Slashdot Mirror

This site has a java applet that shows how light artifacts can move faster then c or go backwards.

http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/APPLETS/2 0/20.html

http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/APPLETS/2 0/20.html
No information ever acutally travels faster than the speed of light.
Nice visual explanation anywho.

Vernor Vinge is a sci-fiction author who was the first to coin up the term singularity, and uses the idea in some of his novels. Linkie: http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html

If you would like to read one of his books I would suggest Across Realtime, which touches on this subject lightly. Although his other stories are somewhat less palatable for me (but I've only read three).

Other authors who delve more deeply into singularity issues are Greg Egan (hard going, but definatly worth reading) http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/, Charles Stross's Accelerando http://www.accelerando.org/_static/accelerando.htm l, and .

Science fiction is odd as a genre since the authors minds are affected by the technology they see possible at the time of writing. Science fiction writers in the past depicted a future with minimal use of networked computers for instance. So the theme seems to change over time, whereas other genres remain pretty static.

My vote is for Diaspora , by Greg Egan. Transhuman artificial intelligences discovering alien squids embedded within 16-dimensional Fourier transformed Turing machines, ending in a hyperdimensional universe 267904176383054 duality transformations away from our own.

I swear I am not making this up.

The real power of delicious is that they allow you to get your tags back in a multitude of ways - HTML, RSS and JSON. This means you can integrate your tags into your content to create a better browsing experience. (JSON is also the preferred data interchange method for Yahoo.)

Delicious also allow you to tap into the "hive mind" by using a generic mode whereby you can see tags/URLs for all users, not just your own account. Somewhat perversely, Joshua announced that they have stopped supporting this mode with JSON - leaving only RSS. In fact, Joshua stated that the /json/tag/* was just an "accident" in the first place!

Anyone got any theories as to why that is? Why publish "socialised content" as (much heavier) RSS feeds but disallow lightweight JSON feeds? Is it to drive users to Yahoo? Or stop third party searches and other add-ons? Maybe it's the more prosaic "we forgot to put it in the specs, now we can't be arsed supporting it 'cause it's someone else's baby now."

I've been an iPrimus ADSL residential and business customer since their first ADSL product - which was 1.5Mbit, unlimited data, for something around A$120/month - an absolute bargain at the time (2001). They soon realised that unlimited data was an unsupportable offer and drastically restricted it (along with all other ISPs).

Anyway, the plans cited above are competitive with other major ISPs: Netspace's comparable plan is $69.95, though quotas rise to 50GB (split between peak and off-peak). Bigpond offers a 512kbps 'unlimited' (really 10GB, after that, it slows to 64kbps) also from $69.95. Their 20GB/1.5Mbps plan starts from $129.95, or more than 8 times the service in Toronto (and it's still not unlimited). Internode's 40GB/512kbps is exactly the same price.

As for 'ii', do you have that service installed? Is it generally available like the other ADSL providers? Are you trying to compare apples and oranges? I'm discussing products available today, not ADSL2 and other exotics that might be available in the future.

When they started making music straight from the Azciak Polls, everybody howled about the Death of Art -- as if the process was anything new, anything more than an efficient closure of what had been happening for years. Groups were already assembled on the basis of elaborate market research. The Azciak Probes were already revealing people's tastes in breakfast cereals, politicians, and rock stars. Why not scan the brains of the populace, discover precisely what music they'd be willing to pay for, and then manufacture it -- all in a single, streamlined process, with no human intervention required? From the probes buried in a random sample of twenty thousand representative skulls, to the construction of the virtual bands (down to mock biographies, and all the right birthmarks and tattoos), to the synthesis of photorealist computer-animated videos, accessible for a suitable fee ... the music industry had finally achieved its long-cherished goal: cutting out everyone but the middleman.

Read the whole story, at: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/worth.htm

If you're interested, Greg Egan's site: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/

Greg Egan has a very cool
applet that lets you see how the right GVD allows superluminal pulse propogation and why it cannot be used to transmit information faster than light.

I've always enjoyed Greg Egan's gallery of applets illustrating the quantum physics that often underlie his splendiferous fiction. Egan is a scientist, a programmer, and a top notch fiction writer. I recommend _Diaspora_ first (the book is better than its applet) - its characters are quite good, the story interesting, the future vision compelling. And somewhere in the first 15% of the book, Egan blows your mind describing higher-dimensional quantum topology that's also integral (pun intended) to the story.

I've always enjoyed Greg Egan's gallery of applets illustrating the quantum physics that often underlie his splendiferous fiction. Egan is a scientist, a programmer, and a top notch fiction writer. I recommend _Diaspora_ first (the book is better than its applet) - its characters are quite good, the story interesting, the future vision compelling. And somewhere in the first 15% of the book, Egan blows your mind describing higher-dimensional quantum topology that's also integral (pun intended) to the story.

No... information still can't be sent faster than the speed of light. Simply an artifact of the sums of several waves of out of phase light travelling in the same direction. Another poster already mentioned this pages which has a little flash diagram which explains the phenomenon. Do the shift click thing to see what happens when the group wavefront reaches the front of the primary wavefronts... it simply fizzles out.

Don't explain it. Show it!

Is this really making the light waves go faster, or is it just anomalous dispersion? I heard in one of my Physics lectures that you can make something happen that looks like superluminal motion, and it caused a bit of controversy when someone did it, but it's not actually the wave that's moving faster than c - it's actually the wave envelope, which is related to the amplitude of the wave. I could try and explain, but I'd only make things confusing (if I haven't already!), so I have found some animations you can look at, see here and here.

On the other hand, if the light really is going faster than c, then I am thoroughly impressed!

People, it was not a troll. I was genuinely interested in the information privacy/liberty thing.

The reason it came across as troll-ish was because the trivial example of contradictory ideas I used was - I realise now - inflammatory to about half of Americans, who seem to be about 90% of Slashdotters.

See here for full explanation:

Re:This is the BESTEST TROLL EVAR!!!! by thetan (Score:1) Friday August 05, @01:39PM

To all those wishing to engage in me debate about the death penalty, abortion, separation of church and state and other uninteresting issues: I'm not going to help you untangle your fucked up worldview.

(If you're desperate to have your say, why don't you run along to my blog and post on the forum there?)

To those who stayed on-topic with thoughtful replies, thanks for your discussion. I read and appreciated them.

To those who've emailed me with back-slapping congratulatory emails about "good troll" and "take that slashweenies" etc - it was not my intent, so save your praise.

`... Today, I wish blogs would fall. This comes from two days of intensive googling while I learned how to netboot an original ibook (no boot from USB, no firewire at all) because of a dead cdrom. I was all over the place: open firmware, tftp, bootp, dhcpd, yaboot, and endless useless tangents. I can't tell you how many pages would come in google where my search terms appeared, but were in completely unrelated parts of some knucklehead's blog. ...`

This post is rings loud and clear with me. But maybe you are searching for information from the wrong end. I`ll give you a personal example.

Ages ago I wanted to resurrect a old `486 to build an OpenBSD firewall. Anyone familiar with old hardware will tell you that, `Its the little things (like *&!!@#$ BIOS) that matter` when installing operating systems. So I read all the manuals, man pages, catalogued the hardware (down to the serial numbers), read every Google, Yahoo newsgroup I could find and formulated a post detailing what I found. Most give up around the Google part.

... gather what you know into a meaningful format, then dump it onto a knowledgeable group and write up your results ...

The key insight I can give you, is to gather what you know into a meaningful format, then dump it onto a knowledgeable group and write up your results. In my case it was misc@openbsd.org. Having given a detailed account of what I wanted to know, I drew out those who had a clue of what was going on. The result was I got that firewall installed, but not without a lot of effort and some very helpful advise. You can read about it here [0], here [1], and here [2].

As for the lame blogs with useless information, I agree.

So the answer is out there, but inside someones head in terms of experience and knowledge. It is up to you to learn as much as possible about what you do and dont know and approach the right domain of knowledge. If you post your knowledge (and verify it) to a list, write it up, then blog about it, the chances of someone else finding the write-up via Google may have better luck.

So if you want to distil this into a repeatable process

• define your problem
• read the esr faq on how to ask questions the smart way [3]
• write up what you know/dont know carefully
• find your expert knowledge domain
• post your question carefully to a newsgroup, forum etc.
• write up the results with meaningful heading, summary.

[0] Peter Renshaw, openbsd on old i386: http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT19 1842.html

[1] Peter Renshaw, i386 install cont ...: http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT20 1637.html

[2] Peter Renshaw, i386 obsd install problem : http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT23 0736.html

[3] Eric S. Raymond, How To Ask Questions The Smart Way http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

`... Today, I wish blogs would fall. This comes from two days of intensive googling while I learned how to netboot an original ibook (no boot from USB, no firewire at all) because of a dead cdrom. I was all over the place: open firmware, tftp, bootp, dhcpd, yaboot, and endless useless tangents. I can't tell you how many pages would come in google where my search terms appeared, but were in completely unrelated parts of some knucklehead's blog. ...`

This post is rings loud and clear with me. But maybe you are searching for information from the wrong end. I`ll give you a personal example.

Ages ago I wanted to resurrect a old `486 to build an OpenBSD firewall. Anyone familiar with old hardware will tell you that, `Its the little things (like *&!!@#$ BIOS) that matter` when installing operating systems. So I read all the manuals, man pages, catalogued the hardware (down to the serial numbers), read every Google, Yahoo newsgroup I could find and formulated a post detailing what I found. Most give up around the Google part.

... gather what you know into a meaningful format, then dump it onto a knowledgeable group and write up your results ...

The key insight I can give you, is to gather what you know into a meaningful format, then dump it onto a knowledgeable group and write up your results. In my case it was misc@openbsd.org. Having given a detailed account of what I wanted to know, I drew out those who had a clue of what was going on. The result was I got that firewall installed, but not without a lot of effort and some very helpful advise. You can read about it here [0], here [1], and here [2].

As for the lame blogs with useless information, I agree.

So the answer is out there, but inside someones head in terms of experience and knowledge. It is up to you to learn as much as possible about what you do and dont know and approach the right domain of knowledge. If you post your knowledge (and verify it) to a list, write it up, then blog about it, the chances of someone else finding the write-up via Google may have better luck.

So if you want to distil this into a repeatable process

• define your problem
• read the esr faq on how to ask questions the smart way [3]
• write up what you know/dont know carefully
• find your expert knowledge domain
• post your question carefully to a newsgroup, forum etc.
• write up the results with meaningful heading, summary.

[0] Peter Renshaw, openbsd on old i386: http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT19 1842.html

[1] Peter Renshaw, i386 install cont ...: http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT20 1637.html

[2] Peter Renshaw, i386 obsd install problem : http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT23 0736.html

[3] Eric S. Raymond, How To Ask Questions The Smart Way http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

`... Today, I wish blogs would fall. This comes from two days of intensive googling while I learned how to netboot an original ibook (no boot from USB, no firewire at all) because of a dead cdrom. I was all over the place: open firmware, tftp, bootp, dhcpd, yaboot, and endless useless tangents. I can't tell you how many pages would come in google where my search terms appeared, but were in completely unrelated parts of some knucklehead's blog. ...`

This post is rings loud and clear with me. But maybe you are searching for information from the wrong end. I`ll give you a personal example.

Ages ago I wanted to resurrect a old `486 to build an OpenBSD firewall. Anyone familiar with old hardware will tell you that, `Its the little things (like *&!!@#$ BIOS) that matter` when installing operating systems. So I read all the manuals, man pages, catalogued the hardware (down to the serial numbers), read every Google, Yahoo newsgroup I could find and formulated a post detailing what I found. Most give up around the Google part.

... gather what you know into a meaningful format, then dump it onto a knowledgeable group and write up your results ...

The key insight I can give you, is to gather what you know into a meaningful format, then dump it onto a knowledgeable group and write up your results. In my case it was misc@openbsd.org. Having given a detailed account of what I wanted to know, I drew out those who had a clue of what was going on. The result was I got that firewall installed, but not without a lot of effort and some very helpful advise. You can read about it here [0], here [1], and here [2].

As for the lame blogs with useless information, I agree.

So the answer is out there, but inside someones head in terms of experience and knowledge. It is up to you to learn as much as possible about what you do and dont know and approach the right domain of knowledge. If you post your knowledge (and verify it) to a list, write it up, then blog about it, the chances of someone else finding the write-up via Google may have better luck.

So if you want to distil this into a repeatable process

• define your problem
• read the esr faq on how to ask questions the smart way [3]
• write up what you know/dont know carefully
• find your expert knowledge domain
• post your question carefully to a newsgroup, forum etc.
• write up the results with meaningful heading, summary.

[0] Peter Renshaw, openbsd on old i386: http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT19 1842.html

[1] Peter Renshaw, i386 install cont ...: http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT20 1637.html

[2] Peter Renshaw, i386 obsd install problem : http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT23 0736.html

[3] Eric S. Raymond, How To Ask Questions The Smart Way http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

See also the Manifold novels by Stephen Baxter.

This was pretty much the first thing that crossed my mind when I read the article... is there anyone in there, wondering who this god person is anyway and why he has such a shabby lab coat on?

The essays in "The Mind's I" edited by Douglas Hofstadter are also of interest: http://www.cogs.indiana.edu/people/homepages/hofst adter.html

It only takes, 1 cookie that does not expire until 2038. Do you want to know more? - Its all a matter of trust #14.

"What George Lucas may have seen as eternal in his "Star Wars" blockbusters, science fiction writers have tended to see as antique"

It started out 30 years behind," said Ursula K. Le Guin. "Science fiction was doing all sorts of thinking and literary experiments on a totally different plane. 'Star Wars' was just sort of fun."

"It takes these very stock metaphors of empire in space and monstrously bad people and wonderfully good people and plays out a bunch of stock operatic themes in space suits," she said. "You can do it with cowboy suits as well."

If truth be told, sci-fi writers say, their work and "Star Wars" never had much in common.

Like science itself, science fiction has evolved since the days of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the end of World War II, the genre has shifted its focus from space and time travel to more complex speculations on how the future, whatever its shape, will affect the individual.

That shift has only accelerated in recent years, as biotech and genetic engineering have moved to center stage in science and captured writers' imaginations, and as the lines between science fiction and other genres begin to blur. . . .

One problem with "Star Wars," science fiction writers say, is that it is not, ultimately, concerned with science, but rather with a timeless vision of good and evil. . . .

The literature is filled with writing by Greg Benford, the 'how to empathize with ordinary deathless people' writer Greg Egan, Ken Macleod, Richard Morgan, Ian Banks, Cory Doctorow , or Charlie Stross. Movies haven't made it past the 70's (Bladerunner, the Matrix) other than perhaps 'Eternal Sunshine' (similar to a few 80's stories), and T.V. shows have only tentatively reached the 80's or early 90's (some Outer Limits and Twighlight Zone episodes). With Star Wars and Star Trek out of the way perhaps there'll be more room for the average media SF to catch up to at least the 80's.

"What George Lucas may have seen as eternal in his "Star Wars" blockbusters, science fiction writers have tended to see as antique"

It started out 30 years behind," said Ursula K. Le Guin. "Science fiction was doing all sorts of thinking and literary experiments on a totally different plane. 'Star Wars' was just sort of fun."

"It takes these very stock metaphors of empire in space and monstrously bad people and wonderfully good people and plays out a bunch of stock operatic themes in space suits," she said. "You can do it with cowboy suits as well."

If truth be told, sci-fi writers say, their work and "Star Wars" never had much in common.

Like science itself, science fiction has evolved since the days of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the end of World War II, the genre has shifted its focus from space and time travel to more complex speculations on how the future, whatever its shape, will affect the individual.

That shift has only accelerated in recent years, as biotech and genetic engineering have moved to center stage in science and captured writers' imaginations, and as the lines between science fiction and other genres begin to blur. . . .

One problem with "Star Wars," science fiction writers say, is that it is not, ultimately, concerned with science, but rather with a timeless vision of good and evil. . . .

The literature is filled with writing by Greg Benford, the 'how to empathize with ordinary deathless people' writer Greg Egan, Ken Macleod, Richard Morgan, Ian Banks, Cory Doctorow , or Charlie Stross. Movies haven't made it past the 70's (Bladerunner, the Matrix) other than perhaps 'Eternal Sunshine' (similar to a few 80's stories), and T.V. shows have only tentatively reached the 80's or early 90's (some Outer Limits and Twighlight Zone episodes). With Star Wars and Star Trek out of the way perhaps there'll be more room for the average media SF to catch up to at least the 80's.

Greg Egan has a simple solution to the neutron bombardment problem -- convert everybody into software. I think he underestimates the technical issues...

Greg Egan wrote a great book on this very subjuect.. Highly recommended reading... In fact most Greg Egan books should interest the Slashdot types. Alan

Greg Egan wrote a great book on this very subjuect.. Highly recommended reading... In fact most Greg Egan books should interest the Slashdot types. Alan

The NRL is a premier sporting event in Australia, comparable to the AFL. We've beena ble to download the games once aired on national free to air and pay television. Recently telstra has taken away our right todownload them and are now only offering them to telstra customers. Certain a step backwards.

We can still download them, but only for a week or so.

Damn, i've used 'download' in the above, but i really should have used stream. Thats how this site came about.

Though the wormhole route is explored most engagingly in Greg Egan's Diaspora, I prefer the Total Perspective Vortex in H2G2.

Not Egan's best (though it does include the brilliant "Wang's Carpets"), but worth reading.

- Crow T. Trollbot

There is an excellent novel by Australian Science Fiction author Greg Egan called Quarantine (Wikipedia entry/Amazon) on this subject. I cannot claim to understand even half the theories in there, but it is a fascinating read and a mindbender similar to what Stephenson's "Snow Crash" had to offer twelve years ago.

So they play Quantum Soccer, and get lost in mathematical studies... they're still human. We can empathize with them and their ignorance, curiousity, love and pain, losses and triumphs.

As for making it there, maybe Kurzweil's Fantastic Voyage can't get me all the way to the 7 not-all-that-complex looking solutions (below), but I sure don't want to be in the control group. And if its the next generation, not mine, that get all 7, I'll be jealous but I'm not going to try to keep them from having it.

"We've always done it this way, we had to go through it, so you do to" is a philosophy that caused a great many hospital mistakes (and deaths) before they realized that forcing 40 hour shifts doesn't make you a better doctor, it makes you a 'functionally equivalent to drunk' doctor. I'm thankful my ancestors worked their health up to keeping grandparents around (30,000 years ago) and got the average lifespan up from the 40's to the 70's (100 years ago). Now to try to get it from 80 to 160, so when you- some datarcheologist in your second career in your 130's- come sifting through Slashdot, don't forget to feel thankful for those of us who fought against the Kassian "We've always died, we're better for it" attitude.

And once more for those people who keep saying: "but what about Cancer and Alzheimers, we'll still have those?" No we won't. Look at what A.d.G is actually proposing, and why, here.

So they play Quantum Soccer, and get lost in mathematical studies... they're still human. We can empathize with them and their ignorance, curiousity, love and pain, losses and triumphs.

As for making it there, maybe Kurzweil's Fantastic Voyage can't get me all the way to the 7 not-all-that-complex looking solutions (below), but I sure don't want to be in the control group. And if its the next generation, not mine, that get all 7, I'll be jealous but I'm not going to try to keep them from having it.

"We've always done it this way, we had to go through it, so you do to" is a philosophy that caused a great many hospital mistakes (and deaths) before they realized that forcing 40 hour shifts doesn't make you a better doctor, it makes you a 'functionally equivalent to drunk' doctor. I'm thankful my ancestors worked their health up to keeping grandparents around (30,000 years ago) and got the average lifespan up from the 40's to the 70's (100 years ago). Now to try to get it from 80 to 160, so when you- some datarcheologist in your second career in your 130's- come sifting through Slashdot, don't forget to feel thankful for those of us who fought against the Kassian "We've always died, we're better for it" attitude.

And once more for those people who keep saying: "but what about Cancer and Alzheimers, we'll still have those?" No we won't. Look at what A.d.G is actually proposing, and why, here.

So they play Quantum Soccer, and get lost in mathematical studies... they're still human. We can empathize with them and their ignorance, curiousity, love and pain, losses and triumphs.

As for making it there, maybe Kurzweil's Fantastic Voyage can't get me all the way to the 7 not-all-that-complex looking solutions (below), but I sure don't want to be in the control group. And if its the next generation, not mine, that get all 7, I'll be jealous but I'm not going to try to keep them from having it.

"We've always done it this way, we had to go through it, so you do to" is a philosophy that caused a great many hospital mistakes (and deaths) before they realized that forcing 40 hour shifts doesn't make you a better doctor, it makes you a 'functionally equivalent to drunk' doctor. I'm thankful my ancestors worked their health up to keeping grandparents around (30,000 years ago) and got the average lifespan up from the 40's to the 70's (100 years ago). Now to try to get it from 80 to 160, so when you- some datarcheologist in your second career in your 130's- come sifting through Slashdot, don't forget to feel thankful for those of us who fought against the Kassian "We've always died, we're better for it" attitude.

And once more for those people who keep saying: "but what about Cancer and Alzheimers, we'll still have those?" No we won't. Look at what A.d.G is actually proposing, and why, here.

So they play Quantum Soccer, and get lost in mathematical studies... they're still human. We can empathize with them and their ignorance, curiousity, love and pain, losses and triumphs.

As for making it there, maybe Kurzweil's Fantastic Voyage can't get me all the way to the 7 not-all-that-complex looking solutions (below), but I sure don't want to be in the control group. And if its the next generation, not mine, that get all 7, I'll be jealous but I'm not going to try to keep them from having it.

"We've always done it this way, we had to go through it, so you do to" is a philosophy that caused a great many hospital mistakes (and deaths) before they realized that forcing 40 hour shifts doesn't make you a better doctor, it makes you a 'functionally equivalent to drunk' doctor. I'm thankful my ancestors worked their health up to keeping grandparents around (30,000 years ago) and got the average lifespan up from the 40's to the 70's (100 years ago). Now to try to get it from 80 to 160, so when you- some datarcheologist in your second career in your 130's- come sifting through Slashdot, don't forget to feel thankful for those of us who fought against the Kassian "We've always died, we're better for it" attitude.

And once more for those people who keep saying: "but what about Cancer and Alzheimers, we'll still have those?" No we won't. Look at what A.d.G is actually proposing, and why, here.

You programmed computers before you wrote novels. Greg Egan shares that hyphenated career, and continues to illustrate his stories with Java applets. Do you still program, possibly targeting the same subjects with your word processor as your compiler? As _Snow Crash_ was originally designed as an interactive game, and such landmarks as _Myst_ have regenerated as (usually bad) novels, do you see the arrival of a truly multimedia story, delivered simultaneously in multiple media, anytime soon? By whom, specifically or generally?

SF is technology marketing. It started as short stories in radio parts catalogs to encourage subscriptions. After 20th Century life was revolutionized by technology, and practically every economy switched from an agriculture to a technology base, real technology marketing has replaced much SF in that role. As a fan of "hard" SF, where the scientific speculation is plausible, I'm encouraged by the prospect of a "die off" of lots of SF twaddle that can't compete with the real marketing. More interesting tech speculation, like Greg Egan (a programmer, quantum physicist, and skilled author) writes, and excellent character development through simple, compelling plots like in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, are possible now that SF doesn't have to reintroduce the speculative framework with each book, or risk missing a large audience containing sophisticated readers. Maybe SF looks bleak today because today is so screwed up that the future itself looks bleak. Well, hope springs eternal, so someone will inevitably write some SF that explores a future more inspiring than the possible futures so dissapointing now. It might not be in a familiar paperback - it might be on a webpage, an email, a chain SMS, or a medium just now being imagined. Get to work!

So... aye@netspace.net.au? or aye@netspace.net.au? just keeping spam filters on their toes ;-)

• Predicting how people will react to one or more significant changes to society, either in the future (most SF) or the past (the subgenre of Alternate History. Start with these 1,600+ stories.) The Handmaid's Tale wasn't predicting a fundie future for the US. It did capture the feel of what happened in Afghanistan after the fundie Taliban took over.
• Predicting interesting uses for new technologies. Networks hadn't been out for that long when Brunner, and even before that Brin (or Benford? one of the 'killer B's') wrote about possibilities for worms and viruses in cyberspace.
• Extrapolating / having fun with an exponential growth or decay of an important resource. What if our population booms or crashes? What if the planet freezes or goes greenhouse? What if a person or computer gets vastly more intelligent than before?
• And the most important part of SF-- Sensawunda. The sense of wonder when you're pulled out of your own time and space and get to gaze (for the length of a book) through the eyes of other humans at a deep future, wide universe, and wide range of societies.
• and as part of Sensawunda-- inspiring the future... all the scientists inspired by Heinlein or LeGuin or Gibson ("Neuromancer didn't predict the future. Neuromancer *created* the future. If you would understand the past twenty years' technological advance and retreat, this book is required reading..."- C. Doctorow.) to go into the sciences or computing...

Enough has been written about The Singularity that any SF writer writing about 50+ years into the future should at least explain why if one isn't in their universe. Doesn't have to be a long explanation: put it in and go on with the story. Good SF writing hasn't been stopped by actual advances in science. Discovering that Venus is 700 degrees, going to the moon, or widespread PCs outdated some earlier SF stories' technology. But those events inspired many more new writers and new stories. The possibility of a singularity in a few decades should have less of an effect than those actual advances.

And if a singularity does happen, there could be a second golden age of SF. You don't just write about universes, you create them. Certainly Alternate History will be filled with that, like "what would happen if Reagan *won* the 1980 election?" versions of earth being run within the trillions of ongoing simulations (and no, the Matrix wasn't original- SF movies are usually far behind the SF literature.)

SF writers who are particularly good at sensawunda in a post singularity (and/or humans dealing with beings larger than ourselves) universe include Greg Benford, the 'can make you empathize with loss in the life of regular deathless people' Greg Egan, the 'pulls off multiple believable economic systems in one novel' Ken Macleod, the recently reviewed Richard Morgan, Ian Banks, and of course Cory Doctorow and the early Slashdot adoptor (and I worry that he's going to hit an Algernon moment soon- how can he keep writing so well?) Charlie Stross.

Many are scientists, but you don't have to be a scientist to be a good SF writer. You do have t

• Predicting how people will react to one or more significant changes to society, either in the future (most SF) or the past (the subgenre of Alternate History. Start with these 1,600+ stories.) The Handmaid's Tale wasn't predicting a fundie future for the US. It did capture the feel of what happened in Afghanistan after the fundie Taliban took over.
• Predicting interesting uses for new technologies. Networks hadn't been out for that long when Brunner, and even before that Brin (or Benford? one of the 'killer B's') wrote about possibilities for worms and viruses in cyberspace.
• Extrapolating / having fun with an exponential growth or decay of an important resource. What if our population booms or crashes? What if the planet freezes or goes greenhouse? What if a person or computer gets vastly more intelligent than before?
• And the most important part of SF-- Sensawunda. The sense of wonder when you're pulled out of your own time and space and get to gaze (for the length of a book) through the eyes of other humans at a deep future, wide universe, and wide range of societies.
• and as part of Sensawunda-- inspiring the future... all the scientists inspired by Heinlein or LeGuin or Gibson ("Neuromancer didn't predict the future. Neuromancer *created* the future. If you would understand the past twenty years' technological advance and retreat, this book is required reading..."- C. Doctorow.) to go into the sciences or computing...

Enough has been written about The Singularity that any SF writer writing about 50+ years into the future should at least explain why if one isn't in their universe. Doesn't have to be a long explanation: put it in and go on with the story. Good SF writing hasn't been stopped by actual advances in science. Discovering that Venus is 700 degrees, going to the moon, or widespread PCs outdated some earlier SF stories' technology. But those events inspired many more new writers and new stories. The possibility of a singularity in a few decades should have less of an effect than those actual advances.

And if a singularity does happen, there could be a second golden age of SF. You don't just write about universes, you create them. Certainly Alternate History will be filled with that, like "what would happen if Reagan *won* the 1980 election?" versions of earth being run within the trillions of ongoing simulations (and no, the Matrix wasn't original- SF movies are usually far behind the SF literature.)

SF writers who are particularly good at sensawunda in a post singularity (and/or humans dealing with beings larger than ourselves) universe include Greg Benford, the 'can make you empathize with loss in the life of regular deathless people' Greg Egan, the 'pulls off multiple believable economic systems in one novel' Ken Macleod, the recently reviewed Richard Morgan, Ian Banks, and of course Cory Doctorow and the early Slashdot adoptor (and I worry that he's going to hit an Algernon moment soon- how can he keep writing so well?) Charlie Stross.

Many are scientists, but you don't have to be a scientist to be a good SF writer. You do have t

Linux Thin Clients@Footscrary Public Library, courtesy of the Computerbank Victoria crew, who I used to run with...

Here's some links I collected for my Japanese 101 classmates:
Hanafuda Card Game (Windows)
Hanafuda plugin for Flowersol (multiplatform)
Go Trainer (Windows)
Go SGF Editors (multiplatform)
Online Go IGS Clients (multiplatform) Ask people for a teaching game after learning rules, practising
The Interactive Way to Go Easy to follow online tutorial (requires Java)
Go An introduction Outlines basic rules in easy to understand comic
American Go Association The info hub of American Go players
Shogi Variants (Windows) Japanese Chess, Shogi
Ricoh Shogi's Page Rules of Shogi (harder to learn rules than Go, IMHO)
Online Mahjong on Yahoo! Games Requires Yahoo! account, web-based
Rules of Mahjong this isn't the Shanghai Mahjong you know! Real Mahjong is like poker, not a tile matching game.

Here's some links I collected for my Japanese 101 classmates:
Hanafuda Card Game (Windows)
Hanafuda plugin for Flowersol (multiplatform)
Go Trainer (Windows)
Go SGF Editors (multiplatform)
Online Go IGS Clients (multiplatform) Ask people for a teaching game after learning rules, practising
The Interactive Way to Go Easy to follow online tutorial (requires Java)
Go An introduction Outlines basic rules in easy to understand comic
American Go Association The info hub of American Go players
Shogi Variants (Windows) Japanese Chess, Shogi
Ricoh Shogi's Page Rules of Shogi (harder to learn rules than Go, IMHO)
Online Mahjong on Yahoo! Games Requires Yahoo! account, web-based
Rules of Mahjong this isn't the Shanghai Mahjong you know! Real Mahjong is like poker, not a tile matching game.

Doesn't beat the snail mail spam that I received recently...
(no, its not goatse)

Greg Egan is one of my absolute favourites (and I have read and like all the authors you list).

Character development is perhaps not his best side, but he cannot be beaten ideas-wise. If you're into SF that focuses on the logical implications of AI and VR technologies taken to the extreme, this guy is the best. I particularly recommend _Permutation City_ and _Diaspora_.

As I recently wrote, SF movies are 30 years behind SF literature. Hollywood has barely been able to capture the feel of cyberpunk. I doubt that Hollywood could even start to do pre/post Singularity science fiction (which all of the above writers excel in).

As I recently wrote, SF movies are 30 years behind SF literature. Hollywood has barely been able to capture the feel of cyberpunk. I doubt that Hollywood could even start to do pre/post Singularity science fiction (which all of the above writers excel in).

I think most businesses are afraid to change since everyone is comfortable with the staus quo. But that's a whole 'nother discussion we don't need to get into again.

0 posts and it down to going at 6kbps.
Sure it'll be slashdoted soon.

Orignal & Digital version

0 posts and it down to going at 6kbps.
Sure it'll be slashdoted soon.

Orignal & Digital version

A thousand times yes - Egan is the most brilliant ideas man in current sf, IMHO. But it worries me that after churning out a great novel every year or two for most of the last decade, according to his website he doesn't have anything at all coming out. Unless he has stopped listing them in advance for some reason, but he always used to have a page about the book he was currently working on. I hope he hasn't stopped writing ...

http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/BIBLIOGRA PHY/Online.html