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Works in certain fiction universes.

(In the Worm ("parahumans") web novel, one of the "Engbringers" (yeah, the name tells you most of what you need to know) main power is hydrokinesis on a massive scale, tsunamis are a regular part of his repertoire. But if you've got clean nukes....)

The BBC Radio production of it is really good. And if you like Pratchett, check out AA Pessimal on fanfiction.net -- https://www.fanfiction.net/u/1...

For school, text books on project management and agile management.

For work, technical documentation

For fun, I've been re-re-reading a lot of Terry Pratchett's stuff as well as a lot of excellent Discworld fan fiction from AA Pessimal on fanficton.net - https://www.fanfiction.net/u/1... . If you like Pratchett and all things DIscworld, Pessimal's stuff isn't to be missed.

Soon computers will generate better entertainment than people.

It is worth noting that link has some somewhat original stuff, though obviously not totally otherwise it wouldn't be fanfiction.. Oh a lot of it is bad, a lot is mediocre, but there is a massive amount on there. One i'd randomly recommend is, "Browncoat, Green Eyes" link No, I didn't write it. It is a firefly Harry Potter crossover. Beyond Blue Eyes is another good story. link

Basically, AI isn't likely to be needed to make more stories anytime soon. I'd more worry about using it to generate pervasive fake news. That would likely be more feasible.

Soon computers will generate better entertainment than people.

It is worth noting that link has some somewhat original stuff, though obviously not totally otherwise it wouldn't be fanfiction.. Oh a lot of it is bad, a lot is mediocre, but there is a massive amount on there. One i'd randomly recommend is, "Browncoat, Green Eyes" link No, I didn't write it. It is a firefly Harry Potter crossover. Beyond Blue Eyes is another good story. link

Basically, AI isn't likely to be needed to make more stories anytime soon. I'd more worry about using it to generate pervasive fake news. That would likely be more feasible.

https://www.fanfiction.net

There are a large number of books that they can use as a base for movies.

The reason is not that they are out of ideas, the reason is that they are lazy and just re-use what did work one more time.

Lots and lots of good books. Heck even lots and lots of decent fanfiction. (Even more than is aweful, but lots of good stories out there.) Just for fun, I'll include a few. The synopsis are taken from the source. Of the three listed, I think the first would actually have potential for conversion to maybe a couple movies of possibly a miniseries. The second has potential too, particularly as it is purely HP. The third could work, but it is fairly obscure, and is darker than the original sources.

Browncoat Green Eyes
Firefly: :Harry Potter crossover Post Serenity. Two years have passed since the secret of the planet Miranda got broadcast across the whole 'verse in 2518. The crew of Serenity finally hires a new pilot, but he's a bit peculiar.

Bungle in the Jungle
If you read just one fiction tonight make it this one. Go inside the mind of Harry Potter as he deals with betrayals, secrets and wild adventures. Not your usual fanfic.

Shadow Chronicles
[I mostly refer to the last story in the series. It is Ranma 1/2 crossed over with Sailor Moon in an AU so if your not familiar with both, you may not care for it. Darker than the originals. The rating is likely M. It is also and likely will forever be incomplete.]
All roads look the same when you don't know where you're going, and Ranko Saotome travels roads that most people don't even realize exist. Or rather, he did; now he's become trapped in a strange world, one unlike his own. His path takes a strange turn, though, when he encounters a band of sailor girls who believe he is the avatar to armagaddon. Ranko will have to fight not only the enemies without, but his own inner demons as well, and the stakes are higher than his battered soul. The truth behind the mysterious crystal key and the dimensional links it commands is waiting to be wrested from the grasp of shadows, but they will not surrender their prize easily. For the time they have been awaiting is at hand. The key has arrived, and with it the last element they require to extend their dominion over all the worlds ...

At any rate, my overall point is there is a ton of original stuff around. Some paid. Much free. We don't need any more matrix copies. Really, we don't.

There are a large number of books that they can use as a base for movies.

The reason is not that they are out of ideas, the reason is that they are lazy and just re-use what did work one more time.

Lots and lots of good books. Heck even lots and lots of decent fanfiction. (Even more than is aweful, but lots of good stories out there.) Just for fun, I'll include a few. The synopsis are taken from the source. Of the three listed, I think the first would actually have potential for conversion to maybe a couple movies of possibly a miniseries. The second has potential too, particularly as it is purely HP. The third could work, but it is fairly obscure, and is darker than the original sources.

Browncoat Green Eyes
Firefly: :Harry Potter crossover Post Serenity. Two years have passed since the secret of the planet Miranda got broadcast across the whole 'verse in 2518. The crew of Serenity finally hires a new pilot, but he's a bit peculiar.

Bungle in the Jungle
If you read just one fiction tonight make it this one. Go inside the mind of Harry Potter as he deals with betrayals, secrets and wild adventures. Not your usual fanfic.

Shadow Chronicles
[I mostly refer to the last story in the series. It is Ranma 1/2 crossed over with Sailor Moon in an AU so if your not familiar with both, you may not care for it. Darker than the originals. The rating is likely M. It is also and likely will forever be incomplete.]
All roads look the same when you don't know where you're going, and Ranko Saotome travels roads that most people don't even realize exist. Or rather, he did; now he's become trapped in a strange world, one unlike his own. His path takes a strange turn, though, when he encounters a band of sailor girls who believe he is the avatar to armagaddon. Ranko will have to fight not only the enemies without, but his own inner demons as well, and the stakes are higher than his battered soul. The truth behind the mysterious crystal key and the dimensional links it commands is waiting to be wrested from the grasp of shadows, but they will not surrender their prize easily. For the time they have been awaiting is at hand. The key has arrived, and with it the last element they require to extend their dominion over all the worlds ...

At any rate, my overall point is there is a ton of original stuff around. Some paid. Much free. We don't need any more matrix copies. Really, we don't.

Heh, just wait until someone feeds it "My Immortal" (https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6829556/2/My-Immortal ;-)

Or better yet, just redirect it to FanFiction.net. Those Love Bots will be coming for us before we know it!

Why are these girls complaining? The club book of their arch enemy, whose club's express purpose is to exclude these girls, has been revealed.. And neither Club Dictator-for-life nor the Club President and the First Tiger complained about it.

1. Select some well-known, compelling characters, and prepare to infringe someone's intellectual property
2. ???
3. Profit!

I wrote most of it.

Oh there're lots of sequels.

http://www.fanfiction.net/movie/Blade-Runner/

They should make a move for every one of them.

Kind of a dark horse, but how about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality?

The actual science is clearly delineated from the magic. The mindset it's trying to inculcate is a really useful one to be able to enter.

Just don't make 'em think it resembles Harry Potter, because I don't think it does.

No sex, but it's not likely to be endearing to people who don't believe in questioning authority. And it is unabashedly propaganda for a certain way of thinking.

Expect a new story in the Buffy/West Wing crossover fanfic series any minute now:

http://www.fanfiction.net/Buffy_The_Vampire_Slayer_and_West_Wing_Crossovers/13/288/

Full Monty Virus. Why can't the DARPA crew waste billions on this Pathogen? It would be every extremists own personal nightmare.

I write hard SF. I go to great effort to get details right, although I know most of my readers will neither notice nor care. As long as I entertain them, that's fine -- and it's important that the details don't get in the way of that entertainment. However there are a few who will notice, who may even do the math. They're the ones I take that extra effort for.

Being a big fan of hard SF and very technically-minded myself, I appreciate your attention to detail, but be aware that you're doing that mostly for your own peace of mind. For example, there are so many faults in the Harry Potter series that somebody even wrote a whole book about that (called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality), and see what disaster it meant to J. K. Rowling's sales.

I will hide here: http://www.jamendo.com/
Or here: http://listen.grooveshark.com/
And here: http://www.fsf.org/
And definitely here: http://creativecommons.org/
And why not here: http://www.fanfiction.net/
Or here: http://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks
... and a myriad of other places on the Internet, including those where I publish my own works.

That being said, I don't think abolishing copyright will mean the end of commercial media, since there are many other ways to make money from them. For example, most blockbuster movies make most of their profit in the first one or two weeks, and people are willing to pay a premium to see the film early, with high quality, and added value features like 3D and advanced sound systems. TV productions are almost entirely financed by advertisements, not future DVD sales. Most artists already earn most of their income from concerts, not from CD/downloadable music sales. And so on.

I recently discovered a remarkable fanfiction retelling of a fantasy series that could teach these lessons in an inspiring way: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

would be a scientist (auto-didact, if that excludes him for you) and is among the youngest people I can think of given your restrictions (31). He has written a few very interesting pieces on AI (Warning: Transhumanist/Singularitan), as well as the best Harry Potter fanfiction I've ever read: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality

For more information see: http://yudkowsky.net/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky

May I suggest though not to restrict yourself to actual people? "Hero" is a word I use extremely rarely, since I consider that to be a "larger than life, thus fictional" label...

You're also forgetting the amazing piece of work that is HALO: Halos in Space

You can google it and find some funny voice-overs of people trying to keep a straight face while reading it.

For example, my sister was very upset that someone wrote a sequel to Gone With the Wind, because the original author didn't want a sequel to be written (it was written after her death). That could have been prevented with modern copyright law.

Your sister didn't have to read it, now did she? She loses absolutely nothing for said sequel existing. On the other hand, the people who did read and enjoy it would lose something had it been prevented from existing.

You have made an argument against, not for, copyright law.

A lot of people view the descendants of Tolkien as the official guardians of the lore, and would be annoyed if someone else tried to hijack that (although the result couldn't possibly be worse than the cartoons).

And a lot of people say screnw that and hijack it anyway. Which is okay, because Tolkien also used elements from common cultural heritage - the works of people who became him - to create his works, so why should it be held more sacred than them?

People like the feeling of officialness. They want the original author to be able to own the work. I think this is related to the fact that in our culture we really don't like plagiarism.

I notice a lot of people haven't objected to Disney ripping off everything from Tarzan to Jungle Book to Snow-White and the Seven Dwarves.

In other words, if you want to get political motion behind copyright reform, you are not only going to find the ideal economic balance, you're also going to have to find a way to convince people that giving control to the original author isn't all that important. Otherwise you can forget reforming copyright law. I am not sure of the best argument for this, maybe someone else can think of a convincing one.

People are already just fine with this, as proven by the fact that Tolkien-inspired art doesn't seem to draw a negative response, nor do the orcs and elves in pretty much every fantasy work. In fact, they are constantly creating derivative works from everything imaginable. That's not a new phenomenom either, but has been with us ever since stone-age hunter-gatherers told stories around a campfire.

No, what you have to do is convince politicians that not criminalizing normal human behaviour is more important than bribes from Disney. That's never going to happen, so let's concentrate our efforts on improving various anonymizing networks like Freenet or Tor that make it easier to ignore such laws. That also has the added social benefit of countering censorship in general.

By plugging the text of #66 and #67 into Goggle using quotes to get phrase matches:

1-75 plus some bogus ones

370 questsions of another version

1-75 plus 1-130 of the 370 version

(PDF) contains a sampling of about 100 randomly ordered questions

1-75

1-566 as VB .asp program source (!) and possibly with "preferred" answers

Enjoy your Streisand Effect!

If you eliminate scarcity, then why should anyone work? For the benefit of society? If you eliminate scarcity, the entire economic system collapses. I mean, really, good luck, but someone else already tried that.

If you eliminate scarcity, why should anyone work? Economy is about managing resources; if resources are infinite, why would they need to be managed? If something is as ubiquitous as the air you breath, why would there be economy around it? The purpose of work is to produce those resources in the first place, after all.

That said, even in a world with no material scarcity, people would still work, judging by the existence of websites like http://rule34.paheal.net/, http://www.fanfiction.net/ or http://www.wikipedia.org/. They'd simply do that for fun and prestige, rather than as a necessity of survival as currently.

In any case, I personally find the whole post-scarcity world a very unlikely prospect. It would remove the elite's power over those less rich than themselves, after all, so if someone comes up with a universal replicator, they'll stop it... because it can be used to make bombs! Yes! That's it! It must be stopped to fight the terrorists!

Here is a great sci-fi author: Secondpillow
There is even a cameo by Ray Bradbury.

It's a screwed up version of a screwed up DOOM fanfic.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/836450/1/DOOM_Repercussions_of_Evil

The legendary Doom fanfiction to end all fanfiction.

http://www.fanfiction.net/

Authors and editors are becoming obsolete as well.

God we really are going to be remembered as the "information" age.

John Stalvern waited. The lights above him blinked and sparked out of the air. There were demons in the base. He didn't see them, but had expected them now for years. His warnings to Cernel Joson were not listenend to and now it was too late. Far too late for now, anyway.
John was a space marine for fourteen years. When he was young he watched the spaceships and he said to dad "I want to be on the ships daddy."
Dad said "No! You will BE KILL BY DEMONS"
There was a time when he believed him. Then as he got oldered he stopped. But now in the space station base of the UAC he knew there were demons.
"This is Joson" the radio crackered. "You must fight the demons!"
So John gotted his palsma rifle and blew up the wall.
"HE GOING TO KILL US" said the demons
"I will shoot at him" said the cyberdemon and he fired the rocket missiles. John plasmaed at him and tried to blew him up. But then the ceiling fell and they were trapped and not able to kill.
"No! I must kill the demons" he shouted
The radio said "No, John. You are the demons"
And then John was a zombie.

What, you thought it didn't exist?

> bigger faster

Sort of like how the development of the Honda Civic completely wiped out the Porche, Mustang and Ferrari?

If you got $$, you'll buy speed (or status: i.e. Rolex vs Casio)

Personally, I'm a great fan of review-supported fan fics, and a portable reader with a battery that isn't sucked dry so quickly by a back-lit LCD would be a godsend - and don't get me started on how woefully inadequate a WinPC is in a k-8 environment.

As a modern internet hybrid--part-geek and part-fandom nut, I can see where you're coming from with that comment, but I dislike the tone. What livejournal is to fandom now is what emailing lists were to fandom five years ago. And before emailing lists, there were fanzines and snail mail and conventions.

Livejournal became especially popular after http://www.fanfiction.net/ cleaned out their database and tossed out all the NC-17 fics. Livejournal is a weird mixture of archive sites such as http://www.fanfiction.net/and http://www.adultfanfiction.net/, and http://www.yahoogroups.com/.

And it works for those ficwriters that don't want their stuff archived all over the place.

Livejournal poses as an archive site--like ff.net and its predecessors--the various FTP sites that hosted fanfic prior to around 1995. When fandom communities and private users accounts are suspended and deleted, some of that fic may have disappeared completely as well. If it were just discussions like the teenybopper junk on myspace, then I would no problem canceling my account. I have my own blog (wordpress) on my own paid webspace...but I still pay yearly for my livejournal account.

That being said, as a paid user, I will be contemplating a move as well. Although, I will most likely follow my fandoms (which are Buffy, Angel and Harry Potter).

As a modern internet hybrid--part-geek and part-fandom nut, I can see where you're coming from with that comment, but I dislike the tone. What livejournal is to fandom now is what emailing lists were to fandom five years ago. And before emailing lists, there were fanzines and snail mail and conventions.

Livejournal became especially popular after http://www.fanfiction.net/ cleaned out their database and tossed out all the NC-17 fics. Livejournal is a weird mixture of archive sites such as http://www.fanfiction.net/and http://www.adultfanfiction.net/, and http://www.yahoogroups.com/.

And it works for those ficwriters that don't want their stuff archived all over the place.

Livejournal poses as an archive site--like ff.net and its predecessors--the various FTP sites that hosted fanfic prior to around 1995. When fandom communities and private users accounts are suspended and deleted, some of that fic may have disappeared completely as well. If it were just discussions like the teenybopper junk on myspace, then I would no problem canceling my account. I have my own blog (wordpress) on my own paid webspace...but I still pay yearly for my livejournal account.

That being said, as a paid user, I will be contemplating a move as well. Although, I will most likely follow my fandoms (which are Buffy, Angel and Harry Potter).

That's tiny. Check out these guys where there're 300,000 Harry Potter stories.

Some of these fanfic writers write a bazillion stories. FanLib has 40 "Highlander" stories but if you look, they're all by the same guy.

This you can (almost) get. I mean, it's fanfic, of course. But what are you going to do?

Evidence - Sam Vimes is summoned to Tolkien's Arda at the end of the War of Wrath.

Skysaber that fantastic fanfic fantasist also known to the world as Jared Ornstead was lambasted when he wrote a little ditty in his fanfiction.net account on how to divide by zero.... Of course some of the overly religious statements he made at the time probably didn't win him any friends either, but here at last in the work of Dr. James Anderson he is vindicated!

So ummm.... Skysaber? How about an update or three? We've been waiting since like forever!

I saw this on Thursday at fanfiction.net. Here's what it looked like: http://nandhp.tripod.com/googlevideoad.html [JPEG compressed to 8kb]

And I also want to say, for instance http://www.fanfiction.net/ - how much bigger would this be if it wasn't mostly grey/illegial? Why do people put so much effort into it (spend some time there, there are some works that are both novel length, and good) for no possibility of reward?

And for many projects, I don't see why the model that's been working for freenet for instance wouldn't work - that is show a monthly amount needed to continue working on a project and ask for donations.

Plus, there will always be a market for physical incarnations of content. See various books by shakespeare or such. People still buy them. Of course, just providing a disc won't be enough unless you want to bill like the linux burning sites do ($2 a disk, including S&H). But cover art and official lyrics, and other cool stuff - boxed sets might do it.

And to people who say that that all is fine for books, but won't work for movies - see various fan star trek productions like the parody Star Wrek, or even the New Voyages covered on /. before. I mean, Star Wrek offers a DVD, but also offers a high quality torrent of it. They are making money, but can't be totally motivated by money, or wouldn't provide the torrent.

"And that, my liege, is how we know the Universe is not PEMDAS." - Sir Bedivere

For a story book, instead of releasing beta of a pseudo-complete book, author should release it chapter by chapter, and change the story direction based on reader feedback, in another word, Plot-Beta rather than Writing-Beta.

As a Fad

Since its introduction into the knowledge of the general public, Asperger's has become somewhat of a fad for those seeking to garner attention. In the fine tradition of disease whores everywhere, many young people who have ever felt the least bit shy or eccentric decide to self-diagnose themselves, forsaking the opinion of a qualified MD and therefore belittling genuine sufferers for just the sake of appearing special.

As Covering Up for Being a Total Fucktard

Some close-knit communities of people with distorted views of reality, such as furries, plushies and otherkin will frequently claim to have Asperger's or be Autistic en masse, often finding some way to tie its manifestations into the fact that they are social misfits, can't properly express affection, or to claim that it's an intrinsic part of being fucked up in the particular way that they are. In these instances, having "Asperger's" seems to be closely tied to posting disgusting and semi-nude pictures of yourself frequently to the internet, or writing extremely off-kilter fanfiction (see here (http://www.fanfiction.net/u/49104/)). This disease (and the associated Autism) are frequent mix-ins for those who like to claim to have many diseases and disorders. They can usually pull it off in quite a long-term manner, much as children are often over-diagnosed with ADD/ADHD simply because if you distort reality enough, you can claim the particular social dysfunction or misbehavior is part of the syndrome in question.

Diagnosis

If you feel that you're shy, unusual, highly intelligent, able to sense the emotional states of others, good at judging body language and inordinantly pre-occupied with things that most people are not, congratulations! You are just like everybody else.

/satire

A friend of mine wrote a very interesting story about brain machine interfaces. I wonder, what will be the future for this technology? Will we be able, as he states, to use this technology for ultra-fast typing, drawing and making computer animations, or even making blueprints, with just our thoughts?

The part i liked the most about his story was the ultra-fast typing. Mix this with display-integrated glasses and a telecomm. Ta-da! You got text-based telepathy! Cyborgs, anyone?

There are entire communities of fansubbing writers.

uhm, 2000 books is very few.

Project Gutenberg sports over 13,000 books (these are legal)

if you go to your local alt.binaries.ebooks or just #ebook you can easily double or triple Gutenberg count (my current library has around 30,000 books). Ofcourse would not so legal to download/own as they still would technically be under a copyright. But then, some of the books are easier to download illegaly than to get them at a library (as soon as I found out that my library has Shadow Puppets by Orson Scott Card I signed up and was waiting for over 7 months till I downloaded it).

and if are a maniac (as I am) of reading, but prefer to read legal things, then you could/should go with the lower quality writtings that are provided through various BBS archives various pr0n archives, as well as fan finction. Heck, there is even wikibooks.

What is needed is some project that makes a global internet library out of all of these resources. Where we have things rated per genre (tied with the iblist or, ugh, amazon) But for all the texts, not just published/bookstore works.

With the understanding, I hope, that there's a lot of bogus script adaptations floating around on the net, especially for a game that's been in production hell (sorry) for as long as Doom has, probably going on nine or 10 years now. Just search for fanfics, you'll hit some scripts.

Better yet, don't search for fanfics and just take my word for it. No one needs to read the Minesweeper http://www.fanfiction.net/directory_category.php?c ategoryid=441 stories.

Or Tetris. http://www.fanfiction.net/directory_category.php?c ategoryid=1897

With the understanding, I hope, that there's a lot of bogus script adaptations floating around on the net, especially for a game that's been in production hell (sorry) for as long as Doom has, probably going on nine or 10 years now. Just search for fanfics, you'll hit some scripts.

Better yet, don't search for fanfics and just take my word for it. No one needs to read the Minesweeper http://www.fanfiction.net/directory_category.php?c ategoryid=441 stories.

Or Tetris. http://www.fanfiction.net/directory_category.php?c ategoryid=1897

read up

My experience with fanfiction predates the internet (not the DARPAnet, however). The one real advantage that some of these fanfiction sites such as Sugarquill have over other sites and just writing in your journal is the extensive editing process. Jenkins is correct to put a lot of emphasis on the editorial process: it's what can make fanfiction writing into a real learning experience!

The internet makes fanfiction reviewing and editing a quicker process. Think back to the days when we sent typescripts back and forth by mail! Nowadays internet writers can afford the luxury of several "beta-readers" all in the time it would take oldtime fans to get the first editorial review from one fanzine publisher.

True, many writers don't take advantage of beta-readers. They just dump their stories up at websites like Fanfiction.Net in all their first-draft horror. Then they often get savagely mocked by disappointed readers. Savvy fans learn to prefer the sites which practice some sort of review process.

...next Slashdot will be telling us Gollum doesn't get the girl.

Don't make me check for Gollum slash fanfiction. Please, don't make me check ah who am I kidding, I can't resist checking aaaaand yes, you can find creepy gay porn about every single character ever. Especially Gollum.

Now bring me the nitrobenzene, Igor, I must bathe my retinas.