You searched for book_author:"Vernor Vinge"
With some books, as was the case with A Fire Upon the Deep, I began reading without any clear idea of what the book was about. The cover copy was less-than-helpful, because the person who wrote it had a clear grudge against commas. And, after reading the book, it's clear the cover copy is full of inaccuracies and hyperbole to the point of complete misrepresentation. Suffice it to say that, for the first chapter…
A few weeks ago, Bruce Sterling shared his thoughts on hacking and activism three years after first discussing the Wikileaks scandal. One thing he said really stuck with me:
Even the electronic civil lib contingent is lying to themselves. They’re sore and indignant now, mostly because they weren’t consulted — but if the NSA released PRISM as a 99-cent Google Android app, they’d be all over it. Because they are electronic first, and civil as
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I don't know about you, but I spend an inordinate amount of time meditating upon the far future of humanity. I don't just worry about the future of my generation, or the future of the generation after mine, or the future of a couple of generations down the line. I'm talking one-, ten-, fifty-thousand years into the future. Will humanity still exist—would we recognize it as humanity even if it does? How many times between…