Subaru? She must be a lesbian.
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Ha!
Your Gaydar is as powerful and finely tuned as the North Warning System (wiki it).
Yes, she's a lesbian. Well, actually these days she calls herself bi which has caused some interesting personal issues. She's one of my oldest and closest friends, a complete gearhead, a brilliant wifi theoretician and practitioner...also a knockout.
As youngsters, we promised to either marry (for the party, presents and cake) or become a world stomping super villain team.
I married another (for love...oh and the party, presents and cake) so perhaps a Tesla coil and robot army are in my future. Monroe...Monroe... No, that won't do for a super villain. How about Dr. Mayhem?
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Andy F:
I was contemplating cataloging and trying to formulate generalities about the accusations of Luddism that get thrown very predictably at the most vanishingly implicit critique of any technology -- yea, unto the original Luddites.
It's kind of a back burner thing for me at the moment, but I'd be curious what folks have to say (assuming that strikes a chord).
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This is an excellent idea!
For a dramatic example of just the sort of thing you're talking about, check out this very long thread at Charlie Stross' blog:
<http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html>
Stross is a Scottish science fiction writer, author of, in my view, the only plausible tech singularity themed novel: Accelerando. In this post - against all expectation (well, all except those of us who've been paying attention) he writes about the futility of space colonization. Not, mind you, space EXPLORATION - the wonderful stuff we're doing with robot probes (relatively cheap and rich in scientific ROI) - he's completely in favor of that.
No, Stross lays out the technical case against the old dream of domed cities on the Moon and Mars and humanity's supposed galactic destiny.
Most impressively, Stross explicitly identifies this fantasy as a libertarian confection and a mind trap for people still in love with a romantic view of Western exploration and colonial expansion (maybe he was talking about boosterish chaps like our own Wojtek "at least the trains ran on time" Sokolowski).
That's awesome but it's in the comments where things really get intriguing. Despite Stross' geek street cred as a scifi writer and generally comfortable with complex tech sort of guy the "high frontier" crowd mercilessly attacks him, accusing him of being what?
You guessed it, a Luddite.
So here's this man who's about as far from a technophobe as it's possible to be; he writes a detailed critique of a dream tech and receives a torrent of abuse for his trouble. He handles the trolls with aplomb though so it all works out.
And oh! I just thought of another example...
Early in my career as a LBOster I participated in an odd little discussion about artificial intelligence. I came down firmly against the idea's prospects because, as smarter people than myself have shown, no one's yet figured out a working bootstrap to cognition method or even created a believable ghost of an outline for such a technique. Even Prof. Rodney Brooks of MIT, once a pretty strong advocate of the 'we'll do it in 10 to 20 years' line of reasoning has refocused his machine cognition efforts on *artificial instinct* (a much more promising line of research) and away from dreams of building HAL 9000.
As I recall, our Andie thumped me pretty hard as being a techno Ostrich, sticking my head in the sand and refusing to acknowledge the dawning age of AI. In other words, I went from being a guy soaking in this technology at a pretty wiggy level at times (certainly at a wiggier level than a Law Prof.) to a, well, Luddite.
So yes, an investigation into the Luddite charge as it's used against even the mildest forms of tech critique is absolutely something worth pursuing.
.d.