ADDED This is what I get for being late to the party and carefully considering how I feel about an issue. As various comments have stated, the policy has been rescinded before it was ever put into place. Someone got smart.

I haven’t really been doing much gaming, lately, and what I have been doing has been mainly Star Trek: Online. Nevertheless, I have enough World of Warcraft players in my world that I became aware of the advent of RealID pretty much from day one. Most of them seemed pretty happy with it, since, among other things, it enables the ability to chat with people on other servers and other factions. This is a big shift in the social architecture of the game, which previously restricted in-game chat to people on the same server and on the same “side” (Alliance vs. Horde).

But a RealID is an e-mail address, which is Problem Number One. Now, everyone can see a player’s e-mail address. Oh, sure, one can probably cons up a free e-mail address that has nothing to do with them in any other context easily enough, and use that in-game only. A lot of people, however, won’t think about that. None of my friends have. And they probably should have.

But now, Blizzard is insisting on a new policy whereby they will only permit the use of real names in their forums. Since you have to give your real name to create an account (at least, if you’re using a credit card, which most people are, I believe), this is rather difficult to evade, and anyway, if it’s policy, then obvious evasions will probably result in banning.

The intention of this is presumably to suppress so-called “griefers” and others trolls and active criminals, by requiring them to stop hiding behind pseudonyms. However, as Scott Lynch points out, all it’s really going to do is give such people a more target rich environment. People who are intent on causing trouble–whether it be merely social maliciousness like trolling or active criminality–will be the most likely to find canny ways to evade the new rules, while ordinary, law abiding folks who just want to play the game and talk about it with other players without getting harassed or stolen from will have no idea how and no real desire to do so. Because they’re not the ones doing anything wrong!

Scott pretty well enumerates all the reasons why this turns out to be a worse and worse idea the more you think about it, so I won’t belabor it further — go chase the link above.

Meanwhile, I think I will not, after all, be getting back into the game anytime soon as I’d planned.

First, read this fun essay by just-announced CONVergence 2011 guest of honor Catherynne Valente: “How SF Prepared Me For The Future“! It’s fun!

Second, CONVergence 2010 was made of awesome and win on several levels. I particularly enjoyed getting to sit on panels with entertaining folks. There was a panel on the evolution of the Klingons from straight-up villains to complex warriors, for example, on which two gents who cosplay as Klingons also sat, and did the entire panel in character, deriding Federation propaganda! And somehow, the Babylon 5 panel was intense and lively despite being in the 3:30p Sunday slot and both the panelists and the audience being badly sleep deprived after 4 days of convention goodness.

My one regret is that I wasn’t really in much of a social headspace this weekend. Which is a bit of a waste when you’re surrounded by 4500 people, all of whom have geeky and fun things to talk about! Oh, I talked to lots of people, but I didn’t go seeking out connections, old or new, very much. I think I need to try to find that groove again for next year.

After one of my panels, I received a head-swelling compliment on my style as a panelist and moderator, including the suggestion that in should do a podcast or something. I’m thinking about it. Other than the fact that I’m clearly sometimes challenged to come up with things to write about here, I’m not sure about it because editing it would touch upon an odd phobia of mine: I actually don’t much like the sound of my own voice! I realize people who know me or see me on panels or in the SCA will boggle at that, given how hard it is to get me to shut up, but it’s true!

But I am giving it serious thought…

Anyway, stay tuned for more actual content soon. It’s time I got this show back on the road!

In 1968, John Brunner published Stand on Zanzibar, a sprawling attempt to predict life in a desperately overcrowded year 2010. It grew out of the same meme pool as Harry Harrison’s Make Room, Make Room (which in turn became the movie Soylent Green) and Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside, all if which build on fears of what life on Earth will be like if population is allowed to continue to grow unchecked.

It’s a book I’m deeply fond of, but the closer we’ve gotten to 2010, the more its predictive flaws become apparent. Manhattan is not covered by a giant geodesic dome; internal combustion has not been outlawed; eugenics remains off the table; marijuana is not legal, and tobacco is not illegal. And of course, he completely failed to predict–but then, who did, really–the advent of the microchip and the resulting revolution. We are caught up in an endless war, but it’s not over communism, not in East Asia, and there is no draft.

On the other hand, he essentially predicted CNN and its ilk (in the form of Engrelay Satleserv) and some of the corrosive effect 24/7 news coverage would have, not to mention the accelerating consumer culture. He predicted augmented reality, albeit not in the mobile form we’re coming to know it, in the form of Mr and Mrs Everywhere — a modification for your TV that allows travelogue shows and news programs to substitute your own image for the show’s hosts. The social trend of relative strangers sharing apartments in the big cities–especially New York–has definitely come to pass. While it’s not as prevalent in the real world as in the novel, he predicted that there would be people sufficiently alienated from their world by modern pressures to go on massive killing sprees. While the world’s population has not quite reached the numbers he predicted, they’re not far off.

And although we have not had quite the panicked reaction he predicted, we’re awfully close to some of the genetic breakthroughs that are central to the book.

Anyway, this is not intended as a full review, although I may reread the book soon and do just that. It’s really meant to commemorate that today, 3 May 2010, is the date the book begins. I still commend the book to anyone with the patience to read through a 1960s view of what 2010 might be like.

I have several post ideas queued up waiting for my brain to reorganize itself after several very stressful weeks, but today I came across an article thanks to Slashdot that I feel a need to comment upon.

The article is entitled, “Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition“, by a fellow named Robert Fortner. I don’t know who Mr Fortner is, honestly, but that doesn’t matter to me much. I mean, not a lot of people know who I am, either, and that doesn’t keep me from venturing opinions I hope people will find interesting

ANYWAY, the gist of Mr Fortner’s article is that, bluntly, speech recognition is a failed technology, and possibly an impractical one for the foreseeable future. Despite 40 years or so of research, despite Google releasing a corpus of a trillion words to feed to recognition engines, speech recognition accuracy has more or less topped out at 80%, and stalled there for over a decade. No really serious research seems to be ongoing either into existing approaches or into completely new ones. The longstanding belief that, if we could teach computers language, that would lead to AI, is being turned on its head, with some people now certain that, without true AI, computers will never really understand language.

It’s a disappointing conclusion, but one that I can’t really disagree with. Continue Reading »

From an episode that wanted to be taken seriously but kinda failed to make the grade, we shift to an episode that was always intended to be silly, one of Star Trek‘s few deliberate stabs at comedy: David Gerrold’s “The Trouble with Tribbles”.

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A couple of times a week, not really often enough, I walk a three-mile course on the treadmill. This is not very exciting by itself, so I generally use the time to watch or rewatch something.

Tonight, it was the last significant Klingon episode of Classic Trek, Jerome Bixby’s “Day of the Dove”.

This is a story that actually starts out somewhat promising. Indeed, for most of the first 20 minutes or so, I thought perhaps the rather low opinion my memory held for it must have been mistaken. There’s a real mystery, coupled with the longstanding distrust between humans and Klingons to build tension. Michael Ansara’s Kang shows hints of the kind of Klingon we’re more used to from TNG and after. We even get a glimpse of the Klingon’s rather tangled gender relations, with the appearance of Kang’s wife and science officer, Mara.

Unfortunately, that’s right about when someone–the director, I presume–started telling Shatner he wasn’t chewing the scenery enough. Continue Reading »

Since my friend Richard was kind enough to refer people my way before writing his well-thought out refutation of my iPad/Star Trek article, it’s only fair that I refer you back to said refutation.

[Original article]

Several of you have pointed out to me that I’m not the only one who has noticed the resemblance between Apple’s impending device and Star Trek‘s ubiquitous portable data thingummies. Gizmodo points out there will be an app for that…

Star Trek is, of course, a world full of ubiquitous computing, although it’s rarely portrayed in those terms exactly. We see communicators, tricorders, flat-panel displays everywhere…and, for portable information access and messaging, the PADD.

Of course, these are really all just non-functional props. But the ideas behind them have long-since fired the imagination of real-world engineers. Communicators have already completely infiltrated our real-world lives–we call them cellphones. Flat panel displays are now so common it’s getting hard to remember when televisions took up significant cubic volume and not just rectangular area. Tricorders…well, we’ve got a way to go on that one, because we’re nowhere near the necessary technology for that kind of magical scanning. But they’re working on it.

PADDs, however, are in reach of our real-world technology, and the iPad seems to be consciously trying to make them a reality. The way PADDs have been portrayed, even as far back as Classic Trek¹ gives us some insight, I believe, into how Apple envisions the iPad being used.

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Let’s start out with the obvious: Russell T. Davies ressurrected Doctor Who. In the process, he also completely re-created the concept of “family television”, meaning television the entire family actually watches together, as opposed to something the kids watch while the parents ignore them. He did two things that everyone, himself included, were fairly sure were impossible, and in a way that appears to be sustainable without him ¹

Given how savage I’ve been about RTD’s writing in some of my recent reviews, you might find this praise surprising, but it’s nothing but the documentable truth. Doctor Who had collapsed in the late 80s, and languished as a television property for nearly 15 years. Lots of people wanted to see it revived, but nobody was quite sure how to do successfully accomplish it.

Until RTD found a way.

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