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 #228 New Moon of July 8, 2013 Contents copyright 2013 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See the Creative Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ for details. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* The Fourth of July holiday weekend is over, and for many people the same old routine is starting up again. Mornings are often as not gray and overcast, lending more of an aura of dreary dullness to the scene. And there on my doorstep is the morning paper, lying there looking thin and pitiful, like a starving kitten or something. Sunday sees a hint of newspapers' former glory, although even the Sunday paper is much thinner than in years past. And hard times are affecting other media as well. One fast-food place I go to about once a week has a TV in the dining room, tuned to a special cable (or maybe Internet) channel produced especially for restaurants. It too appears unwell. Part of the content has included ads. Apparently the idea is that as long as the stuff being advertised isn't a competing restaurant there's no problem with showing ads to restaurant patrons. So in the past I'd seen ads for cars and TV shows and such. I'd also seen ads for those "Forever" postage stamps that will still be enough to mail a letter even when rates go up again, as well as public service spots for animal adoption and such. On my most recent visit a few days ago I noticed them playing what appeared to be at least eight or ten repeats of the exact same Forever stamp spot during the time it took me to eat a sandwich and read the morning paper. Sometimes the spot would play over and over again two or three times in a row. There were a few other public service things such as how to do CPR if you see someone collapse on the street, but as far as I recall there were no other "real" ads for paying sponsors other than the restaurant itself. So are the media in general, or at least those that depend on paid ads, falling upon hard times? One free weekly paper is still looking reasonably healthy, but most of its ads are for local bars and restaurants and other entertainment venues, not to mention a big pile of medical marijuana promotions and some "massage" services that may offer more than just massage (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). These kinds of things may be all well and good for a weekly paper whose readers are planning their weekend, but are less well suited to a daily paper, especially one claiming to be aimed at a family audience. So will the day come when I look out at my doorstep first thing in the morning and see, not the morning paper itself, but just a chalk outline of a newspaper, drawn by some coroner's assistant or whoever it is whose job is to take dead things to the morgue? ********************* The ads for those Forever stamps claim that you'll be able to use them "forever". I kind of doubt that claim. Suppose someone several thousand years from now finds a stack of these stamps somewhere. He (or she or whatever) manages to find enough information to figure out their origin and function. Given that information, will that person be able to use them? If there exists some entity that charges a fee to physically deliver small objects from one person or location to another, and if that entity decides that honoring the stamps as a form of payment would be a useful publicity stunt, then they may be usable. But that's a big If. Even if there is nobody in the business of delivering anything like today's paper mail there still may be some hope. If there's some entity whose predecessors can be traced back to the US Postal Service to the extent that it can be held responsible for the Postal Service's debts, then the people with the stamps might be able to claim that they are financial instruments, evidence of debt owed by the USPS and therefore the successor entity. That's assuming such debt hasn't been wiped out by bankruptcy or something. If, however, there is no such organization (or at least none that will admit to it) or that organization refuses to honor the stamps as evidence of debt, you may be out of luck unless you have very good lawyers who are willing to work cheaply enough to make it worth trying to pursue the matter. Perhaps our descendants would be better advised to hope that something like the hobby of stamp collecting still exists, and that some collectors are willing to pay well for items of that vintage. ********************* From a speech by an official of the Starfleet Galactic Exploration Academy: You may have heard about a bit of controversy at a nearby religious school about student dress codes. That has led to some discussion of our rules on that subject. Those rules are there for a reason. The rule at that other school was that boys' hair was to be cut so as not to touch the shirt collar. There was no corresponding rule for the girls. The analogous rule here at the Starfleet Galactic Exploration Academy is that no one's hair is to touch their spacesuit's helmet collar flange. That's so that hair won't get in the way if you have to seal up your spacesuit quickly in an emergency. Now emergencies that require spacesuits may not seem likely at our ground-based facilities, but even so we do occasionally wear them. And we do want our students to become accustomed to thinking in terms of how likely they are to need a spacesuit at any given time. Likewise with clothing. We don't have much in the way of rules about looks or style or "decency", although some instructors have been known to discourage scantily clad students by quietly lowering the air temperature in the room. We do, however, ban things like scarves and capes and long flowing sleeves and billowy skirts. Again, it's a matter of being able to get your spacesuit on quickly without clothing getting caught in the joints. We have other rules as well, mostly enacted for good and logical reasons. Those who consider breaking them know when they do so at their peril, even if nobody sees them breaking any rule, and when they may break the rule with impunity. In other words, these rules don't always apply, but the list of situations where they do or don't apply is too complicated to spell out in detail. But if you know the reason for the rule you can figure out whether it applies right then or not. On the other hand, we do have some arbitrary rules that don't really make sense but have to be obeyed because they're the rules. And they're there for a reason as well. As our graduates go out exploring the galaxy they will inevitably run into situations where there are rules that are there for a good reason which cannot be explained. Perhaps it involves some kind of alien taboos, or technical stuff that can't easily be explained, or some kind of sensitive negotiations that need to be kept secret. So they need to be aware that rules sometimes do need to be obeyed even if there's no apparent reason for them, and they need to be able to see when they may be getting into such a situation. The military branches of Starfleet have it simpler: They simply treat all rules as rules that must be obeyed even if you don't know the reason. This has been the norm in the military since before the days of star travel, and it has served the military well. But Starfleet's Galactic Explorers are not the military. They're more at home in situations where they have to think for themselves, while remaining aware that some things just can't be solved by thinking them through. And they know that sometimes rules need to obeyed while at other times they may instead need to be bent or even broken. ********************* Speaking of rules and laws, I learned in school many years ago about how a bill becomes law in the US. It's passed by Congress (or a state legislature) and signed by the President (or the Governor). They also explained the less common ways a bill can become law without the President's signature, such as by overriding a veto. So far, so good. But what I was never taught is who tells the police about changes to the laws. When a new law outlaws or legalizes something, that somehow has to get translated into orders to the cops patrolling the streets to start or stop arresting people for doing whatever that thing is. So is there an official channel for this, or the various enforcement agencies get the news over various random ad hoc channels? ********************* Seemingly unrelated to Starfleet Academy, some people around me were discussing first aid and triage and such, mainly from the standpoint of a writer writing about medical first responders. That leads to thoughts about emergency responders in various science fiction universes. How will the needs of various kinds of extraterrestrials differ from those of humans? For example, how would first aid for a damaged exoskeleton differ from first aid for a broken bone in a human? And even if beings of different species appear superficially similar, what internal differences might one need to be aware of? Imagine the possibilities: Different body temperatures, different organs in different locations, different blood chemistry, and so on. Should a medical responder even try to memorize all this stuff, or will they just depend on some kind of portable communicators tied into some kind of central databases? That may be what saves them. Any civilization advanced enough to be dealing with beings from large numbers of different planets is likely to have advanced database technology, image recognition, and so on. So you just upload a photo of the creature you're dealing with and get back the information you need, in your language. In a fantasy (as opposed to science fiction) situation, where you're dealing with elves and gnomes and dragons and such as well as humans, you're likely to have magic-based ways of dealing with the situation. These may not look all that different from our technology-based systems, since any magic that actually works can be considered a form of technology. If you don't have much in the way of either technology or magic, then you may be doomed. But then through much of human history real-world medical technology wasn't all that good. So you're probably not much worse off than you would have been in the real world a few hundred years ago. ********************* Walls I was born in a country of thrown stones And spent my days retreating into exotic lands Of imagination Or else hiding behind walls Of forced wit and nervous laughter Listening to the pitter-patter of pebbles Against my stronghold. I eventually fled that land And wandered in poverty Until I found a realm Where my fortune in strange coin Would be accepted. Still I built walls -- Until I noticed that here thrown stones were few And bruises healed easier And the view, fresh air, and sunshine Were more than worth sweeping up An occasional broken window. No more walls? But I am by nature a builder, Scheduled for frequent deliveries Of lumber, nails, bricks, and mortar: All the materials for building walls. No more walls? No more walls. But the materials for building walls Can also be used To build bridges. Thomas G. Digby written 0315 hr 3/05/77 typed 0410 hr 5/22/77 entered 2210 hr 4/12/92 ********************* 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 you can tell which list you are on by looking at the email headers. 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