Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor

There is nothing better than a Slashdot interview with someone who not only reads and understands Slashdot but can out-troll the trolls. Admittedly, the questions you asked Neal Stephenson were great in their own right, but his answers... Wow! let's just say that this guy shows how it's done.

1) right to keep and bear code - by arashiakari

Do you think that hacking tools should be protected (in the United States) under the second amendment?

Neal:

Such is the intensity of issues like this that I can't tell whether this is a troll. I'm going to assume it's not, and answer the question seriously.

I'm no constitutional scholar but I'm pretty sure that the Founding Fathers were thinking of flintlocks, not perl scripts, when they wrote the Second Amendment. Now you can dispute that and say "No, anything that enables citizens to defend themselves against an oppressive government is covered by the Second Amendment." There might be something to such an argument. But pragmatically, the question is whether you can get nine (or at least five) non-hacker Supreme Court Justices to see it that way. I suspect the answer is no. It's just too easy for them to say "it is not a weapon." To me it seems a lot easier simply to invoke the First Amendment.

Also, remember that there might be unwanted side effects to classifying code as weapons. In the U.S., where the right to bear certain weapons is written into the Constitution, it might seem like a clever way to secure access to such code. But authorities in other countries might say "look, even the U.S. Government defines this string of bits as a weapon---so we are going to outlaw it."

It's difficult to form an intelligent opinion on issues like this without doing a lot of work. One has to learn a lot about the issues and then think about them pretty hard. I haven't really done so, and so I'm inclined to trust people who have, like Matt Blaze. At crypto.com he has posted some interesting material that is germane to this topic.

See http://www.crypto.com/masterkey.html

and especially

http://www.crypto.com/hobbs.html

To make a long argument short, what I have learned from Matt's writings on the topic is that (1) it's not a new issue, (2) it's a First Amendment issue, and (3) it's best in the long run, for all concerned, if vulnerabilities are exposed in public.

2) The lack of respect... - by MosesJones

Science Fiction is normally relegated to the specialist publications rather than having reviews in the main stream press. Seen as "fringe" and a bit sad its seldom reviewed with anything more than condescension by the "quality" press.

Does it bother you that people like Jeffery Archer or Jackie Collins seem to get more respect for their writing than you ?

Neal:

OUCH!

(removes mirrorshades, wipes tears, blows nose, composes self)

Let me just come at this one from sort of a big picture point of view.

(the sound of a million Slashdot readers hitting the "back" button...)

First of all, I don't think that the condescending "quality" press look too kindly on Jackie Collins and Jeffrey Archer. So I disagree with the premise of the last sentence of this question and I'm not going to address it. Instead I'm going to answer what I think MosesJones is really getting at, which is why SF and other genre and popular writers don't seem to get a lot of respect from the literary world.

To set it up, a brief anecdote: a while back, I went to a writers' conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we'd exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me "And where do you teach?" just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another "And which distro do you use?"

I was taken aback. "I don't teach anywhere," I said.

Her turn to be taken aback. "Then what do you do?"

"I'm...a writer," I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.

"Yes, but what do you do?"

I couldn't think of how to answer the question---I'd already answered it!

"You can't make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?" she tried.

"From...being a writer," I stammered.

At this point she finally got it, and her whole affect changed. She wasn't snobbish about it. But it was obvious that, in her mind, the sort of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely different creature from the sort she generally associated with.

And once I got over the excruciating awkwardness of this conversation, I began to think she was right in thinking so. One way to classify artists is by to whom they are accountable.

The great artists of the Italian Renaissance were accountable to wealthy entities who became their patrons or gave them commissions. In many cases there was no other way to arrange it. There is only one Sistine Chapel. Not just anyone could walk in and start daubing paint on the ceiling. Someone had to be the gatekeeper---to hire an artist and give him a set of more or less restrictive limits within which he was allowed to be creative. So the artist was, in the end, accountable to the Church. The Church's goal was to build a magnificent structure that would stand there forever and provide inspiration to the Christians who walked into it, and they had to make sure that Michelangelo would carry out his work accordingly.

Similar arrangements were made by writers. After Dante was banished from Florence he found a patron in the Prince of Verona, for example. And if you look at many old books of the Baroque period you find the opening pages filled with florid expressions of gratitude from the authors to their patrons. It's the same as in a modern book when it says "this work was supported by a grant from the XYZ Foundation."

Nowadays we have different ways of supporting artists. Some painters, for example, make a living selling their work to wealthy collectors. In other cases, musicians or artists will find appointments at universities or other cultural institutions. But in both such cases there is a kind of accountability at work.

A wealthy art collector who pays a lot of money for a painting does not like to see his money evaporate. He wants to feel some confidence that if he or an heir decides to sell the painting later, they'll be able to get an amount of money that is at least in the same ballpark. But that price is going to be set by the market---it depends on the perceived value of the painting in the art world. And that in turn is a function of how the artist is esteemed by critics and by other collectors. So art criticism does two things at once: it's culture, but it's also economics.

There is also a kind of accountability in the case of, say, a composer who has a faculty job at a university. The trustees of the university have got a fiduciary responsibility not to throw away money. It's not the same as hiring a laborer in factory, whose output can be easily reduced to dollars and cents. Rather, the trustees have to justify the composer's salary by pointing to intangibles. And one of those intangibles is the degree of respect accorded that composer by critics, musicians, and other experts in the field: how often his works are performed by symphony orchestras, for example.

Accountability in the writing profession has been bifurcated for many centuries. I already mentioned that Dante and other writers were supported by patrons at least as far back as the Renaissance. But I doubt that Beowulf was written on commission. Probably there was a collection of legends and tales that had been passed along in an oral tradition---which is just a fancy way of saying that lots of people liked those stories and wanted to hear them told. And at some point perhaps there was an especially well-liked storyteller who pulled a few such tales together and fashioned them into the what we now know as Beowulf. Maybe there was a king or other wealthy patron who then caused the tale to be written down by a scribe. But I doubt it was created at the behest of a king. It was created at the behest of lots and lots of intoxicated Frisians sitting around the fire wanting to hear a yarn. And there was no grand purpose behind its creation, as there was with the painting of the Sistine Chapel.

The novel is a very new form of art. It was unthinkable until the invention of printing and impractical until a significant fraction of the population became literate. But when the conditions were right, it suddenly became huge. The great serialized novelists of the 19th Century were like rock stars or movie stars. The printing press and the apparatus of publishing had given these creators a means to bypass traditional arbiters and gatekeepers of culture and connect directly to a mass audience. And the economics worked out such that they didn't need to land a commission or find a patron in order to put bread on the table. The creators of those novels were therefore able to have a connection with a mass audience and a livelihood fundamentally different from other types of artists.

Nowadays, rock stars and movie stars are making all the money. But the publishing industry still works for some lucky novelists who find a way to establish a connection with a readership sufficiently large to put bread on their tables. It's conventional to refer to these as "commercial" novelists, but I hate that term, so I'm going to call them Beowulf writers.

But this is not true for a great many other writers who are every bit as talented and worthy of finding readers. And so, in addition, we have got an alternate system that makes it possible for those writers to pursue their careers and make their voices heard. Just as Renaissance princes supported writers like Dante because they felt it was the right thing to do, there are many affluent persons in modern society who, by making donations to cultural institutions like universities, support all sorts of artists, including writers. Usually they are called "literary" as opposed to "commercial" but I hate that term too, so I'm going to call them Dante writers. And this is what I mean when I speak of a bifurcated system.

Like all tricks for dividing people into two groups, this is simplistic, and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But there is a cultural difference between these two types of writers, rooted in to whom they are accountable, and it explains what MosesJones is complaining about. Beowulf writers and Dante writers appear to have the same job, but in fact there is a quite radical difference between them---hence the odd conversation that I had with my fellow author at the writer's conference. Because she'd never heard of me, she made the quite reasonable assumption that I was a Dante writer---one so new or obscure that she'd never seen me mentioned in a journal of literary criticism, and never bumped into me at a conference. Therefore, I couldn't be making any money at it. Therefore, I was most likely teaching somewhere. All perfectly logical. In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she'd never heard of me was because I was famous.

All of this places someone like me in critical limbo. As everyone knows, there are literary critics, and journals that publish their work, and I imagine they have the same dual role as art critics. That is, they are engaging in intellectual discourse for its own sake. But they are also performing an economic function by making judgments. These judgments, taken collectively, eventually determine who's deemed worthy of receiving fellowships, teaching appointments, etc.

The relationship between that critical apparatus and Beowulf writers is famously awkward and leads to all sorts of peculiar misunderstandings. Occasionally I'll take a hit from a critic for being somehow arrogant or egomaniacal, which is difficult to understand from my point of view sitting here and just trying to write about whatever I find interesting. To begin with, it's not clear why they think I'm any more arrogant than anyone else who writes a book and actually expects that someone's going to read it. Secondly, I don't understand why they think that this is relevant enough to rate mention in a review. After all, if I'm going to eat at a restaurant, I don't care about the chef's personality flaws---I just want to eat good food. I was slagged for entitling my latest book "The System of the World" by one critic who found that title arrogant. That criticism is simply wrong; the critic has completely misunderstood why I chose that title. Why on earth would anyone think it was arrogant? Well, on the Dante side of the bifurcation it's implicit that authority comes from the top down, and you need to get in the habit of deferring to people who are older and grander than you. In that world, apparently one must never select a grand-sounding title for one's book until one has reached Nobel Prize status. But on my side, if I'm trying to write a book about a bunch of historical figures who were consciously trying to understand and invent the System of the World, then this is an obvious choice for the title of the book. The same argument, I believe, explains why the accusation of having a big ego is considered relevant for inclusion in a book review. Considering the economic function of these reviews (explained above) it is worth pointing out which writers are and are not suited for participating in the somewhat hierarchical and political community of Dante writers. Egomaniacs would only create trouble.

Mind you, much of the authority and seniority in that world is benevolent, or at least well-intentioned. If you are trying to become a writer by taking expensive classes in that subject, you want your teacher to know more about it than you and to behave like a teacher. And so you might hear advice along the lines of "I don't think you're ready to tackle Y yet, you need to spend a few more years honing your skills with X" and the like. All perfectly reasonable. But people on the Beowulf side may never have taken a writing class in their life. They just tend to lunge at whatever looks interesting to them, write whatever they please, and let the chips fall where they may. So we may seem not merely arrogant, but completely unhinged. It reminds me somewhat of the split between Christians and Faeries depicted in Susannah Clarke's wonderful book "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell." The faeries do whatever they want and strike the Christians (humans) as ludicrously irresponsible and "barely sane." They don't seem to deserve or appreciate their freedom.

Later at the writer's conference, I introduced myself to someone who was responsible for organizing it, and she looked at me keenly and said, "Ah, yes, you're the one who's going to bring in our males 18-32." And sure enough, when we got to the venue, there were the males 18-32, looking quite out of place compared to the baseline lit-festival crowd. They stood at long lines at the microphones and asked me one question after another while ignoring the Dante writers sitting at the table with me. Some of the males 18-32 were so out of place that they seemed to have warped in from the Land of Faerie, and had the organizers wondering whether they should summon the police. But in the end they were more or less reasonable people who just wanted to talk about books and were as mystified by the literary people as the literary people were by them.

In the same vein, I just got back from the National Book Festival on the Capitol Mall in D.C., where I crossed paths for a few minutes with Neil Gaiman. This was another event in which Beowulf writers and Dante writers were all mixed together. The organizers had queues set up in front of signing tables. Neil had mentioned on his blog that he was going to be there, and so hundreds, maybe thousands of his readers had showed up there as early as 5:30 a.m. to get stuff signed. The organizers simply had not anticipated this and so---very much to their credit---they had to make all sorts of last-minute rearrangements to accomodate the crowd. Neil spent many hours signing. As he says on his blog

http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp

the Washington Post later said he did this because he was a "savvy businessman." Of course Neil was actually doing it to be polite; but even simple politeness to one's fans can seem grasping and cynical when viewed from the other side.

Because of such reactions, I know that certain people are going to read this screed as further evidence that I have a big head. But let me make at least a token effort to deflect this by stipulating that the system I am describing here IS NOT FAIR and that IT MAKES NO SENSE and that I don't deserve to have the freedom that is accorded a Beowulf writer when many talented and excellent writers---some of them good friends of mine---end up selling small numbers of books and having to cultivate grants, fellowships, faculty appointments, etc.

Anyway, most Beowulf writing is ignored by the critical apparatus or lightly made fun of when it's noticed at all. Literary critics know perfectly well that nothing they say is likely to have much effect on sales. Let's face it, when Neil Gaiman publishes Anansi Boys, all of his readers are going to know about it through his site and most of them are going to buy it and none of them is likely to see a review in the New York Review of Books, or care what that review says.

So what of MosesJones's original question, which was entitled "The lack of respect?" My answer is that I don't pay that much notice to these things because I am aware at some level that I am on one side of the bifurcation and most literary critics are on the other, and we simply are not that relevant to each other's lives and careers.

What is most interesting to me is when people make efforts to "route around" the apparatus of literary criticism and publish their thoughts about books in place where you wouldn't normally look for book reviews. For example, a year ago there was a piece by Edward Rothstein in the New York Times about Quicksilver that appears to have been a sort of wildcat review. He just got interested in the book and decided to write about it, independent of the New York Times's normal book-reviewing apparatus. It is not the first time such a thing has happened with one of my books.

It has happened many times in history that new systems will come along and, instead of obliterating the old, will surround and encapsulate them and work in symbiosis with them but otherwise pretty much leave them alone (think mitochondria) and sometimes I get the feeling that something similar is happening with these two literary worlds. The fact that we are having a discussion like this one on a forum such as Slashdot is Exhibit A.

3) Singularity - by randalx

What are your thoughts on Vernor Vinge's Singularity prediction. Is it inevitable? Will humans become a part of it or be left behind by this new "species"?

Neal:

I can never get past the structural similarities between the singularity prediction and the apocalypse of St. John the Divine. This is not the place to parse it out, but the key thing they have in common is the idea of a rapture, in which some chosen humans will be taken up and made one with the infinite while others will be left behind.

I know Vernor. To know him is to respect him. He kicked my ass (as well as J. K. Rowling's and Greg Bear's and a few other people's) at the 2000 Hugo Awards, and on top of that he knows more physics than I ever will. So I don't for a moment think that he is peddling any such ideas with his prediction of a singularity. I am only telling you why I have a personal mental block as far as the Singularity prediction is concerned.

My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more than a really complicated space heater.

4) Who would win? (Score:5, Funny) - by Call Me Black Cloud

In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?

Neal:

You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

The second time was a few years later when Gibson came through Seattle on his IDORU tour. Between doing some drive-by signings at local bookstores, he came and devastated my quarter of the city. I had been in a trance for seven days and seven nights and was unaware of these goings-on, but he came to me in a vision and taunted me, and left a message on my cellphone. That evening he was doing a reading at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus. Swathed in black, I climbed to the top of the hall, mesmerized his snipers, sliced a hole in the roof using a plasma cutter, let myself into the catwalks above the stage, and then leapt down upon him from forty feet above. But I had forgotten that he had once studied in the same monastery as I, and knew all of my techniques. He rolled away at the last moment. I struck only the lectern, smashing it to kindling. Snatching up one jagged shard of oak I adopted the Mountain Tiger position just as you would expect. He pulled off his wireless mike and began to whirl it around his head. From there, the fight proceeded along predictable lines. As a stalemate developed we began to resort more and more to the use of pure energy, modulated by Red Lotus incantations of the third Sung group, which eventually to the collapse of the building's roof and the loss of eight hundred lives. But as they were only peasants, we did not care.

Our third fight occurred at the Peace Arch on the U.S./Canadian border between Seattle and Vancouver. Gibson wished to retire from that sort of lifestyle that required ceaseless training in the martial arts and sleeping outdoors under the rain. He only wished to sit in his garden brushing out novels on rice paper. But honor dictated that he must fight me for a third time first. Of course the Peace Arch did not remain standing for long. Before long my sword arm hung useless at my side. One of my psi blasts kicked up a large divot of earth and rubble, uncovering a silver metallic object, hitherto buried, that seemed to have been crafted by an industrial designer. It was a nitro-veridian device that had been buried there by Sterling. We were able to fly clear before it detonated. The blast caused a seismic rupture that split off a sizable part of Canada and created what we now know as Vancouver Island. This was the last fight between me and Gibson. For both of us, by studying certain ancient prophecies, had independently arrived at the same conclusion, namely that Sterling's professed interest in industrial design was a mere cover for work in superweapons. Gibson and I formed a pact to fight Sterling. So far we have made little headway in seeking out his lair of brushed steel and white LEDs, because I had a dentist appointment and Gibson had to attend a writers' conference, but keep an eye on Slashdot for any further developments.

5) What are you reading these days? - by IvyMike

Since you're Neal Stephenson, I suspect the answer could be something like "surveys of ancient Sumerian accounting systems".

If that's the case, please include a work of modern fiction or two in your list; something you think that a fan of your work might also enjoy. :)

Neal:

Fiction I have lately read and enjoyed:

Set this House in Order by Matt Ruff
Ilium by Dan Simmons
Iron Council by China Mieville
Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart
The I Love Bees alternate reality game
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clarke
The Fool's Tale by Nicole Galland (in galleys; soon to be published)
Short story collections by Etgar Keret: The Bus Driver who Wanted to be God, and The Nimrod Flip-out. Last time I checked, The Nimrod Flip-out was only available from an Australian publisher named Picador, but this should pose only the most minor of challenges to Slashdot readers. Keret is a young Israeli writer who has also done some work in film and graphic novels.

Nonfiction:

Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates and Lincoln's Cooper Union address
Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson

6) storygramming -by Doc Ruby

You programmed computers before you wrote novels. Greg Egan shares that hyphenated career, and continues to illustrate his stories with Java applets [netspace.net.au]. Do you still program, possibly targeting the same subjects with your word processor as your compiler?

As _Snow Crash_ was originally designed as an interactive game, and such landmarks as _Myst_ have regenerated as (usually bad) novels, do you see the arrival of a truly multimedia story, delivered simultaneously in multiple media, anytime soon? By whom, specifically or generally?

Neal:

It has already happened in the form of the I Love Bees alternate reality game, which, as many of you must know, is a promotional campaign for Halo 2. I know the people who did it, but I have lost track of what I promised not to reveal publicly, and so will shut up for now.

I still program, but I tend to do it as a diversion from writing, and so there is little crossover between it and fiction writing. Modern programming is hairy and difficult for me to get a grip on. This is because (1) there is so much user interface code, which kind of makes my eyes glaze over, and (2) GNU type code is crammed with macros, compiler directives and switches that make it very difficult for me to read the source files. Lately my platform of choice has been Mathematica, which is expensive (compared to gcc) but makes it easy to do anything with a few lines of code. Mathematica makes it easy to do proper documentation, in that you can mix narrative material freely with executable statements.

For Cryptonomicon I needed to generate some illustrations of a cutaway view of the mountain where Goto Dengo was building his tunnels. It needed to have a rough, natural-looking profile that maintained its roughness, but still had the same overall shape, when I zoomed in on it for more detailed illustrations. I did this with a Mathematica notebook that used the classic fractal technique of midpoint displacement.

For the Baroque Cycle books I needed to convert my manuscripts, which were all TeX files, into a Quark format used by the publisher. So I wrote an emacs lisp program that churned through the TeX files looking for TeX escape codes and converting them to their equivalents in Quark. This was nasty and tedious but, in the end, reasonably satisfying.

7) Money - by querencia

One of the major themes in Cryptonomicon that carried over (in a big way) to The Baroque Cycle is money. You introduced some "futuristic" views of currency and of where money might be going in Cryptonomicon, and you skillfully managed to do the same thing, while explaining some of the history of modern monetary systems, in the most recent books.

You've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about money lately. Is there anything going on in the modern world with monetary systems (barter networks, for example) that you find particularly interesting?

What do you see on the horizon with respect to money?

Neal:

Actually, what's interesting about money is that it doesn't seem to change that much at all. It became fantastically sophisticated hundreds of years ago. Back before people knew about germs, evolution, the Table of Elements, and other stuff that we now take for granted, people were engaging in financial manipulations that seem quite modern in their sophistication. So if I had to take a wild guess---and believe me, it is a wild guess---I'd say that money and the way it works is going to be a constant, not a variable.

8) BeOS - by Coryoth

When you wrote "In the Beginning was the Command Line," you were very much in love with BeOS. As nice as BeOS was, it is now mostly gone. Do you still use BeOS 5, or have you acquired YellowTab from Zeta? Or, instead have you embraced the new UNIX based MacOS X as the OS you want to use when you "Just want to go to Disneyland"?

Neal:

You guessed right: I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of "In the beginning was the command line" is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely.

9) Travel tips for modern primitives? - by timothy

Mr. Stephenson:

I greatly enjoy your travel stories, both non-fiction (Mother Earth, Motherboard) and in particular your descriptions of the Philippines in Cryptonomicon.

Can you share some of the ideas you've developed for savvy trav'lin? For instance, how do you deal with carrying sufficient technology (whatever level you deem this to be) while minimizing the risk of theft, breakage, or loss by other means? Do you dress native or carry your entire wardrobe? [And broader, do you travel with something close to nothing, picking up necessary items as the need arises? What do you not leave home without?]

Do you carry any sort of self-defense means in some places, and if so What and Where?

Neal:

I haven't done that much in the way of adventuresome travel lately. Even when I was doing so, I was never the sort of hardened third-world travel geek that you are imagining. The thing is that when you go to such countries you can typically get a room in a five-star hotel for less than a hundred bucks a night. At that rate, it's easy to be a sellout and wallow in luxury. Staying in a dive is more romantic, but makes it harder to write. My excuse (if I need one) is that typically I'm not writing about backpackers and rural people in those countries; I'm writing about well-heeled expats whose natural habitat is airport bars and Shangri-La hotels. So that's where I tend to end up.

Re "self-defense means:" I am reminded of a history book I read recently entitled "Skeletons on the Zahara" by Dean King. It is about some American sailors who get shipwrecked on the Atlantic Coast of Africa and go through hell. Eventually most of them make it back to freedom with the help of some Arab traders based in Morocco. These traders range across the Sahara on incredibly arduous journeys. They are just about the toughest and meanest hombres you can possibly imagine. They've been through all kinds of fights and ambushes, plagues of locusts, sandstorms, etc. and come out on top. Because of their success they have acquired camels, horses, and weapons: not only swords and daggers but rifles and shotguns too. After having rescued the Americans, these guys go out on another journey in the desert, and find themselves surrounded by a few dozen people who are wretched even by the standards of the Sahara: no animals, little in the way of clothing, and no weapons except for bags containing stones. A fight breaks out. The traders discharge their weapons and kill everyone they shoot at: maybe half a dozen. Then before they can reload they are all killed by flying stones.

The best "self-defense means" when you are surrounded by a hundred million people of some other culture is to avoid dangerous places and figure out some way to get along with the folks around you.

10) Confidential Proposal, Off shore data haven (Score:5, Funny) - by SlashDread

Greetings to you in the name of the most high God, from my beloved country Nigeria.

I am sorry and I solicit your permission into your privacy. I am Barrister Leonardo Akume, lawyer to the late Dr. Koffi Abachus, a brilliant Nigerian mathematician.

My former client, late Dr. Koffi Abachus, died in a mysterious plane crash in the year 1994 on the way to a scientific conference to make an announcement of the utmost importance to mankind.

He was planning to present a paper regarding his extensive work on data storage. It is said the data storage device he had developed, would be roughly ten times more secure compared to the latest quantum excyption techniques. The device was about the size of a steamer trunk, and stored on a privately owned island close to the coast of Nigeria. Dr Koffi Abachus is also the King of the local tribe by heritage...

Neal:

Your proposition sounds quite reasonable. In order for me to provide you with the support that you need, I will need for you to wire $100,000 into my Swiss bank account...

Oh well.. Should there BE a data haven? If so, where?

Neal:

At this point, that is probably a technical question that I might not be competent to answer. I can carry a gig of encrypted data on a thumb drive now, and it doesn't cost much. Soon it'll be smaller and cheaper. Millions of people in different countries carrying gigs of data on thumb drives, iPods, cellphones, etc. make for a pretty robust distributed data storage system. It is difficult to imagine how one could build a centralized, hardened facility that would be more robust than that. But perhaps there's some technical or regulatory angle that I'm failing to appreciate here. I have not kept up to speed on this since Cryptonomicon.

11) Blue Origin - by Concerned Onlooker

The Wikipedia lists you as a part-time advisor for Blue Origin [blueorigin.com], a company that is working to "develop a crewed, suborbital launch system." What is it that you do for them and has the recent winning of the X-Prize by the Spaceship One team had any effect on Blue Origin's plans? What are your visions of future private space flight?

Neal:

Like Spock on the deck of the Enterprise, I sit in the corner and await opportunities to jump out and yammer about Science. Unlike Spock, I don't have anyone reporting to me and I never get to sit in the captain's chair and aim the phasers. This is probably good.

Though the X-Prize is cool and good, Blue Origin never intended to compete for it. Consequently, it has had no effect, other than destroying productivity whenever a SpaceShipOne flight is being broadcast.

As for my visions of future private space flight: here I have to remind you of something, which is that, up to this point in the interview, I have been wearing my novelist hat, meaning that I talk freely about whatever I please. But private space flight is an area where I wear a different hat (or helmet). I do not freely disseminate my thoughts on this one topic because I have agreed to sell those thoughts to Blue Origin. Admittedly, this feels a little strange to a novelist who is accustomed to running his mouth whenever he feels like it. But it is a small price to pay for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a minor character in a Robert Heinlein novel.

12) Do new publishing models make sense? - by Infonaut

Have you contemplated using any sort of alternative to traditional copyright for your works of fiction, such as a flavor of Creative Commons [creativecommons.org] license? Do you feel that making money as a writer and more open copyright are compatible in the long term, or do you think that writers like Lessig who distribute electronically via CC are merely indulging in a short-lived fad?

Neal:

Publishing is a very ancient and crafty industry that existed and flourished before the idea of copyright even existed. When copyright came into existence, the publishing industry dealt with it and moved on. My suspicion is that everything that's been going on lately will amount to a sort of fire drill that will force publishing to scurry around and make some new arrangements so that they can get back to making money for themselves and for authors.

You can use the brick-and-mortar bookstore as a way to think about this. There was a time maybe five years ago when many people were questioning whether brick-and-mortar bookstores were going to survive the onslaught of online retailers. Now, if you take the narrow view that a bookstore is nothing more than a machine that swaps money for books, then it follows that there's no need for a physical store. But here we are five years later. Some bookstores have gone out of business, it's true. But there are big, beautiful bookstores all over the place, with sofas and coffee bars and author appearances and so on. Why? Because it turns out that a bookstore is a lot more than a machine that swaps money for books.

Likewise, if you think of a publisher as a machine that makes copies of bits and sells them, then you're going to predict the elimination of publishers. But that's only the smallest part of what publishers actually do. This is not to say that electronic distribution via CC is just a fad, any more than online bookstores are a fad. They will keep on going in parallel, and all of this will get sorted out in time.

Re:Neal Stephenson out-trolls the trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. Remember Signal 11? He demonstrated that the moderation system can be socially engineered to give you high karma.

The Slashdot moderation system also serves as a means to eliminate dissent and unpopular opinions. Anyone who asks a question that does not fit the general groupthink will be modded down, regardless of wether the comment was a good question or not.

Shatner he ain't

[Anonymous Coward]

This has got to be one of the longest interviews on Slashdot. but then again this is the author that used 5 pages to describe a character eating cereal. (captain crunch in Cryptonomicon)

Second Amendment

[Anonymous Coward]

"In the U.S., where the right to bear **certain** weapons is written into the Constitution..."

My own emphasis on the word "certain." This is a common mistake, fostered by our educational system. The 2nd amendment doesn't specify "certain" or "specific" weapons for protection. It protects **all** weapons. The key phrase here is "Congress shall make no law..." And even though your government-approved social studies teacher told you that the Constitution is a "living document" and is "open to interpretation," I submit to you that "Congress shall make no law" means what it says and says what it means.

Remember this document was written by people who had just won a war, by a long shot, against the most powerful and oppressive empire in their world. One of the reasons they won is because the **individual** colonists had better rifles than their government overlords. This would be like individual Americans having better assault rifles than the American government. Which, of course, is forbidden by federal and state laws.

Beowulf writers

[drinkypoo]

Imagine a...

Seriously though, Neal says that the contrast between popular authors making money and literary authors not making money "IS NOT FAIR and [...] MAKES NO SENSE" but to me it's perfectly logical. The strength in any system belongs to the masses, whether they realize it or not. The public (myself included) wants good yarns more than great literary works. Do I care that Neal's fiction is, while incredible bright and interesting, essentially mental popcorn? Hell no. I just want to be entertained and his books provide me the greatest entertainment per page and per dollar, so I buy them. I would prefer to read Zodiac rather than Wuthering Heights because it does a superior job of entertaining me.

Re:Second Amendment

[Mac Degger]

I'm a EU-an, and don't know the US constitution by heart, but doesn't the second amendment also have something along the lines of 'by a militia' in there?
The way I always thought of it, that means that individual weapon ownership should be illegal, except if you are litterally part of a militia, /with all the duties which that entails/.

Re:Second Amendment

[iamacat]

Somehow I suspect Second Amendment was talking about pistols, not mortars. Something you can use to repell bandits who show up at your house, but not to interfere with general public's "pursuit of happiness".

If, despite common sense, second amendment advocates private ownership of nuclear bombs, well it's time for another amendment. How are snipper or automatic rifles necessary for self defence? Let everyone have manually loaded single-shot pistols, or better yet decent non/less-lethal weapons.

Re:Beowulf writers

[RexDart]

I might note that Wuthering Heights, in Stephenson's classification, is a Beowulf novel, not a Dante novel.

More precisely, it's a Beowulf novel transformed into a Dante novel by antiquity and the assimilation by the Dante circle and gatekeepers.

Re:Second Amendment

[VAXcat]

It goes "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed". Some interpret that to mean the right to bear arms wes restricted to the miilitia, which is a curious interpretation. If the statement read "a well educated faculty, being necessary to the eduction of the contry, the right of the people to keep and bear books shall not be infringed", would you conclude that only professors had a right to possess book?

Re:Beowulf writers

[Jameth]

Did you notice the way that you insult science fiction as a whole while saying you like it? I would have to say that your suppositions are wrong and are based entirely on what literary critics have been pushing forever (or at least a while).

As a student currently working at a writing major, I run into a lot of literary authors that just don't get Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Literary fiction focuses on giving depth to characters and showing rich emotions, usually specifically at the expense of the rest of the piece.

Most literary critics have trouble understanding that having a piece which studies society as a whole, rather than just individuals, is just as valid, and that science fiction, with an alternative future or alternative world, is an incredibly effective way to portray this.

The other genres which are so denigrated, fantasy and sci-fi, are just different, and treating them as less intellectually valid merely because their purpose is different, is a massive failing.

Re:Beowulf writers

[bskin]

Mental popcorn? 2500+ pages of historical fiction contemplating the roots of our modern scientific, social, political, and financial systems is mental popcorn? I mean, it seemed to me like the whole Baroque Cycle was trying to get at the roots of modern thought. That's not popcorn to me.

Of course, as a caveat, I'll point out that I consider there to be a big difference between the plot of a novel and what it's about.

The Well-Regulated Militia

[Latent Heat]

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

The "militia" clause has been a long-time issue of contention, and it is widely believed that courts in the U.S. don't have any issues with gun control (many cities have very strict gun ordinances which are very often violated) as the 2nd Amendment applies to, as you say, serving in the National Guard. The only people who seem to believe that the 2nd Amendment outlaws gun control laws are members of the NRA, who are a group with a cause rather than people with official standing.

With that said, I think there is a larger issue here than only th people in the U.S. who want to run around with guns as they see fit. If the 2nd Amendment is held to not mean much of anything with regard to enabling gun ownership, perhaps all of the other amendments could be just as readily dismissed. The First Amendment has been given an expansive and broad interpretation while the 2nd Amendment has been given the narrowest of interpretations -- what is to keep it that way?

IANACS (I am not a constitutional scholar) but let me offer my take on the 2nd Amendment. The Militia historically refered to the adult (male) citizenry who would be expected to take up arms to defend the Republic, not to the Texas Air National Guard or related institutions. A well-regulated Militia refers to those adult males having sufficient training with arms that they know how to shoot straight. There are historical precedents. You haven't told us what part of the EU you hail from, but every adult male Swiss is required to have not only a gun, but something quite capable like an H-K stashed away in their closet. They don't get to keep the ammunition, but they are required to have that automatic weapon at the ready. Going back in time, there were English kings who required the male citizenry to able to shoot a cross bow, the H-K of its day in terms of capabilities. The training to handle a cross bow is no small undertaking.

So, the intent of the 2nd amendment is that all adult males in good standing be not restricted in owning, acquiring, and practicing with the type of firearms necessary to acquire good shooting skills. Can we bar felons from guns? We bar them from voting. Can we restrict the kind of gun? In my opinion, we can restrict the type of gun to what is reasonable to use in training and practicing shooting skills. Can we restrict where you can take a gun? Why not -- the 2nd Amendment protects the right to own guns, not the right to wave them around. Is the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment important to people who want nothing to do with guns? Yes, because then all of the other amendments are in peril.

Re:Second Amendment

[rot26]

doesn't the second amendment also have something along the lines of 'by a militia' in there?

No.

It only mentions militias in the sense that they may be necessary from time to time and that it impossible to have a militia unless the individuals which might be called upon to form it are armed.

Gotta disagree here

[wiredog]

I'm a Professional Programmer doing Serious Work for Real Money, which often involves looking through Other People's Code, and software is shit. I will never forget looking through some code and, just before some Deep Magic, seeing /*Why did I do this?*/

Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of SF is shit. Well, >99% of software is.

Re:Shatner he ain't

[DoctorPepper]

Shatner he ain't

Thank God for small favors! ;-)

This has got to be one of the longest interviews on Slashdot. but then again this is the author that used 5 pages to describe a character eating cereal. (captain crunch in Cryptonomicon)

Perhaps, but it was one of the most intertaining interviews I've read on Slashdot in a long time! :-)

Neal

[alexjohns]

I'm going to come out of the closet and declare publically that I love Neal Stephenson.

Actually, I'm going to step further out and say that I love intelligent people.

I guess, more accurately, I love the fact that there are intelligent people in the world.

Note to Cmdr Taco, et. al.: We need more writing like this on here. Do what you can to make that happen. Thanks. Carry on.

Re:Second Amendment

[BladeRider]

I submit you don't understand the purpose of the second amendment. It was not to provide weapons of self-defense to citizens. It was to insure they could take up arms against an oppressive government, if needed. A one shot pistol isn't going to fulfill that necessity.

Re:Superb

[drpentode]

Don't you mean a new tab? ;)

Re:Diamond Age

[ajs]

except for the lame ending.

I've written my thoughts on Stephenson's endings here before, but let me re-state: he's a very bright man, and like most of his ilk, is obviously very easily distracted. This leads to the sorts of endings that make it feel like he's left the room.

That said, you get more out of the first 90% of a Stephenson book than you do with almost all modern fiction (there are exceptions, and they're ALL worth reading, and many suffer from the same problem). Personally, I find his insights on topics ranging from nanotechnology to pipe organs useful enough to warrant suffering his endings. I even hear that the Baroque Cycle marks his first set of good endings, and I look forward to getting my copy of Quicksilver back to find out ;-)

YMMV, but I find that true insight into maters of modern technology and society are rare. This is why I grasp onto authors like Vernor Vinge and Neil Stephenson. They're the bards of our age, and we should listen and learn what we have taught them.

Good thing my boss doesn't know...

[greyfeld]

that I just spent a good half hour reading your replies and some of the comments. It's been a long time since I posted, but your interview was thought provoking and entertaining. Thanks, you made my day.

Re:Beowulf writers

[jazman_777]

The strength in any system belongs to the masses

Yes, if there is hope, it lies with the proles. Thus, there is no hope.

Re:Thanks, Neal!

[Golias]

Heh. My favorite part was this:

But the publishing industry still works for some lucky novelists who find a way to establish a connection with a readership sufficiently large to put bread on their tables. It's conventional to refer to these as "commercial" novelists, but I hate that term, so I'm going to call them Beowulf writers.

Pretense, thy name is Neal.

I can refute his point just by pulling a couple writers off the top of my head: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Maybe you've heard of them, Neal. They were a couple of college Profs who also wrote books, and you would probably kill for the chance for your books to sell nearly as well as some of their lesser works.

Patronage artists are not less accountable than commercial artists. Commercial artists have a publisher, who decides whether or not to print their books based on the opinion of whether or not they will sell.

So, unless he or she self-publishes and hands out the books in coffee shops, a commercial artist has a patron, too: the publisher.

You are not the village skald. You are a contracted employee, hired to write books that can be marketed to a chosen demographic. Get over it, and yourself.

P.S. All this nastiness aside, I do enjoy your books. Keep up the good work.

Re:Beowulf writers

[mbbac]

More precisely, it's a Beowulf novel transformed into a Dante novel by antiquity and the assimilation by the Dante circle and gatekeepers.

Doesn't the same go for Beowolf?

With respect to his first answer...

[gmcraff]

... and I firmly believe that "hacking tools" should be held in the same regard as hammers, saws, pliers, crowbars, etceteras: instruments that have a daily legal purpose that a unlawful minority might use for a unlawful act. The military has them, but that doesn't make them weapons in nature. The military has them because everyone has them.

While he makes the point that the Founding Fathers probably had in their minds flintlocks (and sabers, cannon, horse-cavalry) when they were thinking of the arms that the people might keep and bear, at the same time their view of the press was those with manual printing presses, paper and quill-pens, not radio, TV, high-speed automatic presses and the internet. (Remember that any successful argument limiting the scope of one article of the Bill of Rights can immediately be used in the same form against another... precedent can be a bitch.)

I would point out that the intention of the Founding Fathers was that the militia, both organized and unorganized [gpo.gov], be equipped with such weapons as are customary for the time. (For those who won't RTFLink, the militia is every able bodied male from 17 to 45 that is a citizen or has declared their intention to become one, plus any female that have joined an organized militia, state or national. Religious conscientious objectors are excused from combat duty, and may be assigned noncombatant roles. Still on the books and in effect... if you're American and male, you're a militiaman.) In order to avoid having an standing army in peace-time, the militia would be relied upon to handle defence against an aggressor until an army could be raised. Furthermore, in order that the standing army not be used as an instrument of oppression after it is raised, the militia would be armed alike to the standing army. Indeed, a few years after the Constitution was established, the Militia Act of 1792 was established requiring all men that could afford it to procure a musket, bayonet, shot, powder and associated gear (i.e. the "assault weapons" of the time). Sunday mornings were spent in worship, exercising their hard earned rights; Sunday afternoon were spent at the local firing range, practicing in order to defend those rights.

I think it is clear that the intention of the Founding Fathers was very clear: if the military can have it, the people can have it. It does not, however, follow that the government shall provide it to any individual of the people. Domestic builders of tanks are under contract with clauses to provide them only to the government, so you'll have to build your own, and you can't import them. Want hacking tools? Well, the military doesn't have to give you theirs, but you can write your own.

So the question posed by arashiakari is interesting: if the government is to classify something as an "arm", then they may not infringe the right of the people to keep and "bear" it, even if it is a Perl script, but they don't have to make it easy to acquire. Which does not mean that you can export it, which is where I think the source of the question came from (i.e. the prohibition on the export of cryptographic devices under their classification as a "munition").

When one is unclear as to the intention of the Founding Fathers, the Internet can bring you some of their insight in the form of the Federalist Papers [ou.edu], thanks to Project Gutenberg.

Re:science fiction in the class room

[teidou]

I Call BS.

FYI, some of our local schools (MD) are teaching Ender's game as required reading this year.

Now, instead of being indifferent to science-fiction, non-nerds will hate it. Yeah.

Re:Ouch!

[NoOneInParticular]

I don't know of specific advances in mathematics, but if you shave off a tiny bit of the power of the general O(N^3) inversion for a special case of practical importance, it's a simple calculation to determine the size of the matrix to make the calculation a thousand times faster, a hundred thousand times faster, etc. Algorithms work that way, unlike computers. Furthermore, Moore's law only talks about the number of transistors which is a special case in building a general-purpose machine. CPU speed, memory/cache/harddisk access also count. Each of these have increased but not all in line with Moore's law.

Academia is a riskier career

[cquark]

I'm not sure your risk evaluation is correct. You may be right about your own field because in some fields, it's relatively easy to get an academic job. However, English is not such a field. As there aren't nearly as many jobs outside universities that require an English PhD as there are for a CS PhD, there are far more English PhDs produced than jobs for them.

After all, if a professor produces 10 grad students during a 30-40 year career, only one of them can get his job. Worse yet, English professors are more likely to be replaced after retirement by several part-time adjuncts rather than by another full time professor. All the effort of getting a PhD, then years of non-tenure track jobs, is a taking a considerable risk with a decade or more of your life on the chance of getting an academic job.

You may have a better chance of becoming an academic making the $20,000 a year a starting English prof makes in many universities than you do of being a writer who makes that much, but I'm not sure the chances are that much better and taking a chance at being a writer doesn't take the decade of time that taking a chance at being an English professor does.

Re:Second Amendment

[Ubergrendle]

This is modded as funny, but I'm sure that Native Americans or the southern states that democratically elected to leave the union would agree with "lincoln was a dictator".

Civil rights and abolition of slavery were later incorporated into the justification for the war, as the body count rose and the South under some brilliant military leadership retained the initiative. "Slavery" is the kindergarden version recounted to try and justify the self-mutilation the US underwent in the 1870s. There's even a joke about this in The Simpsons when Apu applies for US citizenship...The fact remains that if the southern states were justified in leaving the British Empire, they were similarly justified in leaving the Union.

I'm not one for hero worship...Lincoln was a very good leader, but he definitely improved as the war carried on. I'm glad the North won, and the US turned into a much better, recognisable nation after the civil war.

Well, there's a bit more to it than that.

[Merk]

An open eye is important, but an open mind and brain is more important. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If you find you're making friends much faster than you expect, they might not be friends. If you feel out of place, you probably look out of place, etc.

He's also right about getting along with the folks around you. Chances are, you'll always stand out, but if you make an effort to fit in it will help. For example, in many places, people wear long pants even when it's very hot out. If you wear shorts, you stand out, and you *look* like a tourist -- a tourist is a target. If you wear long pants, you may still look like a tourist, but you may be mistaken for a tourist who has been around for long enough that he won't fall for the scams.

Re:Beowulf writers

[ThousandStars]

The public (myself included) wants good yarns more than great literary works.

I think the public -- over the long term, anyway -- wants good yarns that are literary works. I don't think there needs to be a distinction between them, although I suspect many writers on both sides of the Dante/Beowulf divide want to say that one is superior as a way of justifying their own style or importance. The best books seek and achieve both.

To my mind, that is the distinction of a great writer: to be both literary and cognizant of the importance of a powerful story. Stephenson does this in books like _Cyrptonomicon_, which explain his well-deserved fame.

Re:Thanks, Neal!

[Eneff]

I think you miss his point. An author can live in both worlds, as Tolkien and Lewis (and Toni Morrison for another example) did and do, but authors such as these know that they live in two worlds.

Fitzgerald was a Beowolf writer embraced by the Dante crowd, for example. There is definite crossover, but the point is sound: having read both, there is a distinct difference of literature coming from the two communities.

Would Georges Perec's La Disparition ever be read by the masses? It's unlikely at best.

C'mon dude

[apankrat]

C'mon Neal...you should know slashdotters better than that. We don't hit the back button, we use mouse gestures.

C'mon, dude...you should know slashdotters better than that. We can't use mouse gestures, because we have carpal tunnel syndrom.

Re:Superb

[gamgee5273]

Methinks someone needs to read a bit more. Have you actually read all of the books, or does their size scare you?

Just because a book is long, Jethro, doesn't mean it's not good.

Personally, and speaking as someone who has edited magazines and a few short books: Snow Crash was in dire need of better editing. Like I said: strong book if you're 21. Not so strong once you've grown up.

Re:Gotta disagree here

[Grab]

A computer scientist is what you start with. A Professional Programmer is what you get when you take a computer scientist and train them properly...

I'll make a more general statement about software. It starts off good. Then you double the number of features, and have to keep all the old hooks for backwards compatibility. OK, it leaves you with messy interfaces, but that's tolerable. Then someone tweaks something in their code that breaks yours, so you have to do some architecturally horrible things that are like taking the Taj Mahal, blocking up the doorways and forcing people to get in via the roof, using some rickety scaffolding (painted orange and purple) to get up there.

You ask for time to rewrite and remove cruft. Request denied. Meantime someone has now written some scaffolding traversal algorithm which will be broken if you clean up your code, so you're screwed. The scaffolding is now seen to be rickety, and someone else's code falls off it and is damaged. The owner of this code is currently on an ultra-high-priority project and can't spare the time to fix it, and no-one else understands it well enough to fix it for him. So the decision is made to fix the problem by concreting the scaffolding in place. After all, it's only a short-term solution until the owner of the other code has time to fix it, isn't it...?

The thrust of this more general statement is that humans who are encumbered with the limitations of a commercial environment are not designed to write software. Humans are fallible, and a commercial environment means that it doesn't get done unless the customer can tell the difference. Each individual bit of cruft isn't noticeable, and by the time the cruft has slowed the code down noticeably, the complete rewrite that it needs is way too expensive. Unless blessed with a godlike manager, your software will become shit.

Let's call this Bartlett's Law:

"All software does not start shit. However, all software will become shit unless management can recognise bad architectural decisions and will allow rewrites to fix them."

Grab.

Similarity of NS's style to WS Burroughs

[Anonymous Coward]

Wotcher,

If one would want to pursue a lit-crit bent inre NS, suggestion: compare in general to WS Burroughs in his "Boy's own adventure" mode. Particularly /Cities of the Red Night/ more than any other text.

NS's style has alot of WSB's cut-up technique applied. And, in terms of criticism, usually doesn't apply sufficient editing from a "literary novel" point of view. NS probably wont become cannon, unlike WSB, but WSB was aiming at an entirely different audience.

Pynchon and Gibson

[sbszine]

People have seen comparisons to Pynchon (Lot 49 particularly) in William Gibson novels as well. He blogs about it here [williamgibsonbooks.com], if you're interested. Gibson says he thinks it's to do with the abrupt endings, which apply to Stephenson as well (more so, really).

My take is that cyberpunk is an outgrowth of the new wave, and the new wave placed value on non-realistic Pynchon, Kafka etc. (Norman Spinrad talks about this a bit in his book Science Fiction In The Real World).

Re:Second Amendment

[Teancum]

Unfortunately there are times and situations where every single member of a society is in grave danger, and notable situations where every single person in a society was killed due to warfare. This is the situation that is going on right now in Sudan, and had those people living there been able to bear arms to fight the invaders driving the Sudanese from their homes, it may not be as big of an international issue.

BTW, there have been many battles that take place in major towns. The problem is that such warfare is always problematic and tends to have extreamly high casulty rates for everybody that tries to do it. It was in Stalingrad that the German Army pretty much bled to death and was stopped, although at a very high cost to the Red Army as well. During that series of battles in that city, a major offensive was considered successful when they captured a single city block. In terms of the American Revolutionary War, you might want to look up the Battle of Brooklyn Heights for some interesting "urban" combat that took place, including a series of skirmishes that occured on Manhattan itself. These make a very interesting tour if you ever get to NYC and want to visit the old battle fields. New York City was occupied by the British Army primarily because Royal Marines and the Royal Army were able to invade with sufficient numbers to completely overwhelm the Americans.

One of the advantages of the Geneva Protocols of Warfare is to make an honorable means to surrender, and realizing that civilian populations will be (at least attempted) to be kept away from combat operations. The problem is when civilians become the target of operations on one side, the gloves come off and these procedures are thrown out the window, as happened during WWII.

Americans have been pretty much isolated from having to directly face warfare as civilians, with the exception of Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, it is because of 9/11 directly affecting ordinary Americans that has given Pres. Bush much of his current warmaking power. It would be interesting if infantry combat operations took place on American soil what the civilian component to combat resistance would be.

Re:Superb

[bob beta]

I personally find that Stephenson grows as a writer with each book.

I like The Big U best.

No, I am not kidding. No, I am not trolling.

The two psuedonym books are good, too. Can't remember their titles.

Re:Second Amendment

[Coulson]

I can't think of any sane raeason my neighbor (in a heavily populated area) could have for owning a machine gun. Potential revolt against a totalitarian state (results of Nov. 2 notwithstanding) seems much less likely than the chance of it being used to harm a large number of innocent people. Or consider an RPG or similar "military" weaponry... I just don't think in belongs. If you want to go out of town to shoot it at a range, well, be my guest. Hmm. I guess I'm more against usage than owning, then...

Regardless, the point of this post is to say that, if guns were allowed, it wouldn't be just the criminals who would have easy access to weapons. An armed society is a polite society, as they say.

Re:Thanks, Neal!

[Stephen Samuel]

In 1991 Many Iraqis were entirely fed up with Saddam, and QUITE willing to put up with the bombing campaign, etc. to get him out. When Bush (sr) called for the people of Iraq to rise up and revolt against Saddam, many did.

Many a surprised Journalist in that war came across Iraqi soldiers happily surrendering and chanting stuff lie "long live George Bush". I expect that they meant it because they expected that their country was well on the way to being liberated.

What GB Sr. did, however, was -- once he had secured the oil wells of Kuwait, the no-fly stipulation for the Iraqi military was relaxed to allow saddam to use his helicopter gunships against the civilians who had heeded GB Sr's calls for revolt. The people of Iraq who responded to bush's call for support were literally rewarded with death and dismemberment.

This cost the US in general, and the name of George Bush specifically a LOT of good will. That the US and UN then funneled most of the money/supplies from the food-for-oil campaign thru Saddamn and his minions (thus reinforcing his hold on Iraq) didn't help much.

Junior's insistence on going into Iraq based on clearly fabricated grounds didn't help much. The Iraqi people were clear, at that point, that whatever the reason GB had for going into Iraq, helping them was NOT at the top of the list (and possibly not even near the top).

The unwillingness of US soldiers to protect Iraqi civilians from looting and random violence in the early days of the occupation didn't help (and was, by the way, a possible violation of the Geneva Convention).

That the US military seems to be continually acting as if Iraqi civilian 'collateral damage' (read: death, and maiming of innocent civilians and destructin of (what's left of) their proerty) isn't a big deal doesn't help. Things like the tourture, murder and general mistreatment at Abu Gharib (and probably other) prisons -- and the way that it was dealt with when it came to light have been bad ideas too.

It's not that GB Sr. didn't go all the way into Iraq, and GB Jr. did. that's at question here. The contexts of the two invasions were very different. Among other things, there were a good number of Arab nations involved in 1991, but effectively none in 2003 other than Turkey who are (a) not arab, and (b) seriously hated by the Kurds in northern Iraq (not without reason).

Best analogy I can come up with at this late hour: If you let a fat lady drown and then insist on saving the pretty blonde who seems to be in somewhat less distress (having waited for her to work her way out of deep water), some people may (rightly) question your motives -- for both situations.

Re:Second Amendment

[Edward Faulkner]

There are two problems with your argument:

First, you can't use slavery to distinguish between the cases of 1776 and 1860. In both cases, the seceding states held slaves.

Second, the belief that a war was necessary to end slavery is ridiculous, considering that every other slave-owning nation of the world managed to end slavery peacefully through comepensated emancipation. Lincoln could have purchased every slave in the south at fair market value, and still spent less money than the cost of the war. By many metrics, slavery was already in decline.

Id' you'd like to learn more, I'd recommend "The Real Lincoln" by Thomas DiLorenzo.

Re:Second Amendment

[Hektor_Troy]

It would be interesting if infantry combat operations took place on American soil what the civilian component to combat resistance would be.

Thrown in jail with no legal rights, no vistation rights and no option of being told what exactly they did; they would be kept on an island far from their home, perhaps one could use of the Pacific Islands in the middle of onewhere.

Neal Stephenson Books @ Amazon

[OmegaSphere Inc.]

Books by Neal Stephenson at Amazon [amazon.com]

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