SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #195 New Moon of November 5, 2010 Contents copyright 2010 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* Halloween is over. And many in the world of commerce found it especially scary this year. According to news reports, worried merchants are rushing into the Christmas season, in hopes of stimulating lagging sales. The local Target was no exception. When I went there the day after Halloween the shelves that had been full of Trick-Or-Treat candy had been cleared off to make room for Christmas stuff, while lighted trees were starting to appear in other sections of the store. Ordinary mortals have not been so quick to change their decorations. Although the inflatable ghosts and stringy plastic spiderwebs and fake headstones with just the letters "R. I. P." on them are pretty much gone from front yards around the neighborhood, a few still linger. There are also some Jack-O-Lanterns still about, although the real ones aren't going to last long, especially given the warm spell we've been having. While an intact pumpkin will last a surprisingly long time, a Jack-O-Lantern is a rather ephemeral thing. ********************* Mention of leftover pumpkins reminds me of a story I heard (or read) from someone in Southern California many years ago. Right after Halloween, some friends decided to go camping. And as it happened, they had some Jack-O-Lanterns, and maybe also a few uncarved pumpkins, left over. The Jack-O-Lanterns would not keep until they got back from their trip. So what to do with them? Since they liked guns, they decided that instead of throwing the Jack-O-Lanterns in the garbage they would take them out into the wilderness and shoot at them. So they went to a favorite camping spot, which happened to be next to a stream. They shot up the pumpkins and then went to bed for the night. During the night they heard what sounded like animals moving around outside their tent, but didn't think much about it. They were tired and felt more like sleeping than investigating. Then in the morning when they got up and looked around they found that all the debris from the shot-up pumpkins was gone. Evidently the sounds they'd heard during the night were from animals eating the remains. Fast-forward a few months, or maybe most of a year, to the following summer or maybe fall. They decide to go camping again. But this time when they get to their favorite camping spot they get a surprise: There are pumpkin vines growing all over the place. Evidently the animals that had eaten the previous year's pumpkin debris had scattered the seeds around in their droppings, and the stream had provided enough moisture for them to grow. I don't know if this continued into subsequent years. ********************* Suppose someone on Planet Zforgv or some such is running a "Name a Star" scam on their planet, and Sol is one of the stars for which naming rights are up for bid. What recourse do we have if we don't like the winner's choice? ********************* It's November, and California has just changed back from Daylight Saving to Standard Time. That reminded me that people in the WELL Movies conference had been talking about some old footage of a movie premiere or some such. It had been sitting in the vaults for decades, until just recently when someone decided to take a look at it. Lo and behold, there was one shot of the crowd that showed a woman holding something up to her ear. And that something looked sort of like a cell phone. Problem is, this was shot in 1928 or thereabouts. They didn't have cell phones then. So was she a time traveler, or was she doing something unrelated that just looked like an anachronism, or what? I started thinking of how it might be treated in a movie. People would be gathered around a monitor (or maybe the equivalent for film), stepping through it frame by frame. Then someone would suggest enhancing the resolution. Someone else would type something at a keyboard, and then the image would zoom in to not only show more clearly that the thing the woman is holding in indeed a cell phone, but that it isn't any known model. They would zoom in on the manufacturer's logo. It wouldn't be any of the known cell-phone brands. But a search of trademark archives or whatever would turn up a hit: A Silicon Valley startup that has been rumored to be working on using faster-than-light tachyons to carry information. But then right after I posted my thoughts some spoilsport suggested that the woman may have just been shielding her eyes from the glare of the spotlights, or hiding her face from the camera, or something like that. And the thing in her hand was likely to be some mildly unusual object but not anything really extraordinary. Of course that's just a cover story. It's obvious that the spoilsport was himself a time traveler, sent back to keep the original 1928 goof from becoming too widely known. ********************* I'm reminded of the quote about "steam-engine time". At a certain point in history the state of the relevant technologies, as well as economic and cultural and political conditions, became favorable for the development of steam engines, and a number of inventors started working on them more or less independently. In other words, when it's steam-engine time people will build steam engines. Something of the sort seems to be happening with self-driving cars. A number of companies (including Google), as well as the military and other organizations, have been testing prototypes. Some of them have successfully operated (with a human standing by at the controls Just In Case) in traffic over considerable distances. One commentator has estimated that they are about eight years from commercial production. I don't know how good this estimate is, but it doesn't sound too far off given lead times for mass production of anything as complex as a car. I'm hoping it will be sooner, because none of us are getting any younger and at least one of my friends is getting to the point where she doesn't feel safe driving, at least in rain or at night. The technical challenges may pale in comparison to the legal and political ones. No matter how careful the developers are, there are likely to be a few high-profile calamities along the way. So even after self-driving cars have become much safer than human-driven ones they may "feel" riskier. Some people will be afraid of them, much as some people are afraid of flying even though flying on a commercial airliner is safer than driving. So the hardest part of all this may be convincing insurance companies and legislators that this is a development whose time has come. ********************* I've been noticing the word "fail" being used as a noun lately, as in "There is massive fail on LiveJournal around Plergbcon banquet menu choices." It seems to be a mass noun, with a meaning usually something like "controversy" or "squabbling" or other sorts of verbal disagreement in which the level of discourse is not always polite. Have any of you noticed this? ********************* There was a thing in the news a few weeks back where some political activist or some such discovered that some government agency had planted a tracking device on his car. He removed the device, and then posted about it on his blog. Shortly thereafter agents from the FBI (or some other scary government agency) showed up demanding their gizmo back. They were so intimidating that he handed it over. Now I'm wondering what his actual legal rights and obligations were. Was the FBI (or whatever) within its rights to demand the return of the tracking device, or could he have legally kept it? Was it like the type of found property where the finder has some obligation to try to find the owner, or was it more of a "finders keepers" situation? The item apparently was not marked as being US government property. Would the presence of such a marking have made a difference? Be that as it may, especially if the mission was of such a level of importance and/or secrecy that the agents were authorized to break ordinary laws, he probably shouldn't have blabbed about finding it, at least not right away. Perhaps he should have taken it to his lawyer first. I seem to recall one spy novel in which a character who found such a device on his car just quietly transferred it to a nearby vehicle belonging to some random stranger. The vehicle he stuck it on may have been an ordinary car, or may have been a taxi or even a Greyhound bus. In any event, it kept the snoopers occupied for a while. ********************* After looking up something in Wikipedia and seeing the article flagged with comments about quality and other issues, I got to wondering about what if someone were to post an article composed entirely of nonsense words. The Powers That Be would probably just delete it. But what if someone says that it should stay, perhaps because it's some universal truth in some language nobody happens to know yet, but which will become clear over the next few centuries as existing languages change to become more like the language that article is written in? Would that be reason to keep it? I think the people in charge would say No. And they would probably be right. But then again, they might be wrong. The only real way to find out would be to wait and see how the relevant languages do or do not evolve. And even then, if it doesn't show up as predicted the proponents of keeping it could just say we haven't waited long enough yet. But then don't we get into a monkey-at-the-typewriter problem? If you wait long enough, might not all possible languages eventually come into use? If that's the case, when the text does at last seem to mean something, how will we know it's the correct meaning? People could be reading it in some spurious language where the words all have the wrong meanings. There may be no perfect solution to this problem. ********************* Speaking of Halloween and time travel ... Going to Seed On a mild October evening I browse the Halloween store, A place of gore and gravestones, spiderwebs and skeletons, costumes and cauldrons. A packet catches my eye, Stirring up memories of days almost forty years gone. It is a "HIPPIE KIT": A headband with the word "PEACE" on it, A large peace-sign neck pendant, And a pair of rose-colored glasses, All marked "Made in China". The tie-dyed T-shirt and longhaired wig are not included, But no doubt await me down another nearby aisle. As a plastic skull blares a tinny rendition of the well-known Funeral March Part of me dreams of taking a time machine back to those days of overwhelming optimism in the face of overwhelming adversity. Would those I would show it to laugh or cry to see all their grand world-changing dreams summed up in a pack of trinkets in a costume shop? To those who would cry I have words of consolation: While the bloom of the Flower Children has faded, their seeds continue to grow and spread, flowering anew into a rainbow of colors beyond what they could have ever imagined. -- Tom Digby written Tue Oct 5 20:54:34 PDT 2004 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware and want to unsubscribe or otherwise change settings, the relevant URL should be in the footer appended to the end of this section in the copy you received. 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