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This really triggers a deja vu moment for listeners of the escape pod podcast just in September there was a two part episode perfectly Matched to this topic: The revolution, brought to you by Nike. http://escapepod.org/2018/09/0... Also shows that the results probably aren't necessarily what you wanted...

I've been listening to various podcasts for almost eight years now. A lot have come and gone, but my two long-time favorites are:

Escape Pod - Weekly short-form science fiction. These guys have been around since almost the beginning of podcasting. This is their sci-fi show. They also have horror (Pseudopod) and fantasy (Podcastle) among others.

StarShipSofa - Also weekly short-form sci-fi but more than just stories. This is an audio magazine with regular articles about science news (Delivered by a biology professor), genre history (Delivered by a history professor), interviews and more. It's part of the District of Wonders (Which also has horror, fantasy, and used to have pulp and crime before those shows withered away).

More recently I've been listening to these and getting a lot of interesting thought topics out of them.

The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe - Skeptical thinking, science news of all types (Astro physics, biology, technology, etc), interviews, and more. This one usually runs a bit long.

You Are Not So Smart - Psychology deep dives into various topics (logical fallacies, changing people's minds, detecting bullshit, etc).

I heard that story on EscapePod http://escapepod.org/ and couldn't figure out what it had to do with SciFi, but that was true of most of the stories during their 'Hugo Month'. In fact, the hosts noted that the only reason some of those stories were on the show was because they were Hugo nominated.

I find including or excluding anybody or their work because of race/gender/orientation pretty disgusting.

"The Caretaker", by Ken Liu, recently featured on escape pod is quite relevant.

Relevant.

A rather timely comment. Escape pod just ran a short story dealing with this very concept.... http://escapepod.org/2011/11/10/ep318-the-prize-beyond-gold/

As a trained teaching guy: If I were to design a course with the objectives to "survey the histories of these genres and recognize how world events have been reflected onto other worlds," I would focus on the science fiction that uses contemporary topics and extrapolates current technologies.

Azimov? Clarke? Awesome, yes. Iconic, surely. But rockets, FTL, time travel, aliens ... all over-worked tropes. Kids have seen it and done it, beat the boss, posted the walkthrough on youtube. It's not sci-fi. It's the future of the archaic past.

Focus more on the future of the present.

Here's a story I'd love to include for a younger audience: Boyfriend, by Madeline Ashby. Kids subscribe to virtual boy- and girl-friend AI apps on their portable computers, and the AIs begin to rethink the meaning of their service to humanity. Listen to it on Escape Pod. Now *that* is a rich topic for today's generation of cell-phone slinging, hyper-connected, emotionally stuntable youth.

The best free sci-fi on podcast I've come across is from Escape Pod.

Currently at about 200 short stories narrated often by the original authors, includes original and award winning works. Kudos to the guy who does it. I've stopped listening now I dont drive 2 hours a day to work and back.

http://escapepod.org/

Each is between 30 mins and an hour or so, reading, mostly non-dramaticized.

Or were neanderthals so cornered by humans that they resorted to cannibalism?

Misleading title...

Not really. There's several explanations for why that jawbone ended up the way it did, but it wouldn't likely be N-on-N cannibalism, since it ended up in a Cro-Mag settlement.

Judging from the absence of other bones, it could as easily have been scavenging, or opportunistic trophy collecting.

OTOH, it could come back to bite us.

A good reading of the story can be found @ EscapePod.

Try listening to some podcasts for new authors.

Here are two outstanding sf podcasts:

Escape Pod
StarShipSofa

No time to read your SciFi? Check out the Escape Pod podcast. Steve does a great job with presenting short stories from acclaimed authors.
http://escapepod.org/

Hush now, you'll give away the real plan!

Good thing no humans read /. comment threads, ne?

That's the first thing I thought of!

The coppers smashed my father's printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da's look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.

Also available in audio format: http://escapepod.org/2007/01/09/ep-flash-printcrime/

Other versions: http://craphound.com/?p=573 (including fan translations into Spanish, French, Italian, and Polish)

Mine's filled with CDs I ripped myself from my own CDs (and a couple episodes of Firefly, also ripped myself from my own DVDs) and free audio from the likes of Escape Pod, Pseudo Pod and Podiobooks.com.

Despite Sony's recent assertion that I'm somehow "stealing" the music that I rip from the CDs I own, I'm Canadian, so I don't expect to be hauled off for extraordinary rendition by the RIAA. Maybe I'll go legally download some music to see if I should bother investing in any new CDs this month!

This weeks Escape Pod Podcast (hosted by Steve Eley) is called the Giving Plague and touches on viruses, HIV, and the potential symbiotic relationship and borg like integration viruses can have with Human cells.

One of the thoughts is that viruses actually benefit the race in the long term, as we will eventually form a symbiotic relationship with the majority of them. (uses e-coli in our gut as an example), but how one day someone will be resistant to AIDS and that will make the human race stronger.

A good listen if you're fascinated by this topic. check it out. non-disclaimer: I'm just a fan.

Most Communist leaders just used the ideals to gain/keep power, unfortunately.

As for it not working on a national level, I agree with you whole-heartedly. Of course, there are technological changes that could easily turn everything on its head yet.

For example, this: http://www.escapepod.org/2006/10/12/ep075-nano-com es-to-clifford-falls/ is a great "What If" peice on what happens to Capitalism when a society suddenly goes from scarcity to abundance too quickly. While nanotech will probably never reach this level, increased importance of virtual items and the like could very well require us to re-examine how we implement Capitalism.

If anyone hasn't heard of Escape Pod - I would encourage them to try it out at http://www.escapepod.org./ Good stories, and excellent sound quality.

Most Communist leaders just used the ideals to gain/keep power, unfortunately.

As for it not working on a national level, I agree with you whole-heartedly. Of course, there are technological changes that could easily turn everything on its head yet.

For example, this: http://www.escapepod.org/2006/10/12/ep075-nano-com es-to-clifford-falls/ is a great "What If" peice on what happens to Capitalism when a society suddenly goes from scarcity to abundance too quickly. While nanotech will probably never reach this level, increased importance of virtual items and the like could very well require us to re-examine how we implement Capitalism.

If anyone hasn't heard of Escape Pod - I would encourage them to try it out at http://www.escapepod.org./ Good stories, and excellent sound quality.

Why couldn't Einstein have bred like a rabbit? The world would have been a better place.

That sounds kinda familiar....

One of my favorite podcasts is Escape Pod. Well worth a listen to. I also enjoy NASA's podcast as well as Space.com's. I also listen the the DragonPage shows as Mur Lafferty's two shows (I Should Be Writing and Geek Fu Action Grip). As for my environment; well, I have a Creative Labs Zen Nomad XTra which my wife bought me for Christmas a couple of years ago. Since I use KDE as my desktop environment, I use KZenExplorer to hook up to it, and KPodder as my aggregator; it downloads the feeds into specific directories in my home directory, and I can just drag and drop them to my MP3 player. KZenExplorer is available for Kubuntu through the multiverse repositories, but I had to install KPodder from source.

It's actually http://www.escapepod.org/ now. Much easier to remember.

Escape pod is also now at more easier to remember link. EP028. Your Corporate Network and the Forces of Darkness was just so incredibly funny... It's one of my favourite podcasts.

I was referring to the tone of the response, not what he wanted. He posted the e-mail exchange, and my own perception is that he responded to huffiness with excessive grandeur. If he didn't want to rub Erik's face in it, George could also have offered to reinstate the keywords (yeah, a moderate pain in the butt) or allowed Erik to reinstate them himself, but left the unreasonable "Leave my URLs out of directory submissions" demand on the table. Instead he went on and on about "MY terms" and Erik's failure to recognize how wonderful he was. When one is speaking as a service provider, even a free service provider, it's pretty assholish to address your users like that. Even when your users are assholes, it's unprofessional to respond in kind.

I'd also dispute the "questionable" attribute for the PodKeyword service. What evidence do you have for it being described in this way?

Simple. I question its utility and value. I'm sure George could lecture me about it for a page or two, but I would argue that blanketing directories with multiple aliased pointers to the same content only dilutes those directories and makes it difficult to get any accurate count of total podcasts or subscribers/click counts for each one. There's already a great place to make keywords searchable: in the channel metadata inside your RSS feed. Every important directory searches descriptions as well as names. This makes PodKeyword unnecessary. My podcast doesn't use it, and I don't know of anyone in the last six months who has. I vaguely remember hearing of it back in the beginning of the year, but until this fracas blew up I didn't even know it was still operating.