From: | The Spaceman <spaced@*.WASHINGTON.EDU> |
---|---|
Subject: | [OT] Real-Life imitates Shadowrun (Mental instability) |
Date: | Sat, 21 Jun 1997 16:43:28 -0700 |
Stranger_.
"Virtual i-O, local makers of the _Virtual i-Glasses_ video headsets
...has gone under. The headsets were cute and offered an intimate viewer-
image experience, but ... the company couldn't get the quality and
reliability up and the price down before it ran out of funds. TCI, the
company's leading investor/creditor, now owns the rights to the technology".
Am I the only one whose first thought was "I wonder how many runner/
runs it took TCI?"..........
ObSR: One of the things Dunkelzahn's Will did was dump a bunch of
money into small companies like Virtual i-O. So what would the typical AAA
reaction be to a small company getting a bunch of money/influence/whatever
before the AAA was finished with the typical black op? Firebomb the place
to smithereens?
Also, on the tech advance note, what comes after simsense? What
entertainment technology could follow that lead? What happens when small
company B finds a way to simulate a simsense loop without all that nasty
cyberware? Would a)that qualify as a "magical effect through technology"?
or b)send the mega's into feeding frenzy time?
Related to simsense: How does it work? (I don't have Shadowbeat, so
this may be a moot question). Say the brain works through active symbols
ala Hofstadter and Pirsig. That idea seems to imply that simsense has found
a way to insert symbols into another's brain (after all, most people haven't
fallen without a chute, yet that seems to be what Holly Brighton's _Free Fall_
was). How permanent are these outside symbols? If you have memory of the sim,
it would seem to be relatively permanent. That means that your thinking
process has been changed, thus changing your personality. So how many sims
would form a critical threshold to a literally "whole new you"?
Urgh. The preceding is what happens when you're on your fourth dew of
the work shift, you've been a)reading _Godel, Escher, Bach_ b)teaching your
self Java and c)an English major (That _has_ to a vital element.....;)
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