[SoothSayer]

>> By the way, I am a software engineer!

I used to be one too - was "Senior Technologist" at a hi tech startup which went from 0 to 450 staff and around $500m turnover in 4 years ... but now I have moved on.

No more 16+ hour days, 6.5 or 7 day weeks, skipped vacations, endless air travel, endless internal meetings, endless meetings with other companies, job applicant interviews etc for me!

I especially won't miss being involved in contract negotiatations, battling clause by clause, with the "help" of lawyers.

Yippee!

(It was a wonderful experience 'tho - I was around employee #18 so I saw the firm expand from a handful of desks to a large organisation in a huge modern building)

[galacticsurfer]

Before I got into reading internet I was not at all politically aware or only of MSM sources which are slanted obviously. I soon realized that I could take any idea, book, group, etc. and find the oppositie critical opinion in a flash in the internet and make up my own mind or weigh the options pretty damn quick. It is a really open marketplace of ideas. Now I have a lot of strong opinions which are more eco, left leaning than before now as I grew up in Reagan 80s so the media was biased strongly in a supply side, anti union, proglobalization direction since that time. In 2003 I did not get the whole story on Iraq so was ambivalent. I think now most people do not buy that crap about Iran as more people read the net. However blogs maybe do not have enough influence yet in comparison to the MSM(rupert Murdoch and friends).

Stranger in strange Land I read in maybe 11th/12th grade, maybe 1982 or so. Dune I saw on TV a couple of times. and I read one of those cyberpunk books by William Gibson a year or so ago.

Sci fi is just a modern fairy tale, nothing else. It can never come true. Dune is obviously about Arabs and oil as far as the movie goes and very much into this mystical religion. Heinlein is also very religious/mystical, esoteric. They used science fiction to replace what now goes as mystery in films. Gibson is very catastrophic future and Matrix is more Eastern religion with terminator overlaid to get an excuse to make the film.

[benzoil]

Galacticsurfer-
IF your only experience with Dune was on TV
AND you have strong opinions about economics or ecology
THEN read the book "Dune".

Its ALL about economics and ecology. You can read oil and Arabs if you like, but that'd be like saying the Mona Lisa is just a picture of a some chick. It may be that, but there's more to it!