Even without knowing much about this, I can tell you: everyone is trying to code to new, non-standard UIs.

And I can predict what the solution will be: before this problem is solved the web browsers in the devices will get better, and we'll be back to coding for the web.

The only question is whether the mobile app startup bubble will go poof before or after that.

(By the way... wouldn't it be nice if all of this effort were directed to solving real problems? I'm pretty sure we could find some real problems if we looked...).

Yeah, 'cause the threat of WW3 after two devastating world wars and the high possibility extinction of humanity in a nuclear holocaust was just so trivial. Get over yourselves, kids and other assorted man-children; you are not some special and unique snowflakes.

Ah, I see, so your conclusion is 'twas ever thus, and nothing ever changes under the Sun (this, or under any other), and people have come to accept this and hence have no interest in how things might change.

Even the WWWIII scenario is pretty easy to think about-- either that happens or all will be well. Singularities on the other hand...

With over 2.5 Million Americans having been deployed to Afghanistan and/or Iraq (over 400,000 deployed three or more times and 37,000 of those deploying 5 times or more), are you still of the belief that Science Fiction stories written by veterans depicting combat are nothing more than "war porn?"

That wars happen has never been in question, the question was whether a David Drake make war more likely-- did this kind of stuff encourage fantasies like "I am a tough-minded realist, willing to face squarely the horrible necessity of engaging in this profoundly nasty endeavor (that I secretly think is Really Cool)."

Can you draw a line between Pournelle & Drake and maybe guys like Taleb and end up at Donald Rumsfeld?

In any case, I think you're taking the younger Sterlings posturing too seriously. He was copping a pose of young upstart, leader of The Movement, and now he's copping a pose of responsible Design School Visionary, and if you think any of these poses are The Real Sterling, maybe you need to re-read some of his books, like "Schismatrix" and "Zeitgeist".

... why it's called "science" fiction given how little science there is in there. It should be called "social" fiction, or so-fi (lol), since everyone is always saying "sci-fi" is trying to analyze how societies or individuals react to technology. The human element is constant, but the "science" and technologies are almost always wrong. Doesn't prevent me from enjoying reading 50 year old sci-fi that is more fantasy than science

No, no, seriously you don't want to go there. Do you realize how many efforts have been made to re-name "science fiction" into something that might make more sense? (Just consider, for a moment, the sheer wasted energy of decades of pedantic nerds standing up for the sacred honor of "Science"...).

In any case, Sterling's tossed-off "explanation" for why science fiction is no longer popular rings far more hollow than usual. No one cares about science, no one cares about fiction? *Bzzzt*. Many people care about both. More to the point: people are scared about thinking about the future. American Science Fiction was originally an underground literature for people interested in grand visions of where things might be going, during a period when the mainstream culture was enamored of a steady-state return to normalcy, "ah, now we can all just relax"-- Now, no one is relaxed.

The idea that technical progress is radically socially destabilizing is so stunningly obvious, SF isn't needed for the primary role it used to play.

Oh well, I missed the call for questions on this one... but maybe it's just as well-- I've been a Sterling fan for some time, but most of my questions wouldn't exactly be polite. I might've tried something like: "Many of the characters you've written about are huckster-types, expert social manipulators-- is that something like your own self-image? I mean, this business where you're playing Futurist for design school mavens-- have you really done a BOFO transition, or did you just decide it would be a good career move at this stage?

I'm not sure what gives you the idea that HIV is biologically unique or bizarre

Yeah, it some ways it's similar to influenza.

There's was a something I saw recently about how new work on HIV-vaccines might actually lead to something like a permanent flu shot.

(Funny, I'd forgotten about the HIV-denialists. I had the vague feeling that one had faded away... No such luck.)

Which was hyperbolic even by the standards of such occasions (Englebart was JFK, Shakespeare, Alfred Hitchcock and Icarus rolled up into one)

I see you're unfamiliar with Englebart. At a time when most of us were doing batch processing on punch cards, at a time when the real digital elite was obsessed with the idea of "artificial intelligence" (hoping to get the computer to do more without submitting another damn deck of punch cards), Englebart came of with a vision of computers as interactive devices, partners that would amplify intelligence, and allow remote collaborative efforts between groups of people.

In other words, the world we're living in, except for that bit about "amplified intelligence".

to be honest, it's really a wonderful experiment to see how even though we're all supposedly well educated in the matter, humans STILL end up repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

And it ain't just at wikipedia, is it?

Techies are people who skipped out on learning anything about social organization, and yet always think they're qualified to re-invent it all from scratch...

One of the big underlying problems seems to be that when someone is a big contributor of some article, he ends up guarding it and the article just "feels wrong" to him when someone else modifies it, even if the contributions would objectively make sense. Let the information evolve and the words be shuffled around, it's not your precious snowflake thesis...

Well yeah, instant reversion of anyone's changes is one trick you might use to discourage newbies, and that no doubt works on many, though if you'd been inspired to rock-n-roll you'd find that the "owner" doesn't really have any privileges, just attitude, and it would count for much if you brought in outside arbitration (not that anything would count for much, wikipedia moderators take the most shallow reading possible to make the quickest possible decision, and then stand-by that practice as their god-given right).

However, if you'd put in a few man-months making an article half-way decent, you might have some sympathy for someone using whatever trick, fair or foul, to discourage newbies. Particularly if you'd tried the opposite practice of watching the pinheads wander by and hack things up...

The actual trouble with wikipedia: they tried a non-system that scaled up far better in terms of number of contributors than anyone would've expected, but can't possibly scale forward through time-- the burn-out rate on "consensus decision-making" is horrendous, as anyone who'd ever done time in an artsy non-profit collective could've told you.

I'm of the opinion that wikipedia is choked on it's own initial success: it can't find another way to do things because the old one seems to have worked so well in the past...

Because then you'll have people showing up court asking the officer who pulled them over to prove their mental state.

Pfft. Have you ever actually been in traffic court? The judge takes a guilty-until-proven innocent stance and hustles people along as fast as possible. The cop says you were speeding while standing on your head and picking your nose, and unless you've got a passenger with video, you'd better assume you're screwed.

Remember: "Driving is a privilege, not a right." That's what that means.

By the way, may I thank all of the pedantic nerds in the audience for complaining that the headline joke is not a precise replication of the entire content of Stross's posting, as well as making the clear implication that there is something terribly misleading about not quoting the entire post so as to make it obvious to people unwilling to click on the link that Stross actually does know something about current events in Scotland?

I'm glad to see that you guys are upholding standards. You make slashdot what it is, truly.

But I must say that people accusing Stross of simply making excuses for writer's block and so on are doing an awfully weak job... if you actually knew anything about Stross you'd realize that he is extremely prolific, and is in fact one of the more highly regarded SF writers out there at the moment (though admittedly, only among people who actually read).

And if you want to look all clever and accuse Stross of being disingenuous, you're missing the obvious: he's bragging, and hiding it inside an amusing complaint: "Oh no, I got everything right again! I hate it when that happens!".

Or he could just be a shit writer

And you could be a weak troll, but thanks anyway.

You could try reading some of his stuff if you're interested. My pick is "Accelerando".

I'm not so naive as to think that "The Cause" as you so pompously put it

Hey man, I'm ironically pompous, unlike some people around here.

will be driven or not driven by random people discussing it on the internet forums.

Ah, but a journey of a thousand steps, and never doubt that a small group of the committed, and don't forget the power of ideas, and the great rough-and-tumble of democracy, and--

In any case, my point is that going after the motives is a common move among the anti-nuclear left (if you're pro-, you must be Pro, who's paying you to say this?!). It is also a fairly common move by conservatives to assume that left-wing activists are essentially just in the business of being left (the "Professional Left"). I don't think anyone effectively makes this case to people on the left-- a question like "How do you know the coal industry isn't funding the Greens?" is from one point of view silly, possibly unfair, a nutty, unfounded conspiracy theory-- but on the other hand it has some interesting mind-fuck potential and if you sincerly believe something like that, it would be at a minimum amusing and perhaps instructive to see you push it seriously.

After all, much as I would like to find a way for reason and rationality to prevail on it's own, it hasn't been doing so well, has it?