blue trane's Journal: Redcap

I'm in the middle of reading "Snow Crash".

Impressions so far:

Why do you have to spend time commuting in the Metaverse? Why not just have instant teleportation? Stephenson's Metaverse is too similar to reality, I think part of the appeal of cyberspace to me is its differences from physical reality.

The powers of two limitations built into the Metaverse (128 ports on the tramway for instance) are silly.

The little demons carrying away bits of hacked up avatar is hokey.

The "pay to play" philosophy of the Metaverse is not the predominant philosophy on the World Wide Web, at least not yet. For example: In the book they have to buy plots for their Metaverse houses; we pay a yearly fee for domain name registration. There's a difference of philosophy there.

In software matters, the Open Source/Free Software movement is completely ignored.

Things I liked:

The way he tries to apply the theory of memetics to real and hypothetical phenomena, i.e.: laying out the "religion as virus" hypothesis.

The Librarian AI - but why can't he handle analogies? This article indicates we now have that capability.

The widely varied writing styles - "Deliverator"-style action sequences to stream-of-consciousness of a 15-year old girl to informative, speculative discussions of history, biology, computer science, virtual reality.

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The (physical) society described by Stephenson would likely result if we gave Libertarianism free reign. Vote accordingly...