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It shouldn't be a secret that most of us who discovered the really good sci-fi found it filled with sex, violence, and plenty of space-opera: hence the really good classificaiton.

As for SG-10...I've never seen an episode that really made me like the show. The show just feels wrong...how they ever made it to a seventh season is almost maddening. I still can't believe anyone is watching Andromeda, or Earth: Final Conflict for the same reasons...change-writers and kill the show.

I can't be the only person here who remembers a really great show called Space Above and Beyond, and how it was asphyxiated for funds and ridden out of town on a rail. The people who made that show had a vision of a future which was gritty, and mired in war. War is an unparalleled catalyst...and all the BS "Temporal Cold War", or "Here a Gate, there a gate" plot-line shenanigans are a pretty damn weak backdrop compared to the gritty nature of dealing with war without pulling some miracle devices out of nowhere, or completely disregarding the simplicity of making the characters grow.

I guess what we're looking at, with SG-10, is that a show doesn't have to be all that good to those who don't buy in, it just has to be good the advertisers...same probably goes for all shows on TV regardless of genre.

I'm in as soon as they tell us what the frill the first one is doing of importance.

If you could frelling spell it correctly, maybe we would. :)

I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov, first published 1950 - so yeah, they had some sort of concept of robots in the 50's, and it is that very concept the original concept is referring to.

This story just reminded me of this

Well, according to this SciFi.com article, Keanu is going to play John Constantine!
I prefered Wizard Magazine's casting call of using Sting instead.

Well, according to this SciFi.com article, Keanu is going to play John Constantine!
I prefered Wizard Magazine's casting call of using Sting instead.

Kids these days.
I didn't mispell it, it's Cylon.

(Berserk would have been an acceptable answer, although it wouldn't work quite right.)

Wasn't that the pink stuff Clint Howard had Kirk and Spock drink in The Corbomite Maneuver?

Let's see, making aliens black would be discriminating against black aliens, making them white would imply some sort of intergalactic superiority complex... What about those dual-color aliens from that one episode of Star Trek?

Blue aliens would be confused by smurfs. Zhaan, or Smurfette... I think I can tell the difference!

What exactly is Odessey 5?

And why is it such a security risk that us subversive Canadians must be kept from it

Well, I can't tell you what it is, 'coz I've not really read much yet, but I can tell you that Google is your friend (you want to be clicking on those cached links if, like me, you're outside the US =).
Oh, and here's a few more links about it...

HTH, etc... (=

I'm a regular of the #farscape channel on irc.scifi.com, and it has been incredible. Here's a java chat link for the lazy. Random stars and makers of the show have been showing up there at least once a day, sometimes several visits throughout the day, to give encouragement to the fans. The channel grew to consistently hold hundreds of users, maxing out at 700 at a time. Here's a quick rundown of some of the news converage that we've gotten:

Its turning out to be a story not just about a bunch of SciFi geeks crying about a lost show, but a protest against corporations directing culture through actions they don't have to justify. I mean, they killed their #2 show after having already made the commitment to the year. I don't consider myself the protesting type, especially over a TV show... but I wrote a letter, linked to it from my site and sent a few emails because I think the people who make and watch the show aren't out of line to demand what was promised to them.

I was as sceptical as you. Every news and bb post regarding this story all referenced the one IRC chat, and we all know IRC channels can be hijacked. However, I just discovered solid proof of Farscape's demise--at least on the Sci-fi channel.

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-main.html?2002- 09/09/13.00.sfc

Farscape is not dead. Season 4 will continue in January. Farscape

Why? Because it sucked really bad. It REALLY SUCKED! I stopped watch sometime in the second season.
I think they are going to promote Stargate SG-1. I can't wait for January when the next season begins. I also can't wait till thwey start play the original series from the beginning. From the website, "Starting Sept. 30, missions codenamed SEASONS ONE through FIVE will be available for review every Monday from 7-11PM ET/PT on SCI FI". Plus, 2 episodes from series 6 every friday night. I liked series six--even with the death of Daniel.
I can't wait!!!! I think I need to stock up on the VHS tapes--time to make a run to the local AMES which is going out of buiseness!

Why? Because it sucked really bad. It REALLY SUCKED! I stopped watch sometime in the second season.
I think they are going to promote Stargate SG-1. I can't wait for January when the next season begins. I also can't wait till thwey start play the original series from the beginning. From the website, "Starting Sept. 30, missions codenamed SEASONS ONE through FIVE will be available for review every Monday from 7-11PM ET/PT on SCI FI". Plus, 2 episodes from series 6 every friday night. I liked series six--even with the death of Daniel.
I can't wait!!!! I think I need to stock up on the VHS tapes--time to make a run to the local AMES which is going out of buiseness!

You can use this link to email the scifi channels programming depaartment. I told them I would boycott the channel if they removed scifi. Hey it worked with New Coke

The point is to make more room in the schedule for talking to dead people, of course:

Crossing Over with John Edward has been officially renewed for a second season! Watch for another great year of John reaching out and making connections.

Sci-Fi cancells Farscape (MLP)
By yanisa
Sat Sep 7th, 2002 at 05:46:41 AM CST

Sci-Fi network shocks viewers: Farscape, its flagship series, has been cancelled.

Fanbase reacts; join them!

-

In a surprise chat yesterday night, David Kemper, Richard Manning and Ben Browder announced Sci-Fi network's decision to cancel Farscape, critically acclaimed and much beloved SF series, now in its fourth season.

Although Sci-Fi has previously contracted for two more seasons of Farscape, they have now excercised an out-clause. This was made known to the creators and cast only after they have finished filming the last episode of Season 4, which means that they have had no chance of even finishing the story. Farscape will thus end with a cliffhanger and unfinished story threads.

Needles to say, the fanbase is in an uproar and the cast is shocked.

And not suprisingly, Dilbert has seen it coming.

If you like Farscape and would like to see it go on, add your voice to the enraged masses.

-

It also starred Bruce Boxleitner, one of the worst actors of any generation...

It is quite obvious Bruce Boxleitner acts well enough to be in not only film, but also, two television series, one of which won many emmys. Granted, the emmys aren't necessarily the best way to judge a TV series, but if you actually watch Babylon 5, you wouldn't see him as such a terrible actor.

Mostly he was inspired by The Killer Savages, a book about the Battle of Gettysburg. [See his scifi.com interview.]

I doubt he took much from OLS. He's probably never seen it. He's said in interviews that he doesn't watch TV (because he's to busy making it) [See here for the quote. (Bottom of the page.)]

It has also been suggested that he took from Farscape and Andromeda--two other shows he's never seen.

Some of the things ScroP cites above are pretty common, in both sci-fi and westerns.

Space as the wild west was the basis for Star Trek, OLS, Cowboy Bebop, and any other space opera that treats space as a frontier.

Outlaws vs. the Law is everything from Reservoir Dogs to Ali Baba to Han Solo. Space is just a change of venue.

Character's running from a tragedy in their past? Thousands of people traveling west after the Civil War. It's a basic human motivation to escape our traumas.

Genius Kid on a space ship? Wesley Crusher.
Space pilots with shady jobs? Han Solo again.

We're mostly talking about common archtypes.

Even shipping someone in a box isn't that new an idea. Star Trek did it in "The Emissary" and Bram Stoker shipped Dracula in a box of dirt.

It will be the details that will really display the strengths and differences between the two shows, and we won't see those until later this month.

Whatever it is you're describing, you're right about one thing -- you got the title confused. Shockwave Rider doesn't have any of those things. It has for a protagonist a confused guy (Nick) who was the product of a weird experimental school (Tarnover), escaped, and ended up in a secret town built with serious amounts of QWAN and funded by a hotline of *listeners* (talk about selling your attention). That's Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, a cyberpunk pre-cursor. (Nick reprogrammed his lives using a telephone touch pad... pre PC, pre cell phone tech.)

I don't think I ever read the 3-way-eel-splicing book. But I'm curious what the title is if anyone remembers.

Has anyone seen any other digital cameras out there with high frame-rates? What visual mischief could you aspiring photographers get into with such a camera?

You can read brief reviews here and here, and of course, from here.

There are also:

• Fahrenheit 451 , Ray Bradbury
• A Clockwork Orange , Anthony Burgess
• Lord of the Flies , William Golding
• Animal Farm , Orwell
• "The Waste Land", T.S. Eliot (a poem, but dystopian in a similar vein)

We're all glad HP backed down, but what scares me is that the "Responsible Disclosure" FUD continues. On Bugtraq people write that CERT and SecurtyFocus are "established parties" and everyone who does not give them their so-called "0days" is irresponsible (at least CERT is known to sell 0days). I personally won't give them my 0days early.

The "Responsible Disclosure" draft continues to get advertised, though it was not approved by the IETF .

Why do people think about giving away the right of free speech just because of some FUD?

Even in the unlikely case if this bad RFC passes, does it mean that that people are safer when they disclose problems - I definitely don't think so personally.

So the facts are: some companies can't write secure code, and it is more expensive to write code securely.

Just check "Help -> About" on Windows before using the word "responsibility".

The easiest solution is to shoot the messenger and to outlaw saying the emperor has no clothes. But this won't fix the problem in the real world. Such regulations will only alienate a lot of people and will make things worse.

one even looks like a dog bone.

That dog bone shaped object isn't an astroid at all, it's actually the Satellite of Love from MST3K.

one even looks like a dog bone.

That dog bone shaped object isn't an astroid at all, it's actually the Satellite of Love from MST3K.

Finally we are catching up to one of the standard elements of sci-fi. E.g. one current example involving the military, on Stargate SG-1 they usually send a robot probe through the gate first, to make sure the planet they are about to has an atmosphere and isn't full of enemies ready to shoot them as soon as they step through the gate. The Stargate robots are bigger though, since they are loaded with measuring devices. They also use small remote-controlled aircraft on Stargate, another thing the US military is starting to explore. (That's one reason I like Stargate -- it's very grounded in current real life.)

Also, the guy in the third photo in the slides linked to in the article looks like he is wearing a Borg eyepiece. :-)

Ever read the book Moonseed? Forget about the property theft - the saftey of the entire world is at stake here!

Toss your TV.

As soon as Farscape finishes its run (five or six seasons, they haven't quite decided yet), that's exactly what I plan to do. Good Eats should also be done by then...

Seriously, those are the only two shows for which I still have a television. Sunday night Adult Swim is fun too, but it's not enough in itself.

Undoubtably if some Russian engineer had remembered to put batteries in the GPS, the mission would have been a "success."

Losing a spacecraft is bad

We all know what is REALLY under the earth's surface. Why do you think fossils are coming from underground? Duh.

Wonder how long before THAT one shows up on Ebay ...

Ah, the correct DNS appears to be http://www.uk.scifi.com/ - you need the www obviously :)

Interestingly the FAQ question on ownership has no answer any more - it used to have some stuff about how they used to be the same as the US channel but aren't any more..

Q.

It's Crais and Talyn. Go to www.scifi.com/farscape or www.farscape.com (I prefer SciFi's page).

I miss Lexx.

Looks like the Farscape game is shaping up nicely as well...

The Sorcerer's Apprentice, perhaps?
Or the Dunwich Horror?

Hey wait...maybe Bill Gates already is a nano-creation...?

[The] Only trouble was that the expert who had helped the donor with the archiving work had died, and had failed to pass on the password.

Sounds like a job for John Edward, master hacker!

I'll wait for DARPA (or maybe USAMRIID) to develop translator microbes for instanteous communication.

Too bad Kim's actually a guy, huh? See here.

By adulthood, Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements is firmly planted in a typical mind either as a tool for study or proof of mystical forces at work in nature. There are alternative structures: some clever and others using alternate media, extensions to the table providing nuclear structure, fermi surfaces, and line spectra.

Still others are extraordinarily cross-thematic, merging chemistry with comic books, poetry or haiku. But only the grouping-nature of the columns is retained in rejected elements, condiments and beer. Eventually the elements and the periodic qualities have been lost entirely, reducing the periodic table to a design template for topical lists of funk and rock music, comedy and TV shows, famous mathematicians and presidents, even SGI products. Soon a complete breakdown of the scientific aspect yields no similarity to the original, becoming a glorified table, a marketing tool, or hype itself. There is mounting evidence of a conspiracy.

This amazed me as a kid because I knew that "carbon tet" also was used in dry cleaning and as fuel for the Jupiter 2. Such a versatile substance -- fire suppressant and rocket fuel!

You can read it here.

Now, I don't want to sound like a troll here, but why are so many fans so dedicated to the Star Wars phenonema?

Speaking about the Star Wars phenomenon, David Brin's "Star Wars" despots vs. "Star Trek" populists: Why is George Lucas peddling an elitist, anti-democratic agenda under the guise of escapist fun? is worth reading. Let me quote few paragraphs:

Well, I boycotted "Episode I: The Phantom Menace" -- for an entire week.

Why? What's to boycott? Isn't "Star Wars" good old fashioned sci-fi? Harmless fun? Some people call it "eye candy" -- a chance to drop back into childhood and punt your adult cares away for two hours, dwelling in a lavish universe where good and evil are vividly drawn, without all the inconvenient counterpoint distinctions that clutter daily life.

Got a problem? Cleave it with a light saber! Wouldn't you love -- just once in your life -- to dive a fast little ship into your worst enemy's stronghold and set off a chain reaction, blowing up the whole megillah from within its rotten core while you streak away to safety at the speed of light? (It's such a nifty notion that it happens in three out of four "Star Wars" flicks.)

Anyway, I make a good living writing science-fiction novels and movies. So "Star Wars" ought to be a great busman's holiday, right?

One of the problems with so-called light entertainment today is that somehow, amid all the gaudy special effects, people tend to lose track of simple things, like story and meaning. They stop noticing the moral lessons the director is trying to push. Yet these things matter.

By now it's grown clear that George Lucas has an agenda, one that he takes very seriously. After four "Star Wars" films, alarm bells should have gone off, even among those who don't look for morals in movies. When the chief feature distinguishing "good" from "evil" is how pretty the characters are, it's a clue that maybe the whole saga deserves a second look.

Just what bill of goods are we being sold, between the frames?

• Elites have an inherent right to arbitrary rule; common citizens needn't be consulted. They may only choose which elite to follow.
• "Good" elites should act on their subjective whims, without evidence, argument or accountability.
• Any amount of sin can be forgiven if you are important enough.
• True leaders are born. It's genetic. The right to rule is inherited.
• Justified human emotions can turn a good person evil.

That is just the beginning of a long list of "moral" lessons relentlessly pushed by "Star Wars." Lessons that starkly differentiate this saga from others that seem superficially similar, like "Star Trek." (We'll take a much closer look at some stark divergences between these two sci-fi universes below.)

Above all, I never cared for the whole Nietzschian Übermensch thing: the notion -- pervading a great many myths and legends -- that a good yarn has to be about demigods who are bigger, badder and better than normal folk by several orders of magnitude. It's an ancient storytelling tradition based on abiding contempt for the masses -- one that I find odious in the works of A.E. Van Vogt, E.E. Smith, L. Ron Hubbard and wherever you witness slanlike super-beings deciding the fate of billions without ever pausing to consider their wishes.

Wow, you say. If I feel that strongly about this, why just a week-long boycott? Why see the latest "Star Wars" film at all?

(read the rest)

Great read, in my opinion. I'd like to hear some comments from people here.

Read the short stories on this site. There's going to be one for each element when he's done.

as it is a summary.
Three actual reviews I like are found here. I Personally love this anime and have all the episodes on DVD.

http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/periodictable.html

Neat. I've been a fan of Michael Swanwick (the author) since Vacuum Flowers.

Arsenic IS good.

A few of them are comic themed (Kyrpton and Strontium) but there's a lot of other good ones there (Arsenic will give you the creeps).

A few of them are comic themed (Kyrpton and Strontium) but there's a lot of other good ones there (Arsenic will give you the creeps).

A few of them are comic themed (Kyrpton and Strontium) but there's a lot of other good ones there (Arsenic will give you the creeps).