On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 12:41:13 -0700 (PDT), Davd Brin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > But as a contrarian it is my job to ask people to step > back. In this case, The Fool needs to ponder whether > his reaction to centralized control is unique. Or > whether, in fact, the future he describes will creep > out other people, too. > > Enough to ... maybe... reject the future he describes?
My concern is that the broad awareness of/concern for the issues won't come until it is already too late to reject. Legislation like the DMCA was passed (with Democrat and Republican support, signed by Clinton), with little argument/concern outside of the tech community - and now we're stuck with it as it's used by companies to squash competition, and ensure that things like these encrypted screws can't be bypassed legally. > Now, undercircumstances like that, how likely is it > that people will put up with the "We control your > television set" parts of TF's scenario? It's incremental and often the loss of owner rights are candy coated in other benefits so that people are willing to accept the negatives to gain the benefits. For example: most DVDs are region-encoded and can only be played on machines from their native area. VHS tapes had no such restrictions. People put up with it because they want the DVD advantages and have no real recourse. And also, the kind of legislation that enforces the "we control your tv set" is tech-ish and doesn't fly high on many people's radars and often gets portrayed as, say, anti-piracy laws, where the impact on legitimate use isn't immediately apparent to most. > My biggest example is the silent, unnoticed vanishing > of any programming language from personal computers. > > I swear, I CANNOT GET A MACHINE WITH SIMPLE BASIC IN > ORDER TO TEACH IT TO MY SON! > > It has taken 2 years, and I hope to get an old pentium > machine soon with DOS 6.2 and BASIC aboard, so I can > teach him the fundamentals of moving a dot via a > simple algorithm. Silently, unnoticed, this has > happened and a new generation will be able to make web > pages and fancy Flash digitals... but without any > grasp of the line coding underneath. > > Very disturbing. There are many freely and easily available compilers in many languages so this doesn't really disturb me. I've heard Yet Another Basic is good (though I haven't used it myself): http://www.yabasic.de/ For your son, maybe you'd also want to try teaching him LOGO. I googled up a free LOGO version for Windows here: http://www.softronix.com/logo.html Cheers, -Bryon _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
