Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Domains

Domain: hycyber.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to hycyber.com.

Comments · 7

  1. DIY by salvorHardin · · Score: 1 · on Enterprise Fans Buy Full-Page Ad In LA Times
    Come on, people... sure, time-traveling alien Nazis are worse than most holodeck episodes, but seriously - how many of you have submitted scripts (Trek or otherwise) to any of the production/publishing players?

    Sure, they'll probably file it in the trash before they look at it, perhaps even sending you a polite rejection letter if you're lucky. Be sure to send a short synopsis of the plot and major waypoints of the storyline you intend along with the story, and be sure to mail a copy to yourself (which remains unopened until court) in case your idea gets robbed.

    Before BigBiz started doing this stuff, the major Sci-Fi outfits (eg Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Storeis and Thrilling Wonder Stories) were happy to receive submissions from readers. Many would be rejected, but a lucky few, including Isaac Asimov had several stories published and went on to forge careers from Sci-Fi because people enjoyed their work. Right now, the ratings for Enterprise are low, not because there's no demand for sci-fi or because the market's too saturated, but because Enterprise is still using alien time-traveling nazis. And once you've seen B5, or V, or read Foundation, or hell, even watched Andromeda, this level of surrealism just doesn't belong in the kind of thing which expects an hour of my life every week. If the show is to be popular, it needs to decide if its audience is

    • a) Lowest common denominator
    • b) Sci-Fi fans
    Sure, less than 0.01% of the population wants to have to understand nuclear fission and special relatvity in order to watch TV, but let's stop the surrealism before we end up with Nazis being accidentally sucked back through a wormhole to the 1770's, riding flying dragons and having the King's men needing to be rescued by brave starfleet officers, aided in turn by a friendly witch they somehow replicated in the holodeck when the elven lieutenant accidentally typo'd a spoken command in the previous week's must-prove-I-am-NOT-typecast (read: holodeck) episode.

    Send them some ideas. They could really use them.

  2. Re:Interesting...NOT! by isomeme · · Score: 2, Informative · on 2004 Year-End Google Zeitgeist

    I am begining to believe Asimov's 'The Marching Morons' is, in fact nonfiction...

    Not Asimov, but rather C. M. Kornbluth. Quite a scary story.

  3. Re:is water really necessary for life? by Doctor+Memory · · Score: 1 · on Top 10 Scientific Advances of 2004

    Didn't dig far enough. It was Asimov, story was published in Omni in October of 1978. See here

  4. And that works how? by 87C751 · · Score: 1 · on Study on the Effects of Spam on End Users
    they'll send you their "message" as the name of the user wanting approval.
    That's a contextual violation, so it's not likely to work. Humans get a lot (maybe most) of their information from context. Putting a sales pitch into a field where the reader expects a name will cause most readers to just reject the whole field without thinking. The commercial you quote is comical, but that scheme only works when both ends have agreed on the code.

    I have to wonder, when scanning some of the spam in my quarantine folder, what the spammers were thinking when they put complete gibberish in either the sender, subject or both. (except for the Chinese spam, which I just write off to bad list selection) If spam didn't work, there wouldn't be any. So does that tell me that J. Random Email-User not only decides to read email with gibberish in the headers, but acts on the (frequently also gibberish, except for the all-important hyperlink) contents? I guess Kornbluth really was right.

  5. Authors I like.. by CyPlasm · · Score: 1 · on Top 10 New Sci-Fi/SF Authors?
    I like Poul Anderson, Charles Sheffield, Philip José Farmer and Mike Resnick among others.

    For Poul Anderson, check out his "Time Patrol" series and "Boat of a Million Years".

    For Charles Sheffield, his "Proteus" series is a definite must.

    PJF: "Riverworld" series.

    Resnick: "Widomaker" series.

  6. Re:Wasn't there 7 stories in I Robot? by Troed · · Score: 2, Informative · on Will Smith as I, Robot
    I have the Complete Robot .. I Robot is a subset of it .. I can't remember either. Let's use the Internet ;)


    Nine, even?

  7. Any good MP3 music? by Zooko · · Score: 1 · on MP3 coalition wants to watermark MP3's

    I listen to a lot of music from mp3.com. Here are my Python scripts to manage my MP3 collection: http://wildgoose.tandu.com/~zooko/ PythonHacking/

    Of course, 90% of the music on mp3.com is crap, but then, 90% of everything is crap..

    Among the best mp3 selections are Goss amer and Manifest Vision.

    Regards,

    Zooko