from earth surface to lunar orbit. And then the reason why it's exponentially more expensive is because everything you're planning on sending from LEO to the moon also has to be lifted to LEO, and whatever you're using to lift that has to be lifted, etc.
That's why the Saturn-V had to be so huge while the return vessel could be so small -- the return vessel got to do the LEO to earth surface transition for "free".
But if you're going to lunar transfer from LEO, then you're already most of the way there! In fact, once you're in LEO, then you're almost halfway to Mars. And I don't mean Mars orbit; I meant the surface.
From Ye Olde WP, Delta-v for: Earth surface to LEO: 9.3-10 km/s Delta-v for LEO to LL(unar)O: 4.8 Delta-v for LEO to LM(ars)O: 6.1 Delta-v for LMO to Mars surface: 4.1
This is why Saturn-V, Constellation, and other ultra-heavy lift vehicles intended to be used to lift things from earth to some destination beyond LEO make no sense -- for the future, that is. It made sense for Apollo because they didn't want to spend the time developing infrastructure in LEO for a two-step mission.
But that's what we should be doing. When we think of going anywhere beyond high earth orbit, we should be thinking of it as two distinct steps: Earth to LEO, and the LEO to the rest of the solar system. If you can use cheap and efficient commercial lift vehicles to launch pieces of the inter-planetary mission into LEO, assemble and refuel it there, then you can have vastly expanded missions at vastly reduced prices.
That's part of what NASA's new plan involves, if it survives Congress. And it sounds like the Russians are planning to do this with their parts of the ISS.
Of course this still doesn't mean it's necessarily economical to boost the ISS to Lunar orbit...:)
The station is not going to be scrapped entirely. This new Russian module being installed later this year, and a few others, will be detached from the ISS before the ISS gets scuttled, and will be used as the basis of a new space station called the OPSEK. It is to be the first orbital dockyard in support of extra-planetary missions, where deep space craft will be sent up in individual modules, and then assembled on site, rather than being sent up in one big shot.
Oh fuck yes. Awesome. I pray that they follow through and build it. Then even if the U.S. scraps its plans for developing in-orbit assembly of vehicles, at least someone will be taking the next logical step in expanding the reach of mankind.
Lifting everything needed for a mission all at once is simply a dead-end. The exponential growth of the rocket as payload size increases puts serious practical limits on missions depending on this strategy. To the point where even remotely-feasible-in-the-future Mars mission plans would have to be either boots-and-flag mission or a one-way trip for the astronauts involved. An argument for either could be made, but why when we can just remove the fundamental restriction that makes these our choices?
OPSEK looks awesome. I hope NASA is allowed to develop its plans too. But with the JWST on the chopping block and the dead-end Pork Rocket still funded, I'm not exactly hopeful.:(
It's called the 'above average effect'. Everyone thinks they are above average, which statistically speaking can't be true....
It could be true that everyone was above average except one person who is so bad it drags the average below the level of everyone else. They would have to really suck though.:)
True but only after the headline claiming "tantalizing evidence" (which is wrong - we have no evidence yet)
Nonsense! The data they've collected already is evidence! It's just not sufficient evidence to satisfy the agreed-upon heuristic standard for drawing a positive conclusion. Evidence that doesn't meet that standard is still evidence. If and when they do have enough evidence to meet the standard, that won't change the findings in the article from not-evidence to evidence. It's evidence today! Just not enough. We want our evidence to be exceedingly unlikely to have been simply random chance, whereas the evidence accumulated so far makes it merely unlikely (~8%).
So it's not sufficient, but it is evidence, and good enough evidence to be tantalizing but again not conclusive.
The article could have explained more about the statistical meaning of the data. Yet nothing they said was in error, or misleading. Your assumptions on what constitutes "evidence" are what is wrong, and thus so are your insinuations about Nature's competence.
Atheism is a philosophy. You're not an atheist if you've just never considered the question of where the universe comes from, especially if this is due to lacking the abstract thinking capability necessary to ask the question. Your chair is not atheist, and neither is your cat.
I'd say it's an open question whether Atheism or something like it was present in early humans. Certainly evidence of religious practices date back a very long time and seem ubiquitous among ancient cultures. It's quite possible that of those humans or human progenitors that were first able to seriously ponder the mystery of Life, the Universe, and Everything, that few or none concluded that there was no higher power behind it all. It's possible that in the scale of the history of the human species (much more so the universe), Atheism is a new idea.
iphones still cannot do basic smartphone stuff like run arbitrary code. its you who is non-technical, if you think iphone is a smartphone. iphone is a dumb phone designed for idiots who wanna look cool.
While I personally believe that taking into account licensing and other non-technical usage issues is vital when considering whether a piece of technology works for your purposes, actually conflating the technical and non-technical aspects is a step too far.
So I'm totally on board with hating on the App Store and Apple's control over the platform, and as a technical person that's exactly why I wouldn't buy an iPhone. Yet at the same time it is clearly a smartphone, can clearly run arbitrary code, and can clearly do a lot more than just voice, text and the web. That the arbitrary code must also be approved is a serious limitation imposed by Apple. Sucks, but doesn't make a smartphone not-a-smartphone.
The use of the future conditional indicates full awareness that said chickens are merely hypothetical, and development from the egg stage not guaranteed, and thus any possible egg-basket-spilling dances of joy are premature.
That's what is confusing to me, who are these people who even bother to think or make up theories about "What if you could catch the carrot" once we have proven time and time again that its impossible within the scope of the laws of this universe.
Imagining what would happen if you could catch the carrot is how we concluded that it is impossible in the first place. The only reason FTL is considered impossible is because according to Special Relativity, FTL implies causality violation.
Sure the relativistic kinetic energy equation says you could never accelerate a conventional space craft to c, much less beyond. But what about something more clever, like a Warp Drive? That and every other method of going faster than light runs into the causality problem.
Trying to figure out if every method of attaining FTL is impossible is much less productive than determining that FTL as a concept is impossible if our other assumptions (constancy of c for all observers, and causality) are true.
First off, why does anything travelling faster _have_ to go back in time?
An effect cannot happen before its cause. That's understandable. However, just exceeding a certain velocity will not cause time to roll back. Or for that matter, to slow down. Ones _perception_ of time might be altered, but time itself does not change. It's all relative.
Time is relative, yes. Not just in how our minds perceive it, but measurably different for different reference frames in accordance with Relativity. This means different observers can see events occur in a different order, and there is no universal ordering because not everyone can agree on it.
They can however agree that Cause A occurs before Effect B. This is causality. And because in Relativity there is no preferred reference frame, all observers must agree that Cause A occurred before Effect B in order for causality to be maintained.
Now suppose you can send information faster than c, and alert the Nations of Earth that the Vogons are coming to destroy earth and make way for an interstellar expressway, or worse, to read poetry at us. From some observer's point of view, the recipients of the message on earth will have shat their pants before the message was sent. That observer will see causality violated, and remember it has to hold everywhere.
Also, given this ability to send superluminal information, it is pretty trivial to construct situations in which every observer would agree that causality was violated. Given two space ships with the ability to communicate faster than c, you can set up a relay where you send a message to them, and they send it back, and you receive the response before you even sent it!
This is the "time travel" case. It's limited by how fast the ships can go and how long they've been traveling, and just how super-luminal your message-sending is... You can't send the message back to the year 3000 BC for example So "time travel" might give the wrong idea; let's just stick with "causality violation".
Nethack has a finite number of levels of finite size, and the total is well below what you'd need to run Linux in stones on the ground or whatever other form of 'computer' you wanted to make. So sorry, Nethack does not run Linux.
Exactly. Real Research does not come with a guarantee of a payoff. You may have worked in R&D devisions, but they do not do Bell Labs, Xerox PARC levels of research. These days only short term payoff kinds of research are done privately. Thanks for proving the GPs point for him.
Bell Labs doesn't do Bell Labs levels of research anymore.:(
There are still some companies investing in basic research, but even they have shifted most of it over to application-driven research with clearer near-term benefit.
Yeah, by the time the transistor was invented the application was obvious. That was in the late 1940s. The people laying the groundwork and doing basic research in Quantum Mechanics in the 1900s and 1910s had no clue that their research would lead to the transistor's invention.
Today, we have no idea if in fifty years someone will invent a "Higgsistor", if it's possible or what it would do, and what it could be used for. Probably whoever actually invents it will know these things.
And then someone will say, when talking about how the next piece of pure research could have unknown benefits, "Well when the Higgsistor was invented, they knew what the applications were already. I doubt this new thing would have any new applications since they aren't obvious to us now."
As far as practical applications, nobody knows what it could mean. It could be 100 years before your grandkids are using a device every day that depends on what we learned about the Higgs, without even knowing or caring that this is so.
For instance, nobody working on Quantum Mechanics early last century would have had any clue whatsoever that this would enable the computer revolution. But without that basic research, there wouldn't be a computer on your desk right now.
They didn't say they found the Higgs and acknowledged there wasn't enough data for it to be conclusive. However at the reaction rates at the LHC they should have enough data within months to confirm -- one way or another -- whether the Higgs exists. Some of the first data in that set shows events in the right range. Tantalizing, exciting, and thus newsworthy, but not a conclusion. This is what the article says, and it's all correct.
So I'm questioning your questioning of the Nature editors and this "ignorance of science" you attribute to them.
It isn't screwy instrumentation or glitches, it isn't a discovery, it isn't an exclusion, it isn't a bird or a plane or superman, it's just a result that is not yet conclusive.
Yes, which is exactly what Nature is reporting. They aren't reporting a result, they're reporting the news that a signal has been seen that fits in the Higgs range. If in the coming months they see more of the same enough to rule out random chance, then what they're reporting today will be in the set of data via which we found the Higgs.
This is news for anyone interested in the search -- in as much as people are interested in the progress of science, not just its conclusions. This isn't conclusive, but it is tantalizing, as the article and several physicists quoted in it state.
So I don't see what the problem is.
Who cares if someone says "Yeah right, I've heard the boy who cried wolf before, even though I never payed enough attention to notice they weren't actually crying wolf so am clearly not all that interested in anything but being a contrary douche." Why are we catering our science reporting to these people?
Yeah, I'm well aware that plenty of people dismissed the internet just prior to it exploding (in their faces). In Microsoft's case they didn't so much predict the Internet would go nowhere as hope it would go nowhere. Bill Gates saying the Internet is just a fad was as much the prediction of a futurist as a sports team captain predicting that their team will win -- they're "predicting" a future they hope to directly bring about.
But go figure a guy writing a Neuromancer-style cyberpunk novel wouldn't go the rout of predicting the failure of the internet.:P
As far as predicting a decentralized Internet comprised of various privately-owned and operated networks interconnected with no central authority, that was already reality as of the late 80s when the government networks were made open. Which he surely knew from his research. As much as there was a central authority in the form of IANA, there still is today in the form of ICANN. It's a corporation now, instead of a government agency, so I guess that's a little closer.
So, again, mad props for the book itself -- which I don't consider a bonus but the whole point itself, anything else on top of that is the bonus -- but I'm not going to credit him for "predicting" things that were already reality. I'll give him some credit for predicting the success of the Internet though not much because it's only a few years before it became obvious, and unlike with idiot technology "analysts" I doubt this was an uncommon prediction among cyberpunk authors, cus you know half the premises kinda require it.
Just in general, it's much more impressive when, say, George Orwell predicts something very vaguely like personal computers and the Internet in the 40s, than when someone in the 90s predicts something that's much closer to the actual Internet because the Internet already exists.:P
Slashdot Mirror
Sure but that just flies in the face of reality. I was trying to stick with the previous observation that people cover a wide range with many being well below average, but thinking they are above. This could be if the previously-calculated average didn't take into account one really sucky person.
That's a lot more likely than everyone being identical, except for one person. :)
One other thing that should be remembered is that the ISS was partly an experiment in how to construct stuff from multiple modules to be assembled in space. The lesson learned was basically: don't do it. Skylab had approximately the same capabilities as the ISS, maybe a bit less power available, and fewer docking ports, but it was built, launched and operated on a total cost of less than a fourtieth of the cost of the ISS. If you've got the right launch vehicle, a space station does not have to be hugely expensive.
Or at least, "Don't do it with the Space Shuttle". Because lest we forget the ISS was also partly an experiment in justifying the Shuttle's existence.
Also I'd like to think the point of an experiment in in-orbit construction is not that it should be cheap right off the bat, because you're learning how to do it, and future construction could be cheaper especially if developed as a general capability. At the very least, it's the only way to go beyond what we've done before. We're not going to get anything much bigger than Skylab if we have to lift it in one shot.
It's orders of magnitude more expensive to put something into lunar transfer than into LEO, and the ISS is at the lower edge of LEO
That's only true if you're comparing a trip from the earth surface to LEO, to a trip from earth surface to lunar orbit. And then the reason why it's exponentially more expensive is because everything you're planning on sending from LEO to the moon also has to be lifted to LEO, and whatever you're using to lift that has to be lifted, etc.
That's why the Saturn-V had to be so huge while the return vessel could be so small -- the return vessel got to do the LEO to earth surface transition for "free".
But if you're going to lunar transfer from LEO, then you're already most of the way there! In fact, once you're in LEO, then you're almost halfway to Mars. And I don't mean Mars orbit; I meant the surface.
From Ye Olde WP, Delta-v for:
Earth surface to LEO: 9.3-10 km/s
Delta-v for LEO to LL(unar)O: 4.8
Delta-v for LEO to LM(ars)O: 6.1
Delta-v for LMO to Mars surface: 4.1
This is why Saturn-V, Constellation, and other ultra-heavy lift vehicles intended to be used to lift things from earth to some destination beyond LEO make no sense -- for the future, that is. It made sense for Apollo because they didn't want to spend the time developing infrastructure in LEO for a two-step mission.
But that's what we should be doing. When we think of going anywhere beyond high earth orbit, we should be thinking of it as two distinct steps: Earth to LEO, and the LEO to the rest of the solar system. If you can use cheap and efficient commercial lift vehicles to launch pieces of the inter-planetary mission into LEO, assemble and refuel it there, then you can have vastly expanded missions at vastly reduced prices.
That's part of what NASA's new plan involves, if it survives Congress. And it sounds like the Russians are planning to do this with their parts of the ISS.
Of course this still doesn't mean it's necessarily economical to boost the ISS to Lunar orbit... :)
The station is not going to be scrapped entirely. This new Russian module being installed later this year, and a few others, will be detached from the ISS before the ISS gets scuttled, and will be used as the basis of a new space station called the OPSEK. It is to be the first orbital dockyard in support of extra-planetary missions, where deep space craft will be sent up in individual modules, and then assembled on site, rather than being sent up in one big shot.
Oh fuck yes. Awesome. I pray that they follow through and build it. Then even if the U.S. scraps its plans for developing in-orbit assembly of vehicles, at least someone will be taking the next logical step in expanding the reach of mankind.
Lifting everything needed for a mission all at once is simply a dead-end. The exponential growth of the rocket as payload size increases puts serious practical limits on missions depending on this strategy. To the point where even remotely-feasible-in-the-future Mars mission plans would have to be either boots-and-flag mission or a one-way trip for the astronauts involved. An argument for either could be made, but why when we can just remove the fundamental restriction that makes these our choices?
OPSEK looks awesome. I hope NASA is allowed to develop its plans too. But with the JWST on the chopping block and the dead-end Pork Rocket still funded, I'm not exactly hopeful. :(
The irony is that for many of us the thing we most need protecting from is the USA...
And we'll protect you from that, too, for a reasonable price. ;)
It's called the 'above average effect'. Everyone thinks they are above average, which statistically speaking can't be true....
It could be true that everyone was above average except one person who is so bad it drags the average below the level of everyone else. They would have to really suck though. :)
True but only after the headline claiming "tantalizing evidence" (which is wrong - we have no evidence yet)
Nonsense! The data they've collected already is evidence! It's just not sufficient evidence to satisfy the agreed-upon heuristic standard for drawing a positive conclusion. Evidence that doesn't meet that standard is still evidence. If and when they do have enough evidence to meet the standard, that won't change the findings in the article from not-evidence to evidence. It's evidence today! Just not enough. We want our evidence to be exceedingly unlikely to have been simply random chance, whereas the evidence accumulated so far makes it merely unlikely (~8%).
So it's not sufficient, but it is evidence, and good enough evidence to be tantalizing but again not conclusive.
The article could have explained more about the statistical meaning of the data. Yet nothing they said was in error, or misleading. Your assumptions on what constitutes "evidence" are what is wrong, and thus so are your insinuations about Nature's competence.
Heh. Good one.
Ha! But based on news of hacking break-ins at various agencies, it seems that the citizens instead "pwn" the government these days. :)
Atheism is a philosophy. You're not an atheist if you've just never considered the question of where the universe comes from, especially if this is due to lacking the abstract thinking capability necessary to ask the question. Your chair is not atheist, and neither is your cat.
I'd say it's an open question whether Atheism or something like it was present in early humans. Certainly evidence of religious practices date back a very long time and seem ubiquitous among ancient cultures. It's quite possible that of those humans or human progenitors that were first able to seriously ponder the mystery of Life, the Universe, and Everything, that few or none concluded that there was no higher power behind it all. It's possible that in the scale of the history of the human species (much more so the universe), Atheism is a new idea.
iphones still cannot do basic smartphone stuff like run arbitrary code. its you who is non-technical, if you think iphone is a smartphone. iphone is a dumb phone designed for idiots who wanna look cool.
While I personally believe that taking into account licensing and other non-technical usage issues is vital when considering whether a piece of technology works for your purposes, actually conflating the technical and non-technical aspects is a step too far.
So I'm totally on board with hating on the App Store and Apple's control over the platform, and as a technical person that's exactly why I wouldn't buy an iPhone. Yet at the same time it is clearly a smartphone, can clearly run arbitrary code, and can clearly do a lot more than just voice, text and the web. That the arbitrary code must also be approved is a serious limitation imposed by Apple. Sucks, but doesn't make a smartphone not-a-smartphone.
WOULD, not WILL.
The use of the future conditional indicates full awareness that said chickens are merely hypothetical, and development from the egg stage not guaranteed, and thus any possible egg-basket-spilling dances of joy are premature.
So, no.
Well technically your mind can be at an imaginary sun created within your mind, which while wonderful, is cheating for purposes of this experiment. :)
That's what is confusing to me, who are these people who even bother to think or make up theories about "What if you could catch the carrot" once we have proven time and time again that its impossible within the scope of the laws of this universe.
Imagining what would happen if you could catch the carrot is how we concluded that it is impossible in the first place. The only reason FTL is considered impossible is because according to Special Relativity, FTL implies causality violation.
Sure the relativistic kinetic energy equation says you could never accelerate a conventional space craft to c, much less beyond. But what about something more clever, like a Warp Drive? That and every other method of going faster than light runs into the causality problem.
Trying to figure out if every method of attaining FTL is impossible is much less productive than determining that FTL as a concept is impossible if our other assumptions (constancy of c for all observers, and causality) are true.
First off, why does anything travelling faster _have_ to go back in time?
An effect cannot happen before its cause. That's understandable. However, just exceeding a certain velocity will not cause time to roll back. Or for that matter, to slow down. Ones _perception_ of time might be altered, but time itself does not change. It's all relative.
Time is relative, yes. Not just in how our minds perceive it, but measurably different for different reference frames in accordance with Relativity. This means different observers can see events occur in a different order, and there is no universal ordering because not everyone can agree on it.
They can however agree that Cause A occurs before Effect B. This is causality. And because in Relativity there is no preferred reference frame, all observers must agree that Cause A occurred before Effect B in order for causality to be maintained.
Now suppose you can send information faster than c, and alert the Nations of Earth that the Vogons are coming to destroy earth and make way for an interstellar expressway, or worse, to read poetry at us. From some observer's point of view, the recipients of the message on earth will have shat their pants before the message was sent. That observer will see causality violated, and remember it has to hold everywhere.
Also, given this ability to send superluminal information, it is pretty trivial to construct situations in which every observer would agree that causality was violated. Given two space ships with the ability to communicate faster than c, you can set up a relay where you send a message to them, and they send it back, and you receive the response before you even sent it!
This is the "time travel" case. It's limited by how fast the ships can go and how long they've been traveling, and just how super-luminal your message-sending is... You can't send the message back to the year 3000 BC for example So "time travel" might give the wrong idea; let's just stick with "causality violation".
Nethack has a finite number of levels of finite size, and the total is well below what you'd need to run Linux in stones on the ground or whatever other form of 'computer' you wanted to make. So sorry, Nethack does not run Linux.
Yeah, but then you re-unify them and you get the electromagnoelectroweak force.
Exactly. Real Research does not come with a guarantee of a payoff. You may have worked in R&D devisions, but they do not do Bell Labs, Xerox PARC levels of research. These days only short term payoff kinds of research are done privately. Thanks for proving the GPs point for him.
Bell Labs doesn't do Bell Labs levels of research anymore. :(
There are still some companies investing in basic research, but even they have shifted most of it over to application-driven research with clearer near-term benefit.
Yeah, by the time the transistor was invented the application was obvious. That was in the late 1940s. The people laying the groundwork and doing basic research in Quantum Mechanics in the 1900s and 1910s had no clue that their research would lead to the transistor's invention.
Today, we have no idea if in fifty years someone will invent a "Higgsistor", if it's possible or what it would do, and what it could be used for. Probably whoever actually invents it will know these things.
And then someone will say, when talking about how the next piece of pure research could have unknown benefits, "Well when the Higgsistor was invented, they knew what the applications were already. I doubt this new thing would have any new applications since they aren't obvious to us now."
It could have been a very small black hole.
Wait, were we talking about the LHC, or asking what floats on water besides wood?
If not, what's to be gained from the discovery?
As far as practical applications, nobody knows what it could mean. It could be 100 years before your grandkids are using a device every day that depends on what we learned about the Higgs, without even knowing or caring that this is so.
For instance, nobody working on Quantum Mechanics early last century would have had any clue whatsoever that this would enable the computer revolution. But without that basic research, there wouldn't be a computer on your desk right now.
They didn't say they found the Higgs and acknowledged there wasn't enough data for it to be conclusive. However at the reaction rates at the LHC they should have enough data within months to confirm -- one way or another -- whether the Higgs exists. Some of the first data in that set shows events in the right range. Tantalizing, exciting, and thus newsworthy, but not a conclusion. This is what the article says, and it's all correct.
So I'm questioning your questioning of the Nature editors and this "ignorance of science" you attribute to them.
It isn't screwy instrumentation or glitches, it isn't a discovery, it isn't an exclusion, it isn't a bird or a plane or superman, it's just a result that is not yet conclusive.
Yes, which is exactly what Nature is reporting. They aren't reporting a result, they're reporting the news that a signal has been seen that fits in the Higgs range. If in the coming months they see more of the same enough to rule out random chance, then what they're reporting today will be in the set of data via which we found the Higgs.
This is news for anyone interested in the search -- in as much as people are interested in the progress of science, not just its conclusions. This isn't conclusive, but it is tantalizing, as the article and several physicists quoted in it state.
So I don't see what the problem is.
Who cares if someone says "Yeah right, I've heard the boy who cried wolf before, even though I never payed enough attention to notice they weren't actually crying wolf so am clearly not all that interested in anything but being a contrary douche." Why are we catering our science reporting to these people?
Yeah, I'm well aware that plenty of people dismissed the internet just prior to it exploding (in their faces). In Microsoft's case they didn't so much predict the Internet would go nowhere as hope it would go nowhere. Bill Gates saying the Internet is just a fad was as much the prediction of a futurist as a sports team captain predicting that their team will win -- they're "predicting" a future they hope to directly bring about.
But go figure a guy writing a Neuromancer-style cyberpunk novel wouldn't go the rout of predicting the failure of the internet. :P
As far as predicting a decentralized Internet comprised of various privately-owned and operated networks interconnected with no central authority, that was already reality as of the late 80s when the government networks were made open. Which he surely knew from his research. As much as there was a central authority in the form of IANA, there still is today in the form of ICANN. It's a corporation now, instead of a government agency, so I guess that's a little closer.
So, again, mad props for the book itself -- which I don't consider a bonus but the whole point itself, anything else on top of that is the bonus -- but I'm not going to credit him for "predicting" things that were already reality. I'll give him some credit for predicting the success of the Internet though not much because it's only a few years before it became obvious, and unlike with idiot technology "analysts" I doubt this was an uncommon prediction among cyberpunk authors, cus you know half the premises kinda require it.
Just in general, it's much more impressive when, say, George Orwell predicts something very vaguely like personal computers and the Internet in the 40s, than when someone in the 90s predicts something that's much closer to the actual Internet because the Internet already exists. :P
The music game genre is not dead, it's just dead for Activision.
Damn straight, now where's my Parappa the Rapper 3 through 17?!