Snow Crash Thread 7 : Chapter 61 to END

[Traveller]

For discussion of Snow Crash Chapter 61 to the END.

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

At the end of chapter 60, Y.T. had pushed the all-important clay tile containing the nam-shub of Enki out of L.Bob's helicopter. This is a bit of a Bond-villain moment, because L.Bob doesn't bother to land again to get it back as he assumes his minions have Hiro under control.

Unfortunately for L.Bob, as soon as Hiro and the minions are out of sight, Juanita shows up and promptly delivers a little nam-shub of her own, incapacitating them, including Hiro who is also susceptible (I presume because he's a hacker. If I'm following the whole virus thing, anybody but a hacker needs to be infected from the blood of an infected person). Juanita whispers another nam-shub into Hiro's ear and the effect wears off.

Juanita has permitted herself to be wired into L.Bob's system, but it can't control her because she has spent the last few years innoculating herself against his viruses via Catholicism. This part just creeps me out. I'm sorry, and I'm developing warmer feelings for the Catholic church with the current Pope than with the last two, but fighting religion with religion seems doomed to failure if you ask me. The whole (fortunately tiny) sub-plot of the Catholic church being the defense against the nam-shubs of Asherah makes me want to vomit. Still, I have to admit that if anybody in the Catholic church could do it, it makes sense that it's Jesuits.

When Y.T. pushed the Enki tablet out of the helicopter, naturally it shattered:
He takes all the pieces that look to be part of the en­ve­lope and puts them into a sep­a­rate pile. Then he as­sem­bles the re­mains of the tablet it­self into a co­her­ent group. It’s not ob­vi­ous, yet, how to piece them to­gether, and he doesn’t have time for jig­saw puz­zles. So he gog­gles into his of­fice, uses the com­puter to take an elec­tronic snap­shot of the frag­ments, and calls the Li­brar­ian.
“Yes, sir?”
“This hy­per­card con­tains a pic­ture of a shat­tered clay tablet. Do you know of some soft­ware that would be good at piec­ing it back to­gether?”
“One mo­ment, sir,” the Li­brar­ian says. Then a hy­per­card ap­pears in his hand. He gives it to Hiro. It con­tains a pic­ture of an as­sem­bled tablet. “That’s how it looks, sir.”

Awesome! He wrote that in 1992, and I'm pretty sure I can now do that with my phone (possibly even using Google Goggles)!

The rest of Hiro's story happens in the Metaverse where he figures out what the US Government's (the Feds) part is in the plot (though not WHY they have a part in the plot), and finds that Raven is planning to plant a logic bomb in the amphitheatre where the hackers are gathering for a memorial to Da5id. They'll all be exposed to the software virus, giving L.Bob control of all of the Metaverse's best hackers. In an homage to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Hiro cuts off all of Raven's avatar's limbs, but he still manages to trigger the bomb. Followed by predictable conclusion.

At the same time, Y.T. is returning to California aboard L.Bob's helicopter, along with a second copter carrying Raven. Juanita, back on the Raft, has blocked L.Bob's communications to the Raft, while the Mafia has apparently blocked his communications to land. L.Bob is forced to land at the nearest corner store and use a payphone. Y.T. tries to escape and almost makes it into a Mr. Lee's franchise, while she fails, it's enough to alert another RadiKS Kourier, and to wake up the franchise's Rat Thing. What one Rat Thing sees, they can all see, and when Fido, way off in Phoenix, realizes it's the nice girl who used to look after him, he races to the rescue—above Mach I, breaking windows all the way. "As part of Mr. Lee’s good neigh­bor policy, all Rat Things are pro­grammed never to break the sound bar­rier in a pop­u­lated area. But Fido’s in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neigh­bor pol­icy."

Flying too low to avoid radar gets the helicopter pooned by Kouriers, and Y.T. manages an outrageous escape. As the copter lands to recover her, more than a hundred Kouriers poon it and prevent it taking off again. Raven's watching from the second copter, not armored and so not susceptible to pooning, and all this display from the girl he's decided he loves just makes him sure he made the right choice. "Y.T. … flips him the bird. With that, the re­lationship is over, hope­fully for all time."

L.Bob leaves the scene in a commandeered pizza delivery car, and somewhere later the second helicopter lands and Raven and L.Bob exchange places. So, how does Raven get to LAX first?

Uncle Enzo has LAX staked out, knowing L.Bob is planning to trade his helicopter for his personal jet to fly to his headquarters in Houston. In an echo of Raven's fight with Hiro in the Metaverse, Raven and Enzo fight in Reality, resulting in Enzo being not quite dead and Raven crippled. Fido fulfils his destiny and takes care of L.Bob.

Everybody who's left, lives happily ever after.

[Traveller]

"And I control the Graveyard Daemons. So all I have to do is kill the bastard once."

That whole spiel is sooo silly. Besides that the whole "black pyramid cube" thing is silly on so many levels.

Firstly, why would Rife keep secret plans and info on the 'net, and even more silly, on the same server and software program that is open to the general public? I mean, I could have understood Hiro hacking into his personal computer to get the info, but the fact that they have to move through cyberspace with avatars and some kind of realistic vehicle like a motorbike is just silly; you can type in codes and commands for that instead and go to your destination instantly. (But I suppose that would make the story a lot more boring.) *eyeroll*

Also, regarding the avatar's behaviour, Stephenson obviously hasn't got an idea how virtual physics and collision detection works- Hiro could simply have taken collision detection off with a simple code typed into the Metaverse's software; he could have made his avatar not collide with stuff, even buildings, with code, instead of using the sword to penetrate, (though the allusions are pretty Freudian, ha ha ha.)

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

But this isn't Hiro's universe, it's L.Bob's. Hiro can do anything he wants in the Black Sun, but not elsewhere. However, he seems to control the Graveyard daemons because he put them into his swordfighting subroutines for the Black Sun, and those routines got adopted wholesale for the rest of the Metaverse.

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

I think Stephenson absolutely understands how "virtual physics and collision detection works". That is, they work exactly as their authors program them. And it makes total sense to me that the designers don't want users teleporting just anywhere. Ready Player One did exactly the same thing, but actually explained the process and reasoning, while you're just supposed to accept it here.

You can't just go to some place in the Metaverse instantly unless the designers let you, or you have hacked into the system to take advantage of a back door. Hiro has put back doors (well, trap doors actually) into the Black Sun, but he doesn't have that advantage elsewhere. Using the tunnels to go between the Black Sun and his office seemed to be one place where he was getting excessive access, but it could conceivably be because it's all part of his swordfight code.

Similarly, if the designers want monorail stanchions and other vehicles to be immovable objects when a vehicle hits them, then that's what they are.

I particularly liked Hiro's invisible avatar, and the difficulty of designing an avatar that was effectively invisible, while not alerting the system code to the fact that it was actually invisible. That sounds exactly right.

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

I keep thinking of other points.

I really didn't like the idea of his sword being able to penetrate buildings and then squeezing his avatar in behind it. I think that could have been explained in a way that works in the Metaverse's own paradigm, but it doesn't work in Stephenson's description because swords are objects that can penetrate matter and avatars are objects that can't. Just because one's attached to the other doesn't mean that they can now both penetrate, unless the designers have left a glaring (and trivially obvious) security hole in the Metaverse.

[Traveller]

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "I think Stephenson absolutely understands how "virtual physics and collision detection works". That is, they work exactly as their authors program them. And it makes total sense to me that the desi..."

No, but the thing is, firstly, who designed this Metaverse? Is it Rife's people?

But even so:
Either you know the commands that work for this application called "The Metaverse" or you don't. You can't mix and match syntax/rules in a uniform world with no transitions.

The metaverse is presented to us as a single entity, a uniform place, so if you know how to use "cheat" code in some of its areas, then it has to work in all the areas. And note, that Hiro is not chasing Raven inside the Black Sun trying to chop his head off, he is doing it from right next to the black thing and he is fully expecting the same rules to work right there than inside the Black Sun, which tells us that this is all the same application; it's the same software that should respond to the same code. And you'd assume Hiro has hacked into that code and knows the syntax. So, if Hiro can chop off Raven's head miles and miles away from the Black Sun, then he should be able to make himself spawn anywhere in the place, just like the daemons can.

Also, if he can make himself "invisible" and "immaterial" to the daemons, then he should be able to enter the black thing as well, by the same logic.

Btw, the story of Hiro's father and Raven's father is to me the best subplot of the entire book.

It would have been cool if NS had developed that story a bit more instead of all the Sumerian hocus pocus. And also worked on having less of the inconsistencies we see happening in the Metaverse.

I don't know if you've heard of the Elder Scrolls. It's a game series that releases its construction set as freeware so that the community can build mods for it; and flying, being invisible and being able to go through objects are some of the qualities you can endow your avatar/objects with, and I've tried my hand with a bit of it. So I have a very good 'feel' for how this kind of logic works.

You get very similar mechanics with another very realistic kind of "open world" game series called Gothic. Same rules apply. And the Metaverse is constructed according to the very exact same principles.

C'mon, Hiro is suppose to be this ultra good hacker dude. Manipulating aspects of the Metaverse should be peanuts for him. ;)

[Traveller]

...and btw, 'gravity' is something that needs to be programmed in as well. That's how the flying bit is done--you program the object to ignore "virtual gravity".

[Traveller]

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "I keep thinking of other points.

I really didn't like the idea of his sword being able to penetrate buildings and then squeezing his avatar in behind it. I think that could have been explained in..."

Yes exactly. That was exactly the point I was trying to make. Things don't automatically assume the same rules in virtuality than it does in reality without being programmed that way. You have to specifically program them to resemble reality, because after all this is all a simulation in a completely different medium (electrical pulses and silicon, etc) than that of which it is simulating.

[Traveller]

It was a nice enough ending though, niggles aside. I've been wondering who won: Uncle Enzo or Raven. I really enjoyed their little altercation.
It might be true that Uncle Enzo is the typical cold-blooded manipulative Mafia type, but he's clever in a good way, and he's not destructive for destructions' sake. He likes to play nice where not being destructive is an option, and that's cool.

So I found myself routing for him, bec. Raven is simply too fond of playing with nuke bombs.

And yeah, I have to admit that Hiro's anti-virus program was neat.

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

Traveller wrote: "No, but the thing is, firstly, who designed this Metaverse? Is it Rife's people?

But even so:
Either you know the commands that work for this application called "The Metaverse" or you don't. You can't mix and match syntax/rules in a uniform world with no transitions.
"

Yes, I believe it's Rife's universe, but whether or not, it was never Hiro's universe.

Why can't you mix and match? Stephenson says it explicitly: Hiro wrote the swordfight code for the Black Sun. Ready Player One worked in exactly the same way: in your own domain, you can have any rules you want. The Black Sun is no longer Hiro's domain, but Da5id gives him carte blanche, so it might as well be.

"The metaverse is presented to us as a single entity, a uniform place,…"

That's not a valid assumption. In fact, it's explicitly countered. "When Hiro wrote The Black Sun’s sword-fight­ing al­go­rithms—code that was later picked up and adopted by the en­tire Meta­verse…" The rules were different in the Black Sun, once.

So, Hiro knows all the codes for the Black Sun, but he does not know the cheat codes for the Metaverse at-large.

"Hiro is not chasing Raven inside the Black Sun trying to chop his head off, he is doing it from right next to the black thing and he is fully expecting the same rules to work right there than inside the Black Sun, which tells us that this is all the same application; it's the same software that should respond to the same code."

The same rules apply for sword-fighting: this is public space, and the Metaverse has adopted his code. That does not mean he can change the collision detection rules. Stephenson's trying to convince us that the cheat to get Rife's "black cube" (it's not a pyramid—the Black Sun is a truncated black pyramid) is a natural extension of the sword-fight algorithms: a sword must be able to penetrate matter. If his "invisible" avatar is small enough, I suppose it should be able to squeeze through the hole made by a sword, but there still should be rules that unauthorized users aren't permitted in private domains.

Manipulating bits of the Metaverse is simple for Hiro: but you're theorizing rules that clearly don't exist. He can't change the collision detection rules because the Metaverse isn't The Elder Scrolls: avatars are NOT permitted to pass through objects (though swords are). Avatars are explicitly not permitted to be invisible. "If your avatar is trans­par­ent…it will be rec­og­nized in­stantly as an il­le­gal avatar and alarms will go off." But you can change their size, though you can't give your avatar zero size, as it's going to lead to divide-by-zero errors. The implication, though we're not given a real description of his process, is that he makes the avatar vanishingly small.

Traveller wrote: "...and btw, 'gravity' is something that needs to be programmed in as well. That's how the flying bit is done--you program the object to ignore "virtual gravity"."

That's one way. Or you could program in atmospheric density and Bernoulli's principle.

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

Traveller wrote: "It was a nice enough ending though, niggles aside. I've been wondering who won: Uncle Enzo or Raven."

Stalemate. "Mafia chop­pers com­ing in, doc­tors jump­ing out with doc boxes and blood bags and stretch­ers, Mafia sol­diers scur­ry­ing be­tween the pri­vate jets, ap­par­ently look­ing for some­one. A pizza de­liv­ery car takes off from one of the park­ing areas, tires squeal­ing, and a Mafia car peels out after it in hot pur­suit."

(view spoiler)[If there are doctors, it implies that Enzo is still alive at the time. That's Raven in the Deliverator. (hide spoiler)]

[Traveller]

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "Traveller wrote: "No, but the thing is, firstly, who designed this Metaverse? Is it Rife's people?

But even so:
Either you know the commands that work for this application called "The Metaverse" o..."

No, you can't mix and match. Remember that your avatar can move over the entire Meatverse (This typo for Metaverse was so funny that I decided to leave it in). So the metaverse is a coherent piece of software; or at the very least, it's software that's been written in compatible code, --the various pieces of it have to be compatible, otherwise the same avatar wouldn't be able to move from various places in the Metaverse to other places in the Metaverse. Think it through. (Or else just trust me on that one). There are obviously transitions, yes, in which some of the 'rules' could work differently in various places, but my point is that it all needs to be written in the same language with the same basic syntax, otherwise Hiro's avatar would simply not work in the areas like Rife's black cube.

And all he has to do, is to access the code files (it should be relatively easy to this for him, especially as an experienced cracker, which one assumes Hiro is, given all the hype that is pushed out around him being such a fantastic free-lance hacker and IT security specialist (and remember that Hiro has cracked stuff in the metaverse and on the internet before--in fact, he wrote anti-virus software against Rife's virus, not so?)) that those areas are written with, to see the code that was used for it. Given a bit of time, one can work out which code does what, and you can rewrite it to serve your purposes.

Re uncle Enzo and Raven: Yes, I'd assumed Raven was the one driving away, and was hoping that uncle Enzo would still be saveable.

But you're right, the best scenario one imagines is that Raven gets away, Uncle Enzo is saved, and they both live to continue their little disagreement another day.

[Traveller]

Re the metaverse. Go to the end of the book, and you will see Stephenson mention this:
After the first publication of Snow Crash, I learned that the term "avatar" has actually been in use for a number of years as part of a virtual reality system called Habitat, developed by F. Randall Farmer and Chip Morningstar.

What he is referring to, is actually the following game
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_...

Since then, these types of games, or 'universes' have developed quite a lot. I'm pretty sure you must have heard of WOW.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of...

Some of the virtual reality worlds that are a bit closer to Stephenson's Metaverse, would be
URU live :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst_Onl... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life .

Note that these all work on principles similar to that of MMO games. You need dedicated servers that host versions of the said universe, and you can't, for instance, visit Second Life with your WOW avatar, or URU with your Second Life avatar. These universes are insular things, because the avatar you're using, needs to be able to mesh and interact with that specific world or 'universe'.

I'm particularly using URU as a nice example, because although it had a 'story' attached to the background world, it was more a meeting place for people very similar to that of the Metaverse, except that Stephenson's Metaverse serves no discernible purpose, and there were things to do and beatiful sights to see in URU Online.

Of course, Second Life is a place for people (view spoiler)[ in which to have virtual sex ADULTS only please (view spoiler)[ http://vimeo.com/63265460 (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)]; so at least it, too serves some kind of purpose, and I guess a predictable one at that. :P

[Traveller]

Oh, one more thing: I suppose it might be possible at some far point in the future, to have servers big enough to accommodate 6 million people all at the same time, but as of the present, that is not even close to reality; and universes of this size is divided up between various servers. Note that if you access a specific metaverse or cyberworld on one server, you will not be able to interact with people who are using a different server, even if it has the same map loaded.

So that is another aspect to consider.

In a future world where we have servers that are capable of accommodating millions of people at the same time on the same map and on which said millions are able to interact, I feel pretty certain that nobody will be using pixellated graphics anymore. Or perhaps they would indeed all have to, to enable so many people on all at once. But who would want to, anyway? My guess is that people would still prefer quality above quantity, as they do now.

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

Traveller wrote: "No, you can't mix and match. Remember that your avatar can move over the entire Meatverse (This typo for Metaverse was so funny that I decided to leave it in). So the metaverse is a coherent piece of software; or at the very least, it's software that's been written in compatible code, "

Sorry, you're wrong. It is no different from the existing situation with the Internet. You build protocols that ensure that at a certain low-level, things are done the same way, but there is nothing that says that my web page needs to work the same way as yours (it does if they are pure HTML, but there are lots of other ways to display a web page).

The key in your own statement is "compatible code". Compatibility doesn't mean it's identical. The Black Sun is compatible with the Metaverse in that it has a direct interface (via the front door, and the tunnels), and that it has an appearance from elsewhere in the Metaverse. Beyond that, there is absolutely no need for the code to be identical.

"And all he has to do, is to access the code files (it should be relatively easy to this for him…)"

That's absurd! If even a super-hacker could "access the code files" that easily, the whole Metaverse would fall apart pretty quickly. I build pages on the Web: but I can't change the way TCP/IP works (and after about 20 years, neither can anybody else—we've been trying to migrate to IP v6 for about that long). I can, however, encapsulate other data inside the IP protocol to do things that its designers never intended, but that's no use unless I have a way to use the data at the other end. All Hiro can do is use the Metaverse protocols he's given. But inside the Black Sun, he can impose his own protocols on top of them.

Pixellated graphics are purely a by-product of blowing up digital images. They'll always be with us, because there'll always be a quantum past which we can't make smaller pixels.

It's clear in Snow Crash that everybody does prefer quality avatars. But if programming one is hard enough, not everybody is going to have one.

[Traveller]

It sounds as if, Derek, you are equating the Metaverse with the Internet.

The Metaverse is not the internet. Start the book again at the beginning, and you will see that the Metaverse is a grid map on the internet, something similar to Second Life and Habitat. The Metaverse is more akin to a single website on the internet.

Have you read the bit at the back of the book that I pointed you to, as well as the links?

But, Derek, pixellation is a function of resolution and of using bitmap images! The renderers of 3-D graphics for purposes of virtual reality don't even use bitmaps technology anymore, they use vector graphic techniques. ...and even when using bitmaps, why would one use such an incredibly low resolution that pixels are so large that your eyelashes look like chips of wood hanging from your eyes?

Regarding cracking into the code of the Metaverse, simply by going on the logic of the novel itself, Hiro is able to! And no, it doesn't just work in The Black Sun, otherwise Hiro would not have been able to have switched into his 'invisible' mode outside of the black cube and evaded the daemons there. How come his code worked on the black cube daemons?

Neither would he have been able to unlock his antivirus program and superimpose it onto Rife's virus.

And you are quite correct in that I said the code should be compatible. Of course I didn't say identical; then everything would look the same!

Building pages on the web isn't even close to an equation with the kind of software we're talking about; we're not talking about separate web pages/websites all patched into the entity that we call the internet; though I can see how that comparison can be arrived at. But that is not what I believe that Stephenson was trying to portray. Have you explored Second Life? The Metaverse would be more akin to the Second Life application. And, like Stephenson himself admitted, his metaverse is based on habitat, and on this:

The Habitat that Yoshida and Kakuta discussed as an example of an online community devoted to cooperative play is a project of the Japanese computer-aerospace-electronics giant Fujitsu. Fujitsu's Habitat is based on an older, pioneering, graphical virtual community first developed by Lucasfilm Games and an early commercial online service in America, QuantumLink Communications.

I observed the Japanese version of Habitat when I visited Fujitsu's research-and-development facility in Kawasaki, but my first encounter with Habitat's original architects took place years earlier. In Austin, Texas, in 1990, at the First Conference on Cyberspace, I met the two programmers who created the first large-scale, multi-user, commercial virtual playground.

In their address to the conference, and the paper they later published, "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat," Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer recounted their experience as the designers and managers of a virtual community that used computer graphics as well as words to support an online society of tens of thousands.

Much of that conference in Austin was devoted to discussions of virtual-reality environments in which people wear special goggles and gloves to experience the illusion of sensory immersion in the virtual world via three-dimensional computer graphics. Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar stood out in that high-tech crowd because the cyberspace they had created used a very inexpensive home computer, often called a toy computer, and a cartoonlike two-dimensional representation to create their kind of virtual world.

Farmer and Morningstar had one kind of experience that the 3-D graphics enthusiasts did not have, however--the system they had designed, Habitat, had been used by tens of thousands of people.

In the early 1980s, LucasArts Entertainment began a series of ambitious research ventures through the Lucasfilm Games division. Morningstar and Farmer were handed the tempting and vexing task of designing a graphic virtual community for a large population that was using computationally puny Commodore-64 computers.

-- Howard Rheingold at http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/6.html

[Puddin Pointy-Toes]

I think you two are arguing the same thing: that the Metaverse is an incredibly complex communications protocol (like HTTP), platform-neutral virtual machine (such as Java) and collection of standard data formats (take your pick).

Semantics aside, that seems to be what you're both saying. ;)

[Traveller]

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "Traveller wrote: "No, you can't mix and match. Remember that your avatar can move over the entire Meatverse (This typo for Metaverse was so funny that I decided to leave it in). So the metaverse is..."

Let's say that the Metaverse was indeed representative of the internet and its different regions were webpages (which would require much more sophisticated protocols than it currently has), and let's say that I had a little avatar that could run over from my website into your website, then, would you agree that on these websites, we would have to embed similar rendering and other protocols? Let's say the avatar is a web browser; let's say FirefoxJ.

For FirefoxJ to be able to 'read' or run your website, let's say your website uses HTML5 and JAVA, and I haven't updated my FirefoxJ to be compatible with HTML 5 and JAVA, then I'm going to have problems running some aspects of your site on my FirefoxJ, aren't I?

[Traveller]

J. wrote: "I think you two are arguing the same thing: that the Metaverse is an incredibly complex communications protocol (like HTTP), platform-neutral virtual machine (such as Java) and collection of standa..."

That is one way that it could work, yes, I'm trying to say partly that, (as far as compatible protocols are concerned) but do remember that webpages don't interact with one another all the time! We don't have avatars and railroads and vehicles that run over from one website into the next and into the next and into the next.

One could say, I imagine, that the metaverse grid was a communications protocol superimposed onto the internet; and that our avatars can travel from website to website via a graphical representation on a metaphorical railroad, from one website to another; but imagine if we had to devise code which replaces the addresses we typed into our browser windows with physical representations of geographical places, and then have a physical representation of your little avatar run all the way either by foot or via some vehicle all the way to where ever on the internet's geographical representation of your website supposedly sits... I mean, it would be a crazy clumsy and time-consuming way of doing things, let alone the space we'd be wasting with all that code... but nevermind, that's just me, the old auntie sitting on the stoop with her knitting.

In any case, if we did this, don't you see that we would have to have some kind of communal mutually compatible mechanism and protocols with which firstly to ensure continuity of the landscape, and secondly, to ensure continuity in the behaviour and appearance of the avatar from one website to the next.

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

Traveller wrote: "It sounds as if, Derek, you are equating the Metaverse with the Internet."

NO, dammit. I'm equating the Metaverse with a software construct that has its own rules, not the rules of URU or WOW or Second Life, or anything of the sort. I used the Internet as an example because it IS based on the Internet (the Internet is very simply the set of pipes and the computers they connect using the TCP/IP protocol stack; the Metaverse is the set of pipes and the computers they connect using some set of Metaverse protocols), but it is not the same thing, while you keep insisting that it can't operate the way Stephenson says because you have experience with some other software constructs that don't work that way.

[Traveller]

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "Traveller wrote: "It sounds as if, Derek, you are equating the Metaverse with the Internet."

NO, dammit. I'm equating the Metaverse with a software construct that has its own rules, not the rules..."

All right, I had meant to say that it looked as if you were equating the world built on the metaverse road with the WWW. Okay, so we agree that it is a software construct with its own rules. I can see the comparison with the internet that you make here:

Sorry, you're wrong. It is no different from the existing situation with the Internet. You build protocols that ensure that at a certain low-level, things are done the same way, but there is nothing that says that my web page needs to work the same way as yours (it does if they are pure HTML, but there are lots of other ways to display a web page).

in relation to what I said here:

No, you can't mix and match. Remember that your avatar can move over the entire Metaverse . So the metaverse is a coherent piece of software; or at the very least, it's software that's been written in compatible code, --the various pieces of it have to be compatible, otherwise the same avatar wouldn't be able to move from various places in the Metaverse to other places in the Metaverse. Think it through. (Or else just trust me on that one). There are obviously transitions, yes, in which some of the 'rules' could work differently in various places, but my point is that it all needs to be written in the same language with the same basic syntax, otherwise Hiro's avatar would simply not work in the areas like Rife's black cube.

I don't see how you can say what I said there is "wrong", (you agreed that there has to be similar protocols- regarding HTML and all the objects embedded in your page- sure you can encapsulate stuff, but whatever you encapsulate must still in some way be interfaceable with the surrounding environment otherwise what is the use of it?) and I don't see where I said there that the code has to be identical, I said commands (as in procedure calls) or basic protocols at grassroots level should be similar; instead of the term 'commands', if you use OO programming, then you'd perhaps be more familiar with the terms "events" and procedure calls and event handlers - the protocols for the software responding to events (or your event handlers) must be similar or compatible.
For instance, when you're browsing the WWW, then mouseclicks are certain events, and pushing the "enter" key on your keyboard is another event, and for the WWW to be able to work in any coherent way, we use relatively similar browsers which have interfaces compatible to the WWW, where certain events need to have certain universal results.

Pressing the "Enter" button after typing an address in your address bar, will cause a similar response that is universal for all users of the WWW, otherwise there would be chaos, and the internet wouldn't work as the powerful universal tool that it currently is.

So yes, I can see the relevance of why you made a comparison with the WWW, but if you build a webpage, you're still going to have to write them using some form of HTML as a base, not so, and the page has to be interfaceable with HTTP protocols for your page to be uploaded and accessible to other users of the WWW.

Okay, so you build webpages and I build certain aspects of games, (and sometimes web pages too) and I'm saying that there are a lot more features of 3-D online games that are comparable to the Metaverse in Snow Crash, than web pages on the WWW are, because web pages are flat, 2 D, abstract representations, and the multiverse is a collection of 3-D representations with simulated phsyics. Once you start implementing 3D and virtual physics things become a lot more complicated.

[Saski]

J. wrote: "I think you two are arguing the same thing: that the Metaverse is an incredibly complex communications protocol (like HTTP), platform-neutral virtual machine (such as Java) and collection of standa..."

Nice try, J., but I think they are long gone :)

[Traveller]

Ruth wrote: "Nice try, J., but I think they are long gone :) ..."

Yes, our, er... [whateveryouwantocallit] is derailing the entire discussion. Sorry I got carried away. I'll step away from the, er... solopsising and from the, debate now. Since the internet developed along a different tack in any case, it's all pie in the sky in any case, and not really provable or disprovable. It's starting to sound like one of those religious debates...

Btw, had I mentioned before that I was disappointed when I found out Y.T. was blonde? I had imagined her with a short curly crop of russet, brown or in any case, dark-ish hair.

I had also wanted to comment earlier on the fact that the US now has no laws. If this is true, I can't help wondering how the government and the FBI is run and what their raison d'être is. With no laws in place, who pays for the upkeep of the government and the FBI, since, of course, levying taxation requires laws.

[Saski]

Y.T. is a blonde?!?! Noooooooo. Actually, for some reason I thought she was Asian. Nope, can't/won't picture her as a blonde.

Funny about the FBI, I think I saw it as one of those perpetual motion machines, stuck on a loop with no reason, that someone forgot to turn off, everything on automatic pilot. No,it doesn't work logically, but that fits with the rest, looking at these discussions, doesn't it?

[Puddin Pointy-Toes]

Hey, I had to try.

The government does seem to have laws, but its effective jurisdiction is evidently far reduced to the point that modern-day US territory can be said to be lawless.

Individual burbclaves and franchulates do seem to have their own laws, though, so it's probably more a matter of perspective: there are laws, but they're such a hodge-podge that it's no different from vigilanteism.

As for how the US Government has money enough to operate at all, that's a very good question.

[Traveller]

J. wrote: "Hey, I had to try.

The government does seem to have laws, but its effective jurisdiction is evidently far reduced to the point that modern-day US territory can be said to be lawless.

Individual..."

The burbclaves have their own laws and their own police, but one gets the distinct impression that America as a whole does not:
Have a look in chapter 33, on about the second or third page; (Page 258 in my book)

"The Mafia wouldn't do that." "Don't be a sap," Hiro says. "Of course they would." Y.T. seems miffed at Hiro. "Look," he says, "I'm sorry for reminding you of this, but if we still had laws, the Mafia would be a criminal organization." "But we don't have laws," she says, "so it's just another chain." "Fine, all I'm saying is, they may not be doing this for the benefit of humanity."

On my page 228: (Chapter 29, quite a bit in)

Recognizing his van is easy enough. It is enormous. It is eight feet high and wider than it is high, which would have made it a wide load in the old days when they had laws.

I'm almost sure it was mentioned somewhere else as well, but I can't find it now.

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

Traveller wrote: "The burbclaves have their own laws and their own police, but one gets the distinct impression that America as a whole does not:"

Exactly. The highways do have policing, though. With different organizations being responsible for different highways (and no doubt having different regulations).