Cory Doctorow, "Walkaway"

www.politics-pr...
A three-time Prometheus Award winner, Doctorow, author of young adult novels including Homeland and Pirate Cinema, returns to fiction for adults with a dystopian epic. In a world of rampant consumerism, a band of renegades known as the Walkaways braves ravaged nature and the industrial wastelands to create another kind of life. Doctorow, co-editor of the Boing Boing blog and a columnist for the Guardian, vividly evokes a new kind of wilderness where the essentials-food, clothing, shelter-can be printed out from any computer, but where humans are still vulnerable to predators. Or are they? When the Walkaways discover a way to outwit death, they have the one thing their old world couldn’t buy and now vows to steal.
Doctorow is in conversation with Amie Stepanovich, the U.S. Policy Manager for Access Now, an advocacy group dedicated to an open and free Internet.
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Produced by Tom Warren

[@sebastianjimenez2211]

Just finished this book -- >.< -- miss it already

[@AsIfInteractive]

I love how optimistic he is, but let's face it: there's just one Edward Snowden for every 100 scientists willing to "prove" whatever their corporate bosses want them to prove.

[@nicktaylor5264]

I would have thought there were far more corrupted scientists in that ratio than that. There's only one Ed Snowden on the planet. That said #1, the number of non-corrupted scientists massively outweigh the corrupt... if you're going to use the % of scientists that still deny global warming as a benchmark (and I think you can) then (roughly) the ratio is reversed - there is one corrupted scientist for every 100 or so that aren't. Scientists that are corrupt are a minority outside the bounds of statistical significance. Note that I'm not talking about journalism here. People often attribute bad journalism to bad science. If a news organisation is simply printing out "scientific" press-releases from Exxon, then it's not doing journalism. #2, None of which matters - the adversarial peer-review system means that results are publicly auditable, and with experiments/research that are repeatable. Bad science gets found out and discredited by the scientific community fairly quickly. #3 - Science doesn't do "proof", it does evidence. Proof is left to maths etc. Scientific laws only become laws (rather than theories) when they're underwritten by mathematical certainty. At least that is my understanding.