At 12:32 PM 04/26/2003 -0700, Bill Frantz wrote:
At 3:54 PM -0700 4/25/03, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
Making the leap from key-holder to meatspace entity is unsound unless something in meatspace demonstrates it. You're all bits from here.
The definitive fictional treatment is Vernor Vinge's, "True Names".
BTW - Is the re-issue of this short story available?
http://www.powells.com/subsection/ScienceFictionandFantasyV.html has Vinge books, including ISBN 0-312-86207-5, published by Tor, which is the collection with Vinge's novel and articles by a number of people including Tim, Chip Morningstar / Randy Farmer, RMS, and others. The original is on the net in several places - http://home.earthlink.net/~whitestones/truename/truename.html in mostly-pure-ASCII HTML with illustrations from one of the editions of the book. Back when cypherpunks were lamenting the fact that the book was out of print, and that publisher copyright issues were preventing reprints, I found a copy of that edition in a used bookstore and lent it to a heavyset bearded guy who never returned the hard copy. I have no idea if the events are related, though I've since found a copy of the original paperback which had different cover art... (:-) http://members.tripod.com/erythrina/ has interesting original artwork.