I don't know if it's something most politicians do consciously, but it's certainly something they benefit from.

Coke and Pepsi aren't in competition with each other. They're in competition with anyone not Coke or Pepsi. As long as the conversation is defined in terms of "Which shall I have, Coke or Pepsi?", they both win, and they like that. The danger (from their POV) is that the question might become, "What shall I drink?"

The original was the one with printing on both sides.

(I'll get my coat.)

So don't let the players and coaches dispute anything. Place the technology under the control of the officials.

Soccer/football is not a non-stop sport. Play stops all the time -- for injuries, throw-ins, corner kicks, etc. It's just the clock doesn't stop. This "play never stops" thing is the biggest dellusion in soccer, and I think it hurts sometimes, such as FIFA's inability to admit it's not 1932 anymore.

Can, but often doesn't. At least, not in the Cup matches I've seen.

That still doesn't explain why technology must be forbidden. I'm not talking about changing game mechanics. Just allowing for things like goal detection or honoring of replay evidence. With modern technology you can replay something in a matter of seconds. If this was under the control of an off-field official they could signal the referee if they saw something. You don't off to stop play unless there's an infraction. Similar to how the linesmen work. Add in two-way hands-free radios to make communication easier.

I'm not talking about US football here.

Yah, the first book was definitely the clear best there. Great concept, but it only got you so far.

Larry Niven is a Favorite Author(TM) of mine. I like his shorter fiction best. Niven's an idea guy, when he works in full-length novels sometimes things drag a bit. He's got several short-story collections. N-Space is good for that.

My employer makes parts for the F-22. (This isn't *that* special. Like most big government programs, the F-22 is carefully designed to spread the work across as many different Congressional funding districts as possible. But I digress.) When the program was cut, the people in that division started to really worry. A year later, it turns out we're actually getting almost as much business as originally planned. Since they didn't buy as many planes, they're having to fly the planes they do have more, which means they're burning through spare parts faster.

The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.

One of the problems is that nobody seems to understand the difference between NRE (non-recurring expenses) and RE (recurring expenses). A lot of the budget disasters we see in government are because the NRE is significant. Designing and testing the F-22 was hugely fscking expensive. There's a ton of new technology on the plane. You pay for that if you build one plane or one hundred planes. Every time Congress cut the planned order count to "save money", all they ended up doing was making each plane cost more. And they were surprised each time.

Morons.

So I've seen at least three Neal Stephenson threads, a Will Gibson, a Phil Dick, and Ender's Game. Some more recommendations on books I think most geeks should read:

Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End. Seriously, every geek should read this book. It's the best fiction on near future augmented reality that I've seen myself. Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is also outstanding, but much more "out there"; it's more entertaining than eye-opening. It does have one of the best alien perspectives I've read. Not just humans with bumpy foreheads, really *alien* aliens.

Charles Stross - Just about anything, really. His "Laundry Files" fantasy read like a cross-between H.P. Lovecraft, Douglas Adams, and Ian Fleming ("James Bond"). I know that sounds really weird, but it works. They're a riot. More serious and sciency are the "Eschaton" books -- Singularity Sky and sequels. Some of his works are available online for free, legally. Scratch Monkey for example.

John Scalzi - Old Man's War. I just finished this myself. The finish was weak but the ideas are a blast. As one reviewer put it, it's like Starship Troopers without the lectures.

Here's a few others I'm suspect will won't appeal as broadly, but I'll throw in 'cause I want to. It's my post.

C.S. Friedman - This Alien Shore. Space SF. Protagonist is a girl with cooperative multiple personalities; this is fascinatingly portrayed. Very good speculation on how direct brain interfaces might be realized. Lots of diverse human cultures. The real winner, though, is a human culture that values emotional differences and has social customs to let people interact across such boundaries. Introverted geeks (INTJ) will love this. Friedman packs a very high density of ideas into her books.

Corey Doctorow - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom . Free content. An interesting take on a post-scarcity meritocracy. I think it's kind of nutty, but interesting. For the price, it's decent.

Okay, I see your point there.

Certainly, *adding* a reason to stop the action would *change* the existing dynamic. But it wouldn't be the *only* time play stops, which is my point. Faking injuries to stop play is already a well-documented technique, so it wouldn't even be the worst case. Does this mean it's worth the change? That I can't say.

And really, I don't think the game needs replays so much as it needs goal detection, which can be done in real-time nowadays, or so I'm told.

Note that "you never received" does not mean they didn't send it. The message prolly ended up in your spam folder. I know that's where the one they sent me ended up, when I lost the name I had been using for a few years. Of course, I only found that out once it was too late and I went and looked in the spam folder.

Come to think of it, I suppose I could have tried contacting them to explain what happened. Maybe they would have forgiven me. But I just shrugged and picked a different parent domain.

Except that people still see the replays at home/after, so they still get all pissed off.

"Fair or not, those are the rules" is a bad reason for anything.

Why not?

And you neglect the vision augmentation thing. When people have cameras and displays implanted in their heads, you can't just ban it. Sure, that's decades away, but it's likely to happen. Everybody is already carrying a high-resolution movie camera with them already.

Er, slight self-correction: ASPI is technically not part of the BIOS. It was usually provided by a device driver loaded in CONFIG.SYS. It provides a separate interrupt vector, called by the same mechanism as the BIOS calls, but not implemented by the BIOS. It's been awhile.

Gibson talks out of his ass a lot. Sometimes he just makes stuff up. I don't take what he says at face value.

I have never seen any evidence of SpinRite actually "talking directly to the mass storage system hardware".

Reading between the lines of release history, I think Gibson just added support for the regular standard calls that were there all along, but he didn't know how to use before.

Take "direct hardware register level awareness of IDE and SCSI drives". SCSI drives *don't have hardware registers*. The SCSI spec is quite abstract and hides all that stuff. Further, you don't talk to a SCSI drive, you talk to a host adapter. You literally *cannot* talk directly to the drive.

You can, however, request additional sense data and mode pages, which provide a wealth of useful information about the drive. This is done through the regular BIOS calls (ASPI). It's a useful capability, and I expect it's what SpinRite does, but it isn't the Amazing Scientific Breakthrough!!!1! Gibson claims it is. He just Read The Fucking Manual and learned how to use ASPI.

I do think SpinRite did things other software wasn't doing, at least at the time and in that place. Even something as simple as pattern testing wasn't common in the dark ages of DOS. (Other platforms had it, but the IBM-PC was the ghetto of the computer world.) I acknowledge that. It was valuable at the time, and even today, a nicely-presented, integrated package might still have value.

But that doesn't mean Gibson's bullshit doesn't stink.

The problem is, you're not going to be able to stuff that genie back into the bottle. With modern televised sports, you're always going to have great instant replay. And camera coverage is only going to increase. (And think ahead a few decades to when people have implanted vision augmentation tech!) If you just ignore the tech, you just piss off everyone, who can clearly see a call was bad.

There was a gag in The Jetsons a lot like that. Technically the coaches were controlling robots, but otherwise it was as you describe.

I hate that excuse. Soccer/football is not a non-stop sport. Play stops all the time -- for injuries, throw-ins, corner kicks, etc. It's just the clock doesn't stop. This "play never stops" thing is the biggest dellusion in soccer, and I think it hurts sometimes, such as the World Cup's inability to admit it's not 1932 anymore.