Yes, there are still arguments, and not everyone out here is on board with LGBT rights, but conservative side has lost that war, and we're just waiting on the generational turn over to get most of the rest of it. Amongst my social circles, the discussion isn't about "how to tell your children about transgendered people", but rather, "how to teach them to respect transgendered people".
But what this really dredges up for me is the reality of your gedanken experiment: I just did this inadvertently. It was both a brilliant book and a weird disappointment. In some very important ways, it has not aged well (oh, yeah, I went there; I am not sorry). Had he been my neighbor, in 21st Century San Francisco, Dorian Gray would have never killed Basil Hallward (spoiler alert). The horrible sins that marred the painting are, by and large, all acceptable things where and when I live. You have to find the right subcultures for some of it, but they aren't hidden here. It's more that not everyone is into hardcore BDSM. It took a lot of mental effort to muster horror over his relatively tame debauchery. I had to try and understand how someone from five generations ago would have reacted to the story.
This is not to rag on the book. It was still a great read, particularly for Lord Henry's character. Harry would be able to fit in in 21st Century San Francisco. I have hung out with people not unlike him. Which leads to the other side of this coin: fundamentally, we haven't evolved significantly from when we were cavemen drawing graffiti on cave walls in France. So in some ways the details and technology will be unrecognizable, but certain attitudes and reactions will be fundamentally understandable.
(For the record, Mr. Stross, I think you are pretty good at this. I really enjoyed Glasshouse, and even with the Stepford-Wives-SCA conceit, the characters hit a good balance of recognizable in an alien culture.)
]]>Essentially, the hypothesis is that the Great Society Reforms of the 1930s were popular at the time, and for quite a while afterwards. Until the courts started cracking down on racist corruption and insisted that welfare and social security has to be given to all Americans, equally. Which meant no more blocking black people from getting benefits. At which point, the idea of American Individualism was cranked up to be a primary trait, and used by politicians as the underpinnings of the platform to dismantle the Great Society.
They didn't create this idea from nothing, but I believe the importance of individualism as an American trait was much lower historically. (It's hard to tell; I only date to the early 1980s, so I only get to see the end state.) It is most popular with the politicians who are most dedicated to (implicitly) preserving white privilege.
(FWIW: I'm rich, white and live on the West Coast.)
]]>You've never lived and worked in the Bay Area, have you? Unix is dominant here. If it's a mixed environment, generally, the other system is what the accountants and marketers use.
Also, Unix systems dominate the web server market (and, really, any server connected to the open internet, really, web or otherwise). I'm pretty sure this has been true since shortly after BSD got a TCP/IP stack.
]]>The publishers have one tool to point towards, and because of how popular that tool is, they don't have to write any documentation or do any technical support. And they can assume that some huge super majority of all their authors, copy editors and other contractors already have a copy. If you cannot sort yourself out, it ain't their problem. No one likes having a technical support division. Not even the tech companies (see: outsourcing).
HTML5 doesn't have a ubiquitous tool to write it in. Seriously, what are you going to point people at?
Second, revision control. Publishers use this to keep track of who did what. For HTML5, there are any number of bolt-ons, but they're all developer tools. I love version control, but they are not simple tools (part of my job is doing git tech support for our engineering team; even highly technical folks often get turned about by version control).
(I will give you that HTML5 does have comments. But that's 1 out of 3, and it is still missing a standard UI for people who don't want to read and edit raw HTML...)
I suspect changing away from Word as the standard would require Microsoft to go into significant decline. This process may have started in the last decade or so, but assuming that it did, they've got a lot of assets and will be around for decades to come. MS is deeply entrenched. Good Enough is the enemy of both Perfect and Better.
For the record: I use vim+make+git+plain text (having used POD and LaTeX in the past, depending on exactly what I'm up to; I like markdown, but haven't been using it more than casually). I have roughly the same feelings as OGH with regard to Word.
]]>Miniaturization caught up in the last decade, there are motorcycles with EFI setups now. I think you can still get carburetor equipped bikes new, but probably not for too much longer. So, the bike might still be dead, alarm or no, for the same reason the car is.
]]>The whole sending Bob in half-cocked bit does beg the question: did Iris know about the EMOCUM units, and was she making a play against rival cultists within the Laundry? There's clearly a problem faction within Her Majesty's government at work, and I don't remember Iris being the horse fancier type... (I expect the answer to this is "just keep reading.")
Also, you had entirely too much fun writing those letters from Howard Phillips Lovecraft, didn't you?
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