Given that the Voyager probes are pushing the absolute edge of humanity's reach into the cosmos, I'd love to see NASA publish the hardware specs and open up a competition to find the best possible solution.
With open specs, a simulator or emulator could be built, and anyone with interest could give it a try. A core team of NASA engineers might come up with some unit tests and acceptance tests. If these are passed, then the code is eligible for professional review.
Hang on a moment, there's something about this use case that I don't really get.
Is it ever possible to send a murderer to the right address? I mean, shouldn't we be throwing a UserIsAMurderer exception and take some other kind of action?
I learned about Google a decade ago when "worse than satan himself" brought up either Bill Gates or Microsoft. I worked at Microsoft at the time. Everyone I knew thought it was hilarious, and it spread through the company like wildfire. Within a week or two, everyone was using Google as their default search engine.
(I may be mis-remembering the exact search string, but it was something like that. Keep in mind that Bill's philanthropy had not become public at that time.)
The parabolic sinks that started popping up all over Seattle around a decade ago are great. If I owned my own place, I'd rip out all the existing sinks and put in parabolic sinks.
I think it is easy to see the Sprawl books as being technology-oriented with cyberpunk window dressing. If that is your perspective going in to Blue Ant, then I can see how you might be disappointed. The Blue Ant series makes it clear that Gibson is interested in contemporary humans and their culture. Technology informs these topics, but isn't the primary focus.
Going back to Sprawl after reading Blue Ant, new layers of detail became apparent to me. There is a lot more than just an AI-driven singularity story going on. If anything, the [Spoiler!] Neuromancer-Wintermute union is a McGuffin made too explicit, distracting many readers from the rest of the interesting content. Like Space Rastas. How awesome are Space Rastas?!
I found it easy to follow the Cayce Pollard thread in Pattern Recognition. Everything seems to develop around her or eventually relate back to her. In some sense, Cayce is a hybrid of Case from Neuromancer and Marly Krushkova in Count Zero. Bigend is a hybrid of Josef Virek (Count Zero) and perhaps the physical aspects of Armitage (Neuromancer).
All of Gibson's books deal with characters that operate with relatively little wealth and power on the fringe of society and their interactions with figures of extraordinary wealth and power who have ambiguous locations within society. But these characters aren't just computer hackers / programmers. They can be marketing advisors, children, fashion designers, linguists, artists or mercenaries.
It is worth giving the Blue Ant* series a second change, there is more in common with Sprawl than first appears.
No, I got the point. And Osama was quite effective at terrorism. Though I think most of the credit goes to the US government and media. I don't believe it was an inside job, rather that similar motivations created similar outcomes: radicalizing war in the middle east.
If humans were rational, terrorism wouldn't work. Driving your car to work is more dangerous than taking the subway to the world trade center, even if the WTC was demolished every year. But we are afraid of what we fear, not what will actually kill us. There are a lot of people who are eager to exploit that cognitive defect.
Walter Jon Williams' The Green Leopard Plague, which is also part of an anthology of the same name. The anthology includes several other stories that build up the world that GLP takes place in. Some interesting ideas about identity and consciousness in a society with extremely advanced bioengineering.
Umberto Eco's Prague Cemetery which expands greatly on a tiny section of Foucault's Pendulum. Eco's writing is extremely dense. Similar to Neal Stephenson, but with more of a literary flavor than a technogeek flavor. A nice way to balance out your reading if you find you are a bit too focused on modern technology.
I finally read Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy. Early Internet and web culture was so deeply infused with RAW's ideas that the trilogy felt like one long déjà vu session. Lots of fun. RAW + Eco are a great antidote to taking conspiracy theories seriously, while having a ton of fun at the same time.
Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. Wow. Since the release of the Blue Ant books, I've been telling people that Blue Ant is the place to start, as it updates a lot of the underlying themes of Sprawl for this decade. But Sprawl is still very current and relevant. If you read Sprawl during or before the dot-com bubble like I did, you probably focused on the prophetic internet stuff. If you read it again, you will find out that there is plenty more interesting stuff to feed your brain in Gibson's early novels.
But seriously. Comments are useful. Don't over use them, don't under use them. If you are being dogmatic about your comments, you are probably doing it wrong. Autodoc comments can be nice, when done properly.
The difference is that drugs are physical goods that require nontrivial infrastructure to produce. Digital media is essentially free to reproduce, and very cheap to distribute. Instituting the death penalty for trading Metallica's songs is unlikely to drive the price of a bootleg copy of the black album into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Bounties might reasonably be paid for help closing a deal, but only a fool pays for an introduction. Not that there is anything wrong with separating rich fools from their money.
With open specs, a simulator or emulator could be built, and anyone with interest could give it a try. A core team of NASA engineers might come up with some unit tests and acceptance tests. If these are passed, then the code is eligible for professional review.