praguestepchild <praguestepchild @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
volny.cz> wrote:
> Do any of these pretentious idiots who list
> 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' and 'Fahrenheit 451' as
> some of the greatest books ever written actually
> read?
Yes we do. More im****tantly, we read with
understanding, something you should really try
before criticizing them.
_1984_ is an object lesson in the limitlessness of
the behaviors justifiable to evil mated with power,
being replayed in current events.
_Farenheit 451_ is a novel of the "trends already
evident" near future and of "fundamentalist
bookburnings in the square" current events.
Now go read _1984_ again, and think -- offshore war
prisoner torture facilities where none of the
civilized rules of engagement of international law
are allowed to be considered, where horrific means
are entirely and fulsomely justified by pur****tedly
attainable good ends -- and perhaps you will gain
some grasshopper-scale enlightenment on the lesson
the book conveys, and see just how prescient George
Orwell has eventuated to be.
Now go read _Farenheit 451_ again, and see as well
how prescient Bradbury has turned ou to be in his
morality tale of the dangers of permitting the habit
of censor****p and the habit of intolerance of
conflicting ideas to invade a society.
xanthian, who read both novels for the first time
long, long ago, and has watched their predictions
unfold unflaggingly over the intervening decades.
Strangely enuogh, it is less than two months since
the announcement of a wall sized TV monitor capable
of depicting an elephant at full scale.
Strangely enough, my cable TV supplier already
furnishes "push button interactive" TV, and equally
strange beelzebub is one of many using voice input
technology that would make even that button push
unnecessary.
Strangely enough, "interactive limited selection
story lines" have existed in print novels for
decades, and in computer games since "Adventure" in
the early 1980s.
Strangely enough, Tivo-scale local video storage
sufficient for limitedly interactive movies has
existed for years.
Put those all together, a "mere matter of
engineering" , and you have Bradbury's limitedly
interactive video walls available constructed
entirely from current technology.
Funny how successful his predictions look when
analyzed in detail.
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