Well, I wrote a long appreciative response to David Weinberger and Tom Matrullo this morning, then i started up a betaware game and crashed my system, thus losing this morning's ruminations. I’ve got to get a keystroke saver. . . .
In fewer and less-well-chosen words than this morning’s, I acknowledged that David cites me as “more positively enthusiastic about digID” than he is. That’s true, though to a less dramatic degree than I would say. If I’d been expressing myself judiciously, I’d probably have said not that “I’m a cheerleader” (a frightening picture for anyone who knows me) but that “it sounds as though PingID provides a good enough protocol for us, the people, to exercise a more-than-trivial role in shaping digID, so I’m willing to root for them to catch on as the digID norm.” After all, David has pointed out that we already participate in unsystematic, haphazard, often covert digID in our current online activities; and Eric has convinced me that digID will be non-optional for someone who wants to buy from Amazon, file taxes online, check his rotisserie-league baseball team, and other online activities. I’m enthusiastic about what looks to me like the most commendable of several alternative futures, though I share much of David’s dubiety about the whole thing.
Tom wonders how I reconcile my interest in “natural” signifiers of identity with my hermeneutical emphasis on language as convention (specifically, with regard to names as markers of identity). I could allow that I’ve always been attracted to the Stoic and Confucian doctrine that entities have transcendentally proper names, and that the philosopher’s job is to associate the right names with the right entities. I could, but despite that attraction I remain a resolute Cynic conventionalist when it comes to language and communication. I feel no identity-stake in my DNA sequence; I feel some attachment to my fingerprints; I feel a certain warmth of association with my handwriting; I’m resigned to my face; and I like my name.
But I could manage just fine with some other name, and I would think myself to be the same guy. When I was playing the Game Neverending (before it ended) (that is, “went on hiatus”,0 I played the role of Peter Verona in a way quite congruent (so far as I can tell, and so far as game rules permitted) with the way AKMA lives his life. Now, when I correspond with other GNE players, it feels odd to address them by their physical-world names, but I can get used to that. You can call me Dave Winer and him AKMA, but I’m still a theologian and he’s still a Berkman Fellow.
But I need to think more about this — it’s mostly just off the top of my head, for now.
Posted by AKMA at April 21, 2003 12:53 PM | TrackBack"You can call me Dave Winer and him AKMA, but I’m still a theologian and he’s still a Berkman Fellow."
Isn't there a problem with simultaneously making that statment and wanting to be a conventionalist? (Not that you have any other(clear) choice.) If language is pure convention then each term in your proposition("I", "am", "theologican") opens up pretty big gaping chasms, no? Not that this is a bad thing (far from it!).
Posted by: daniel at April 21, 2003 02:20 PMThe Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
Posted by: Jane at January 13, 2004 10:48 AMLet's take a moment to reexamine that. What we've done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we're storing data in it. That's the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that's really called favoriteNumber, and it's the one we're working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn't big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.
Posted by: Jocosa at January 13, 2004 10:49 AMWhen a variable is finished with it's work, it does not go into retirement, and it is never mentioned again. Variables simply cease to exist, and the thirty-two bits of data that they held is released, so that some other variable may later use them.
Posted by: Cuthbert at January 13, 2004 10:49 AM