I don't understand. DRM
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I don't understand either, basically because I never grew up to think that business and the economy was the end all be all of human existence. Let's note that we are playing a `given limited resources' game created by capital for capital.
There is no such thing as limited resources. Hell we live on a planet that is just about half iron, with a thin scum of organic shit on the crust---that's folded into coal every few million years now and again. What's the problem? There ain't none, except those created by capital for capital. So let's rock.
As for the robots, well, I work on them all day, every day, except here in O-land they're called power wheelchairs run on pre-programmed flash EPROMs, probably not too dis-similar to those on Mars (running pico bsd-like OSs?). We do a serial port thing with the phone lines to phone home to Elyria, Ohio, so Invacare Incorporated can fix our Spirits and Opportunities (named Ranger X and Arrows), dot, dot, dot, more or less in a related manner to the NASA-AIMES satellite telecomm link to Mars. It works about forty percent of the time. I would expect pretty much the same success rate. If I had to guess, I would bet their software glitch was a `kill' feature (not a bug, no, never a bug, a feature), from what one hilarious wheelchair customer called `spurious electrical anomalies', as in `My chair has exhibited random and spurious electrical anomalies' or RSEA's for short.
Here in the last hold out of the grease monkey mechanic, super-intellectualized proletariat communist scum of the earth, we interpret most RSEAs to mean that a motor voltage monitoring feedback routine returned a value out of the normal range and the fucking EPROM routine turned the processor chip off. So, here on capital-uber-alles-ridden earth, you have to call the manufacturer in order to get the tech at corporate HQ to send the propriety protected command line command to the EPROM flash bios to re-boot the processor. Sure its just an ASSEMBLER routine. But hell if I know or care what the code is. Fuck'm. That's why they earn the big bucks---let them do it. We charge Medicare all the same overpriced rate.
These NASA meta-discourses have a way of reflecting the mentality of the earth bound capitalist pig hegemon, just like everything else we do in the meta-narrative space of abstract discourse.
Taking this out to the n-th dimension in scifi, has anybody read John Brenner's Total Eclipse? Not that great a story, but an utterly devastating and dark last few pages.
Chuck Grimes
PS. ``It fascinates me that those distant places, which to our ancestors were simply lights in the sky are becoming quite real to us.''
Men, women, or machines---fiction or real time I don't care. I love it all. This isn't a game of false oppositions, like food or Mars. That's the capitalist pig hegemon--stingy ass bean counter over at the Haas Business School talking. Let's have it all.
``But I suppose I'm nearly alone in this opinion.''
You're not alone.