> Once upon a time, they were counterculture idealists bringing power to the people. Today they’re greedy monopolists who’d sooner destroy our democracy than be reined in by government in any way—and they have to be stopped.
What changed? The people in question remain the same. Apparently those people are no longer paying their tithe to the Big Guy, and so the narrative winds have shifted, AFAICT.
I've met both, Niven, twice, briefly. He was a grand story teller, but not really approachable.
Pournelle was always pleasant.
I had the opportunity to share a dinner with JP. I was on BIX, Byte Information Exchange, their "BBS" or "CompuServe"-ish service. And Jerry would occasionally sponsor small get togethers.
So there was about 8 of us just sharing dinner at a Chinese place in the Valley. It was a great time. The man can talk, to be sure. Sat right next to him.
I was also on BIX, then NLZ, same name as here. Even made it into the "Best of BIX" in the back of BYTE a couple of times.
Living in New Zealand, it wasn't easy to meet people — or for that matter to access BIX! I was fortunate that from mid 1986 my employer paid for access via X.25 [1] for several years until telnet was possible from Actrix BBS.
jdow took me to LASFS once in 1989 and I think I saw JP from a distance. But in 2004 I spontaneously caught a flight to LA for the historic SpaceShip One 100km high flight. jpistritto picked me up at the airport and we drove to Mojave. Parking at the XCor hangar david42 and his wife Rita pulled up next to us in an RX7. There was a party in the hangar that evening, I got to talk with JP and LN and many others, at one point helped Doug Jones (can't remember if he was on bix) make LN2 icecream. A lot of us slept in the hangar. In the morning I helped shadow cook bacon&eggs for everyone, before we all went out to watch the flight.
Also at other times got to meetups in Phoenix, New York (a lot of C++ crowd there), New Haven (people came down from Boston), Seattle.
Good times.
[1] NZ$13.20 per kilosegment (ISTR even more at first!) .. up to 64k bytes if you filled the packets, but possibly as little as 1000 bytes if there was only 1 byte per packet e.g. sitting there and hitting return: so I always filed all new messages to scratchpad and then did either SHOW or else download via X/Y/Z modem.
Unlike Pournelle, Niven is still alive (87 year old), but I don't think he is writing new science fiction these days (although he has collaborated on some stories this century and has made guest appearances at some conferences in the last few years).
> Why do we, as a species, ignore hard-won experience and instead restart?
Humanity moves from individual to society, not the reverse.
Some knowledge moves from the plural to the singular, top to bottom, but the regular existential mode is bottom-up, which point The Famous Article (TFA) makes in the context of programming languages.
Children and ideas grow from babe to adult. They do not spring full grown from the brow of Zeus other than in myth.
Thanks, that’s helpful. My wife is a teacher and talks about knowledge being recreated, not relearned: IOW it’s new to the learner even if known by the teacher. Hadn’t put those things together before.
> If we're going to manage gender and case across nouns appearing in sentences, why not make them more distinct, please?
> We've got 'die' owning far too much real estate here, in my opinion.
German has a relatively simple case inflection system, one that mostly applies to particles. Fully inflected languages often apply case and gender to the nouns and adjectives themselves, in many cases with overlap between cases only distinguishable via context.
Yeah because it makes perfect sense to them, just like it doesn't confuse us that the pronoun "them" in English can refer to either a singular non-gender-specified individual as a verb object or plural individuals of any genders (or even non persons) as objects.
That's three distinct meanings of "them" in standard English, and there are even more in dialectical speech.
What changed? The people in question remain the same. Apparently those people are no longer paying their tithe to the Big Guy, and so the narrative winds have shifted, AFAICT.
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