I hope the habit of latrine jokes doesn't become too entrenched.
My bit done. Thanks for making this easy, Marilee. And thanks for making Marilee's innate honesty evident to any who would question it, Michael!
We are all neglecting her most important qualification: winning the "Miss Congeniality" title in the Miss Alaska contest. So, um, she's used to losing.
Brooks Moses@14: I think that was my comment.
At some point in thinking about what might have happened I tentatively concluded that the satellite counting systems were uploading vote tallies over some kind of network link and probably running a complex OS ("...uploaded to shared servers."). That might be close enough for government work if the network were private (or virtually private), but not otherwise.
In general, I'd think that any software system which included a TCP/IP stack would be suboptimal w.r.t. efficient and accurate audits. Allowing random systems to throw traffic at such a system would take it from "suboptimal" to "fully pessimized."
"The reason your quarterly financial statements were wrong is that you were running antivirus software while collecting the spreadsheets from your regional accounting managers."
Why would antivirus software interfere with loading data, or why would voting machine data uploads include executable code?
I don't think that the timing of turning off the antivirus software is particularly significant: clearly malware could be introduced at any point in the computer's operating history and set to lurk until the appointed moment, then spung into action.
The notion that this computer system is ever exposed to live, unfiltered interactions with the world at large (which is the only reason one would need antivirus software running on it) is truly frightening.
I would not be at all surprised to discover that the procurement rules required that all these systems run Commercial, Off The Shelf (COTS) software, or even that the requirements were such that some variant of MS Windows was required. Even given all that, though, there is no good reason why the central tabulator should ever have to process input from systems other than its satellites.
Hey, Mark Wise:
Your second sentence irks me. While a donation jar at a convention party is not unheard-of, at a publisher's party it would be a once-in-a-career spectacle.
Asking people who know you to help schlep some party supplies at a worldcon is a completely different kettle of fans from asking for money from party guests. Your comment unfortunately juxtaposes a jest with a minor insult.
Some Making Light commenters will cetalogical limit on fish jokes at the point of dolphins and whales; others find the difference hard to keep in their mammaries, the boobs.
The former are more fun, since the depths the latter'll line up at lead to japes with no real porpoise. They're apt to blubber that you've Mysticeti fish jokes that were not about fish in the anal finalysis.
Whale, am I Right? Am I Blue? Should I just Bowhead and slink Minkely from the stage?
My apologies if this comment starts a fight by being needlessly Belugarant. Making people mad would leave me Baleen my eyes out.
Small numbers of fish puns are funny, but they don't scale well.
I'd try to put that more tactfully, but you're all experienced enough that I shouldn't need to caudal you.
Truly sad news. I did not get to know Robert well; I found that his prickliness and my insecurity were not a good match. I liked and admired him based on his public writing and speech, and had hoped that I might eventually get to know him, and that getting to know him would be worth persisting at. Now that the chance is gone, I wish I'd started in on persisting at it some time ago.
My condolences to those of you who will miss him more to the degree that they knew him better.
Yeago (595) and Kristen (584; Sorry I got your name wrong):
Yes, I admit that I lost track of the point about the Nebula award status of the writers listed, but please note that I encountered the essay from Kristen for the first time in the context of a more general Doctorow-bashing.
In the larger picture this error would only change my point if one of us did some research and found out what fraction of Doctorow's work was nominated for or won Nebula awards (or any other awards for which all nine authors were qualified) at similar points in their careers and found Doctorow to significantly lead or trail the others. I suspect that both Asimov and Herbert would ring in no nominations at all because the awards available now weren't yet being given out at this point in their careers; Stephenson might not have been writing genre fiction, so even if he had been nominated for a Nebula, he likely wouldn't have received it. I'm too ignorant of the award-related aspects of the careers of the other writers to even guess whether or not knowing something about such things would make me want to change what I've written in that regard.
Unless the other authors were comparable with Doctorow in terms of this "Nebula metric," it still seems to me that comparing him with them in this way is a faulty approach.
Also, I agree to some extent with Kirsten that judging the quality of a work by its status with regard to award nomination or even award awarding is at best a flawed approach. Many of the sf genre awards are particularly problematic because the judging body changes in composition between years, so it's not even possible to develop a reliable "feel" for how well the awards will agree with one's own tastes.
I'd go along with a number of other folks writing here and note that I go back and sample the works of a writer I didn't care for from time to time, and I'm particularly likely to try a writer whose work I didn't like again if people whose tastes I've been able to calibrate against my own do or don't recommend a particular work (whether thumbs up or thumbs down will make me try again would of course depend on the results of the calibration process). Their writing changes and my tastes change.
Based on my experience reading Overclocked, if you didn't like Doctorow's writing because of issues with the way he writes his characters and because his purpose seems more political than literary, it's not time to try his work again, yet.
Xopher 554: Yes, it was purposeful. I thought of noting that in a reversal of history, the earlier text was more Moronic, but didn't want to be seen as heavy-handed.
I find it uninteresting that neither "Kirsten" nor "Yeago" has laid claim to any history of professional publication, since neither seems to be able to write coherently, let alone with even a half measure of wit.
I find it interesting that they would hold up that list of writers as exemplary figures against whose measure Cory Doctorow seems, to their minds, small. Doctorow is at a fairly early point in his career as a science fiction writer, not too far from the point in Asimov's career when his published work was bad enough to make even the Good Doctor I's ego blush when he republished it after achieving fame.
Orson Scott Card's early short fiction in Omni was truly nasty work, too -- the story which springs to mind featured fetuses rising from a toilet and fastening lamprey-like on the Evial main character, if memory serves. And the first published version of Card's Hot Sleep: The Worthing Chronicles had enough problems that Card did not allow it to be reprinted, instead overhauling the work for reissue. For that matter, I think even A Planet Called Treason caused the latter-day author to go for a rewrite before a reissue.
Then there's Stephenson, whose The Cobweb and The Big U (and the presidential election one with the title that's slipping my mind) were not Great Novels. Snowcrash was definitely not up to the standards of his later work, and while Zodiac was fun, Stephenson was clearly still developing as an author.
Early Frank Herbert I don't recall much about, but like many professional sf writers he produced a significant amount of hack work, as one had to do to keep food on the table and a roof over one's head as a professional writer.
Niven perhaps didn't have to push to get work at that level sold and perhaps there's less of it in evidence, but he didn't spring full grown and armored from the forehead of past Grand Masters of the genre. Some of you may recall learning that Niven had published a story where the Earth was rotating in the wrong direction or seen the mimeographed pages which described how he had not noticed the instability of the Ringworld.
Bill Gibson of course did very well, and the fix-up that Terry Carr got out of him and published as Neuromancer set his feet on the path of fame. He's always been a hugely talented writer, but a careful reader might find some inspirations from Robert F. Stone in Gibson's fiction. I wouldn't want to praise Gibson for, what was it, Dogfight (?) more than I'd give Doctorow credit for After the Siege.
I recently wrote some comments on the stories in Overclocked, and frankly I didn't particularly enjoy I, Robot, for example. Doctorow is not the best writer of polemic, and sometimes does seem to lose the beauty of the story in the process of making the plot conform to his political beliefs. But relative to the writers to whom he was compared in that list of six, he's still starting out. Doctorow has years to go before he reaches the mature peak of an Asimov, Card, or Herbert, and still more years after that before his career has been as long as those writers' were when they jumped the shark.
What I find interesting, in contrast to the lack of claim for professional writing credentials or ambitions on the part of these two sad sacks of bits, Kirsten and Yeago, is that while apparently in early in their third decades of life they don't see that Doctorow could still be on his way to his own zenith, that they don't see that he has some brilliant stories as well as the thousand natural schlocks that flesh is heir to.
Gabriele Campbell, #305: Some degree of regulation definitely seems like a good thing to me. What I see happening in the US, though, is that vendors are expected to be better about securing liquor sales than the airport screeners are about finding weapons. When the inspectors smuggle a fake bomb or imitation gun past a security checkpoint in an airport, it does not seem that the screeners are dismissed from their jobs or heavily fined. Selling to a mature-looking 20 year old in a liquor control test easily costs employees their jobs, and the fines to the establishments where the liquor was sold seem frequently to be huge.
John Stanning, #308: The costs I had in mind go far beyond the implementation costs. There are less immediately obvious costs associated with massive surveillance: for the HUMINT part you have a lot of indirect costs due to making everyone worry that everyone else is an informant. Me, I just inform on myself and cut out the middleman.
Teresa, #318: Cue Fred Astaire singing, "How can you believe me when I said I trolled you, when you know I've been a liar all my life?"
Shorter recent comments on BoingBoing generally and from TruthFriction here, "I am NOT Spartacus!"
One of the lessons about data security is that identity can't lift itself by its bootstraps: source IPs, postmarks, copies of identity papers sent by fax or in the mail, none of these are worth anything. Plausible content and stylistic markers are probably as good as it gets and more than good enough for blog comments. Unfortunately, a nose for stylistic markers is probably not something that Teresa can give anyone through a book, though she has a superabundance of nose for style herself.
N.B. I'm nobody's sock puppet but my own.
Yes, indeed, Datenschutz is a foreign word in the US, I'll give you that.
However, employers do not own health records here, and indeed there are health record privacy laws in the US (though handled with the usual American sloppiness in practice).
The requirement for presentation of a government-issued identification to enter various places of business is indeed onerous and for the most part of no practical use. As a friend of mine pointed out to me recently, most people in this country had never given a thought to their security from terror attacks and are at best catching up with what's needful and useful. I have some hope that practicality and the need for security from corporate data collection will occur to more of the population as time goes by.
ID checking at bars is related to astoundingly draconian laws regarding liquor licensing and the way the burden of keeping out the under-aged is placed on the proprietors in the US. Card readers are an easy technological fix and raises the bar on ID forgery while shifting some of the burden of liability for letting children become inebriated away from bar owners.
Really, every society has to explore the consequences of social control decisions for itself. The DDR (no, not "Dance Dance Revolution!") learned, among other things, that a full-blown Stasi has costs far beyond its benefits and far more than German society could afford. The US and post-reintegration Germany have lessons to learn about the cost of data collection and integration and we're still working though the early part of the curriculum.
The actual exam will be a snap quiz, not scheduled ahead of time. Our test in the US will be written differently from yours in Germany, and may be given on a different day.
I quite liked Rebecca Ore's depiction of the character of a Usenet troll who finds himself living in the future in Time's Child. That character's combination of cowardice, aggression, intelligence, self-interest, and self-stupidity has come to mind quite often over the last couple of days. A sick, sad, frightening (and frightened) mind.
Just a couple of factual points which might be left dangling without referents:
1. Jon Pescovitz's most recent BoingBoing post was made just a little while before a comment here mentioning that Pescovitz had mostly stopped posting.
2. Ursula K. LeGuin's unhappiness seems to have been directed toward Cory Doctorow in particular, not BoingBoing in particular. The paragraph which refers to this unhappiness conflates it with the unhappiness of various persons whose reasons, such as they are, appear to have nothing to do with LeGuin's personal and legitimate response to the unrequested and unauthorized republication of her writing on BoingBoing.
People are certainly entitled to be disappointed when their hopes for (say) the way BoingBoing will operate are not fulfilled. This is not the same as an entitlement to have the angry, insulting, and moronic comments with which they respond to having their unjustified expectations not met preserved intact and presented as part of BoingBoing's content.
Shorter "Neverending*"
Nyah, nyah-nyah, nyah nyah!
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 3 |
| 2008 | 8 |
| 2007 | 33 |
| 2006 | 1 |
| 2003 | 6 |
| 2002 | 104 |
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