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Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:06:26 -0500
From: "Paul D. Fernhout" <pdfernh...@kurtz-fernhout.com>
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Subject: Re: [Open Manufacturing] Re: A Change of Tone to Well Being
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Vinay Gupta wrote:
> The point I'm making is that you're falling into really dumb social  
> antipatterns where substantive discussion is replaced with talking  
> about how people are talking. Quit it and get back to work.

Your story on your site is a rather narrow self-fulfilling prophecy of life 
and politics -- one which I presume many here hope we can move beyond. That 
is not necessarily to disagree with it as a current state of affairs in some 
specific parts of our society. :-(

Again, without necessarily disagreeing with your point quoted above, as a 
software developer, most of my time is spent thinking about how objects talk 
to each other. That *is* my work. See:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_passing
"Alan Kay has argued that message passing is a concept more important than 
objects in his view of object-oriented programming, however people often 
miss the point and place too much emphasis on objects themselves and not 
enough on the messages being sent between them."

Granted, people are not objects, so maybe, when all you have is a hammer, 
everything looks like a nail? :-)

By the way, this page has a link for a really cool video on the future 
directions of computing, with physical objects (with displays) that are 
sending messages to each other as you move them:
   "Demo of Spatially Aware Blocks "
   http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/13/1630232
"This 5-min demo just posted from last week's TED — got a big crowd 
reaction. It's a new technology coming out of MIT, about to be 
commercialized. Siftables have been seen before, but not like this. They're 
toy blocks/tiles that are spatially aware and interact with each other in 
very cool ways. Initial use may be as toys, but there's big potential for 
new paradigm of spatially-aware physical mini computers."

--Paul Fernhout