RAPTURE FOR THE GEEKS: (RETAIL)
END-USER LICENSE AGREEMENT (EULA)
Published: October 7th, 2008
1. GRANT OF LICENSE. Richard Dooling grants you the following rights provided that you comply with all terms and conditions of this EULA:
2. INSTALLATIONS AND USE. You may install, use, access, display and read ONE COPY OF THIS BOOK on a SINGLE PERSON, such as an adult, man, woman, teenager, or other human person. This book may NOT be read by more than one person.
3. MANDATORY ACTIVATION. The license rights granted under this EULA are limited to the first thirty (30) minutes after you install the book by opening it, unless you supply information required to activate your licensed copy of the book in the manner described on this page. You may also need to reactivate the book if you modify yourself or alter your personality. For instance if you grow older and more mature, develop a mental illness, change your diet, or receive any artificial limbs or joints, pacemakers, implants, or organ transplants, then you may need to reactivate your license before you will be allowed to reaccess the book.
4. UNLICENSED USE. This book contains technological measures designed to prevent unlicensed use of the book. For instance, an embedded microchip allows the publisher to scan your retinas from time to time and make sure that it’s really YOU and ONLY YOU reading this book and not some random book pirate. Rest assured that Richard Dooling will not collect any personally identifiable information from you during this process, just blood, tissue, and bone marrow samples, which may be taken (forcefully if necessary) to determine DNA. If you are not using a licensed copy of the book, you are not allowed to read the book or read subsequent updates to the book.
5. BOOK TRANSFER. You may make a one-time permanent transfer of the book to another end-user. But after the transfer you must completely remove all knowledge about the book from the brain of the former person who read the book. If the book was so memorable that knowledge cannot be completely removed from the former person, then execute the former person using the most humane measures listed in Appendix A and mail the enclosed proof-of-execution and a notarized certificate of death (with a raised seal) to Richard Dooling at the address below.
6. TERMINATION. Without prejudice to any other rights, Richard Dooling may terminate this EULA if you fail to comply with the terms and conditions of this EULA. In such event, you must destroy all copies of the book and all of its component parts, destroy any notes you made about the book, and forget any parts of the book that you may be tempted to remember. If you find the book simply unforgettable then decapitate yourself and mail your head to Richard Dooling for a $50.00 rebate. Be sure to enclose your original sales receipt (no copies!), the bar code from the book jacket, and the enclosed rebate form, which you should take care to complete before detaching and mailing your head.
7. PROTECT YOURSELF! Read only genuine books purchased from an authorized reseller. Do not download pirated books! Anytime you read counterfeit books, you are at serious risk. In a recent study, an organization hired by Richard Dooling found that 25% of the websites offering pirated copies of books also attempted to install spyware and trojan horse programs that can compromise your operating system and make it impossible for you to properly view pornography on your computer.
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Okay, now if you are sure that you have a GENUINE copy of Rapture For The Geeks, it’s probably safe to proceed.
Excerpted from Rapture For The Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ, by Richard Dooling.
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Send me an e-mail Subject: EULA Applied To Books and, as soon as I’ll have time, I’ll send you an addition I’m sure you will like, something you won’t think of in your country.
Many private computers in the U.S. are now used for gaming only, not serious computing. Microsoft, by patenting living languages throttled interest in programming in the American youth, and fed them pre-packaged pablum in the form of Windows, cheap games and the like! Will rampant and uncontrolled capitalism and greed shape the uses of super computers of the next generation of chips as well? Are there ways to prevent a repeat of this sorrowful situation? I use and personally promote Ubuntu because it is open source. Europeans as well as Americans are seeing the light, and converting to open source. Such wonderful resources as computer languages must not be controlled or taxed by a single monopolistic corporation like Microsoft, they belong to all the people, to develop, enhance, work with and exploit for the benefit of all mankind, taxed for use by no corporation, government, political regime or other form of coercion. God help us to keep it clean and unfettered this time! If we do not, the intelligentsia of China, now rising to the forefront in the world, and unfettered by sick capitalism, will. Happy Computing! It belongs to everyone who can think! Welcome to the 21st Century – a new world dawning, perhaps from China!
I just finished the Rapture for the Geeks, and it was a fun read (mostly). The problem I had reading it is that about half-way through, it took a hard turn off the tracks.
It went from being a tongue-in-cheek commentary on technology, to a neo-garage-coder anti-Microsoft screed. There was a point in the second to last chapter where I almost put the book down and stopped reading on principle. Had the book been sub-titled “Why Microsoft Sucks” at least I would have known what I was getting into.
Further, I found a great deal of the indictment of Microsoft to stem from an obvious novice to the world of programming.
You talk of “real” programming languages and only include languages that are either script or require a JIT or VM to work. Where’s the real OOP languages? If you want to discuss the follies of bad programming, you need to be informed. (write me an e-mail and I’ll explain to you how Java is the worst thing to happen to programming since LOGO).
You talk about standards and formats that will exist in the future and use ASCII as the example. At the VERY least, as a *linux user you should have talked about UNICODE, and if really concerned XML.
Look, it may seem like I’m picking nits, but you’re trying to come off as someone trying to save people from the Singularity (welcome to 15 years ago), and you end up sounding like you think you wrote an OS after you completed your first web page. I don’t mean, to come off like this is an ad-hominem attack on you, but I just found the whole thing lacking.
Perhaps, looking back, there should have been two books. The first half or so was truly good, and truly thoughtful. The way you speared science its holiest members was fantastic, and something I could really relate to. The end where you just tried to shred Microsoft because you couldn’t read a Word 1.0 file from a floppy disk in 2008…well…I just didn’t get it.
…and to the above comments:
I’ve been programming since I was 11 (that would be 25 years), and can code in more languages than I care to count. (I’m no superman, but it bears worthy of mention before I continue).
Microsoft didn’t try to tax or patent or take over ANY languages. Indeed it CREATED Visual Basic for rapid prototyping BEFORE the concept even existed. It also has and continues to provide FREE compilers for various languages on its platform (to include C++ I might add, and the newer .Net languages).
What they did was provide the platform, standardize it and bring it to the masses. Beyond that they turn server rooms around the world from Gazillion Dollar Sun Racks into 3rd party server racks (cheap, and easily upgraded) with a legitimate networking OS on them.
Can you recall a time when Commodore and Be existed, or when the very first GUIs showed up on the PC? There were so many competitors, and yet MS won out. I was a bit sad, I happened to think that OS2 was the way to go, but it happened. What followed was the ENTIRETY of the boom in consulting/programming for the next 10-15 years.
Dear Matthew:
I’ll take any structural complaints to heart, but I took great pains at several junctures in Rapture For The Geeks to explain how I am NOT a computer expert and am in fact a rank amateur programmer. “Python complaining about my inferior coding skills . . .” etc. See especially the acknowledgments, where I thanked the members of the Python community for introducing me to computer programming. I fail to see where I would come off as somebody who wrote an OS. You wrote your first program at age 11; I wrote my first computer program at age 51, and I was an English major in undergrad, so it would be silly of me to pretend I’m a computer scientist. I think you bring too much technical knowledge to Rapture For The Geeks. The audience I had in mind was the heavy to moderate computer USER, who has never given much thought to where our relationship with computers may take us as a civilization. I am first and foremost a humanist concerned about what technology is doing to us or could do to us (see, e.g., my third novel, Brain Storm). I’m eminently qualified to write about those concerns.
All of that said, I really enjoyed reading your other insights. And I’m glad that you liked the first half. Neal Stephenson also takes pains to point out how Microsoft is responsible for bringing computing (PCs) to the masses, so you are in good company there. I still can’t abide their authentication schemes and their criminal behavior when it comes to antitrust, a matter of public record, and a tired cliche to you, but not to most users who never think about it and don’t care. Even much of this screed was tongue-in-cheek.
Thanks for writing.
RD
Richard,
First off, thanks for responding, I have to say I was a bit surprised to see that you had taken the time to read, and react to my post. For my part, I probably get into a bit of a spiral when I respond to what I see as an anti-MS philosophy and it doesn’t really help me get my point across well. As a programmer, knowing the amount of support I have gotten from Microsoft, and the free tools they have made available, I tend to get touchy. I also have my issues with the Open Source movement (specifically around Java) in that I believe that there are “right tools” for the “right jobs” and that it doesn’t fit every model and can be counter-productive.
You should know that I have felt (though never put into words) about modern science (quantum physics in particular) exactly the way you portray it in your book. The notion that once again we find ourselves absolutely sure that things are as we say they are, and damned be the person who dare challenge that. It is truly a strange thing when something as observable as gravity can be described mathematically only by using a magic number (big G), things like that make me doubt everything scientific around me.
Your book came to me as I was finishing John Archibald Wheeler’s book and a biography of Einstein, trying to find insight into the men who put us in our current quantum-predicament. In the end, much of the book was entertaining and insightful…it just got political/religious on me, and I suppose that is where my disappointment came in.
Either way, thank you again for responding. I’m probably going to end up picking up some of your other work, out of sheer curiosity, and I’ve already told me friend to go out and buy Rapture for the Geeks (because even if its ok to let him read mine under the EULA, I think people should support you monetarily for your hard work).
-Matt
Thanks, Matt. Two additional items. I too was on OS2 Warp fan. And the UNICODE lapse was unforgivable.
RD
UNICODE lapse? Am I missing something?