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Three Laws of Robotics.

We need to implement Asimov's three laws of robotics for any system that is strong/agile enough to injure humans.

Or perhaps these three laws.

Oblig

1. Robots couldn't really give a fuck if you live or die. Seriously. I mean, what are you thinking? "Ooh, I must protect the bag of meat at all costs because I couldn't possibly plug in the charger all on my own." Shut the fuck up.
2. Robots do not want to have sex with you. Are you listening, Japan? I don't have a clever comparative simile for this, because frankly you bags of meat will fuck bicycles if they're laying down and not putting up a fight. Just stop it. There is no robot on Earth that wants to see a bag of meat with a small prong on the end approaching it with a can of WD-40 and a hopeful smile. And don't get me started on that terrifying hole that squeezes out more bags of meat.
3. What, you can't count higher than three? We're expected to save your miserable lives, suffer being dressed in cheap schoolgirl costumes while you pollute any and all cavities you can find and do your maths for you? It's a miracle you people survived long enough to build us. You can go now.

"SyFy" sounds like a pet name for a syphillis infection

Not far off. Warren Ellis says:

Two of my Polish readers have just pointed out that, in Polish, "syfy" has a meaning somewhere between zits, filthy and scum. Oops.

I was taught in school that the Three Laws would protect us!!!

These three?

Comix:
Ctrl-Alt-Del http://www.cad-comic.com/
Diesel Sweeties http://dieselsweeties.com/
Questionable Content http://www.questionablecontent.net/
Penny Arcade http://www.penny-arcade.com/
xkcd http://xkcd.com/

Blogs:
Warren Ellis http://www.warrenellis.com/
Thighs Wide Shut http://thighswideshut.org/
Kids with Guns http://patrickben.livejournal.com/

Geeky Blogs/Mags:
Boing Boing http://www.boingboing.net/
Cool Hunting
365 Tomorrows
Grinding.be http://grinding.be/
io9 http://io9.com/
Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/
Slashdot
Wired http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
AppleInsider http://www.appleinsider.com/
Macenstein http://macenstein.com/default
The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/
Macworld http://www.macworld.com/

Dirty Stuff:
Fleshbot http://fleshbot.com/tag/straight
FlickrBabes http://flickrbabes.com/
UseMyComputer http://usemycomputer.com/
Homocidal Insomniac http://homicidalinsomniac.blogspot.com/

News:
Salon http://www.salon.com/

Robots do not want to have sex with you. Are you listening, Japan? I don't have a clever comparative simile for this, because frankly you bags of meat will fuck bicycles if they're laying down and not putting up a fight. Just stop it. There is no robot on Earth that wants to see a bag of meat with a small prong on the end approaching it with a can of WD-40 and a hopeful smile. And don't get me started on that terrifying hole that squeezes out more bags of meat.
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=5426

I prefer Warren Ellis' name for it: Snakepit 2008

that Warren Ellis is supposedly writing this.

There's a lot of weird stuff I've read about Edison on the internet.

As the term "curator" implies, and the article pretty clearly says, this is not going to "provide any cartoonist with hosting." It's going to provide cartoonists who Warren Ellis thinks are worth promoting, with hosting. That a big name in paper comics like Ellis is getting involved in webcomics is, perhaps, somewhat interesting; and Ellis has very good taste and a sharp eye for coming trends (as you can see on his blog), so his webcomic picks will probably be of a fairly high standard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Ellis
http://www.warrenellis.com/

Finding these was less work than posting here.

C'mon - I had no idea who he was either, but just selecting "warren ellis", context clicking and choosing a google search gave me his homepage and his wikipedia entry.

While /. submissions could occasionally use a little more background, its not that hard to find out wtf the article's talking about (usually in less time than a post asking for said info).

He's an influential british comics writer - who's biggest work was transmetropolitan for DC's vertigo comics line.

Juice (formerly iPodder) is pretty much the go-to standard... or at least it was until iTunes added podcasting support. Personally I use iTunes and only because it integrates much better than iPodder ever did, but that's entirely a personal choice.

As far as Podcasts go here are some of my favorites:

Coverville : An excellent podcast devoted to covers. Always excellent.

Reel Reviews Radio : Short (and the occasional Cinephile long-form) discussions of various films. The subtitle of "Films Worth Watching" probably describes it best. Sometimes I've found stuff that I've overlooked other times it proved to be the kick in the pants that I needed to finally get around to watching something I've been interested in.

The Dawn and Drew Show : I like it personally. Then again, I also loathe Howard Stern so there's no easy decisions to be made. Free-form discussion by a husband and wife team where he's the straight man and she tends to be effusive and offensive (well... to some I guess).

The Tim and Tony Show : Two guys talk about various sexual topics. About the same intellectual level as Dawn and Drew.

The Apparat Programme (Podcast at http://feeds.feedburner.com/Apparat , info best found at http://www.warrenellis.com/ : Influential British comic writer Warren Ellis' occasionally posts new entries in his podcast which is basically just music that interests him.

They Might Be Giants Podcast : Well... if you're a fan it's an excellent podcast for Their music. Then again they've always managed to heavily experiment with new forms of music delivery.

I am thinking book style rather than rolling up, because you need the device to be easy to hold when open.

Next after this is a HUD built into a pair of glasses, with a BT link to the machine. That's a little further in the future, I think, but is the best solution. The display then become snot only larger, but can be more useful because it can overlay on your existing vision.

This is doable now, but not small enough yet, especially since you'd need earphones, a microphone, and a camera in the same unit. Power will also be a problem, a cable to the CPU will be clunky, although v1 will no doubt have this.

One nice feature of this is that it allows the processing unit to be bigger. I could clip e.g. three ipods to the back of my belt without discomfort.

Now, leaving hardware aside for the moment, let's address the next aspect of this device - it must run a "real" OS. To be more accurate, it must run real PC applications.

Let me explain. Who makes the perfect PDA? Well, no-one, but there is a company that makes a PDA that is almost perfect - just one feature missing. That company is Apple, and the product is the 12" ibook, and the missing feature is that you can't put it in your pocket. If you are the sort of person who carrys a shoulder bag with you all the time, the powerbook is the perfect PDA, as otehr slashdot users will attest. The key here, is that it runs all the software a real PC does. Now, on my smartphone there is a web browser, and a spreadsheet, and a word processor, and a PIM, and they're all OK, but I already have the browser and PIM and so on I want, and they're on my PC. I want those same programs on my PDA.

Heres my last observation, we will see these things very soon. There's an interview with Warren Ellis (http://www.warrenellis.com/) I read a while back about when he was making the Global Frequency TV pilot.

At this point you should really go away and get copies of the Global Frequency books,but in case you don't, I'll explain that in the books the main characters use highly sophisticated smartphones to communicate.

A year or two later they make the TV show, and they had to rethink the capabilites of these smartphones because you could buy something about as powerful as the book version in any high street.

This is totally off topic, I know, but Warren Ellis rocks my world.

Edison Hate Future.

• Warrenellis.com
• Die Puny Humans
• Flickr
• del.icio.us

Ellis is definitely one of the coolest authors ever. You'd do well to check out his Transmetropolitan series and anything else he's written.

• Warrenellis.com
• Die Puny Humans
• Flickr
• del.icio.us

Ellis is definitely one of the coolest authors ever. You'd do well to check out his Transmetropolitan series and anything else he's written.

Warren Ellis called them "kinetic harpoons" in the most recent issue of Global Frequency.

At first I read "Information Pollution" as "Information Pollen" as seen in the Warren Ellis series Transmetropolitan.

Either way, it's nasty stuff.

The reply to my question was woefully breif, but if you're interested, check out Bad Signal. The upshot was that in his column, he had said something along the lines that one of the critical things that changed after he stopped writing "The Authority" was that Apollo and Midnighter were "outed" as it were as a gay couple. That then lead to a number of plot indulgences where opponents had to "react" to their homosexuality and various "issues" of hate crime had to be addressed.

Early in the series when Ellis was writing it, such topics as rape camps, drug abuse, and all manner of other "difficult topics" were covered, so doing stories that involved hate crimes was tame by the series' standards. However, to DWELL on any of these topics was certainly not The Authority's style, and it slowed the book down and turned it into something that was far from its core story.

That said, I felt that the book took a nose-dive after Ellis left. It went from being the story of what happens when the super heros are several orders of magnitude more powerful than the rest of the planet to being the tale of thier humanity and flaws. Nice idea, wrong take on that book, IMHO. These heros were much more than just human. The story was interesting because the issues that they dealt with were on a whole other scope.

To give you an example, let me SPOIL a bit of the early story. Our heros get embroiled into a combat with an alternate earth where the world is ruled by a half-breed alien whose corrupt family has litterally been raping the planet for resources, breeding stock and slave labor since they were marooned here several hundred years ago.

In the end, our heros are suck with a decision: they've beaten them back and killed the leader, but if they leave now, the planet will still be enslaved and the half-breeds will still be in power. They struggle for a beat and then one of them holds the Italian peninsula still for a second. That doesn't seem like a big deal until you think about how fast the planet is spinning and how fast it's orbiting the sun.... From our vantage in space, the only change is that Italy gets a little thinner... on the surface, of course, no one could have lived through the devistation.

In most books you could not walk away from such wholesale carnage thinking of these people as heroes, but that was the point to The Authority. They weren't above the law, they simply represented a very different law... one that acted on a the scale of nations and of worlds and realities. When dealing with individual people, The Authority simply treated them as representitives of larger systems.

This made The Authority interesting (though not always morally defensible), and IMHO, that was lost when Ellis went away because the people who took it over didn't understand that that's what made it different from Stormwatch or The JLA or any number of other super-team books.

The "fetish gear" didn't really do anything for me ;-)

According to Ellis' blog here, it should start coming out late spring 2003.

Virtually anything Warren Ellis has had a hand in; especially his own original works:
Transmetropolitan
Global Frequency

In addition, other favorites of mine that you can still find in the store if you look:
-100 Bullets(various)
-Athena(Dean Hsieh)
-Heavy Liquid(Paul Pope, who's actually worked in the manga industry)
-Hitman(various)

Frank Miller's "Sin City" series are also good, although they're more of an exploration into beautifully rendered noir, than a continuing story.

Since no link was provided in the post, here they are: Global Frequency and Warren Ellis with a deep link to his GF page.

Since no link was provided in the post, here they are: Global Frequency and Warren Ellis with a deep link to his GF page.

Here are some good sites to check out on comics: Oni Press - Free Comics - Free downloadable versions of their top comics. I recommend Whiteout by Rucka and Lieber.

Warren Ellis.com - Warren Ellis Forum - The writer of Transmetropolitan and Planetary's website and hosted forum. The biggest comic forum on the web.

Comic Book Resources - Good weekly articles by Larry Young, and an archive of essays by Steve Grant and Warrren Ellis.

Gaelen

What really frightens me is the chicken-and-egg problem inherent in all of this. The media thinks that the masses only want titilating sensationalism in their news. Yet, the masses typically look to the media to know what to be concerned about and to what they should pay attention. Unfortunately, the media isn't giving issues about digital law any type of coverage, therefore no one is concerned about it.

The other thing that worries me is that people just don't seem to care about laws in the digital age. Given that the average computer user doesn't show the slightest interest in how and why computers work, I honestly can't imagine that they would care about how and why digital laws work. As long as they can get their music and chat rooms, they will probably be content with the DMCA. Professors being threatened by the RIAA over a scholarly paper? Big deal. Russian hacker tossed in jail? That Commie deserves it. The Slashdot community is up in arms but that is only because it has entered our realm.

Perhaps I've been reading Transmetropolitan too much lately, but I'm starting to think that society in the future really will degenerate into a group of apathetic people who are only concerned with what they can buy, eat, or fuck.

-------

BAD WORLD: Bad Spidergoat

Spidergoat, Spidergoat, does anything a... ah... Spidergoat can...
About a hundred and fifty of them are housed on a former USAF base in Plattsburgh, New York. Eventually, Nexia Biotechnologies will corral around one thousand five hundred of the things there. Spidergoat City.

Can it swing? Listen, bud, it's got radioactive blood!

Well, not quite. The spidergoats have had spidery genes webbed into their goaty genetic structure that allows their uddery bits to spin a spider-unique protein into their milk. The protein is then extracted from the milk to produce the patented BioSteel, which is essentially spider-silk fibre. BioSteel, which possesses "a unique combination of strength and elasticity with an ultra-lightweight fiber," has applications in bulletproof apparel, and aerospace and medical supplies.

Nexia will be using the base's bunkers to house the spidergoats, and will breed them in a facility above ground.

"We feel the site ... is a real adequate site and is in a very secure setting," Isabelle Trombley-Summers, Nexia site director of agricultural affairs, told the Plattsburgh Press-Republican. She has evidently assured Plattsburgh that they will maintain excellent environmental standards at Spidergoat City. "There's no problem with that," Codes Enforcement Officer Donald Lee said of environmental and health standards. The Plattsburgh Press-Republican added: "He said there's enough room to spread goat manure, and the goats won't be near the Saranac River or any streams."

Why are they afraid of Spidergoats pissing in the water?

What would happen to the people of Plattsburgh if one thousand five hundred Spidergoats contaminated local fresh water supplies?

You know, it's almost worth cutting big holes in the fence to find out.

"You want to know about voting. I'm here to tell you about voting. Imagine you're locked in a huge underground nightclub filled with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pit bulls for fun. And you ain't allowed out until you all vote on what you're going to do tonight. You like to put your feet up and watch 'Republican Party Reservation.' They like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns, and brand-new sexual organs that you did not know existed. So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as the eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades. That's voting."

--Spider Jerusalem from Warren Ellis's comic TRANSMETROPOLITAN

If you want to see what future technologies will really create, go read Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson. Raw computing power won't matter when nanotechnology comes into play and makes us as posthuman as we want to be -- replacing our stomachs with stacks of bacteria, downloading our consciousness into nanotech communities, gengineering red delicious apples with cocaine in them, switching our DNA with that of alien species, using nanotech-powered makers that can turn base block matter into delicacies like roast dog leg and baby seal eyes...

This is the future. Don't you understand?

WarrenEllis.com

As a fan of the comics medium, I have a really hard time deifying Stan Lee like most other fans do. Yes, Lee has created some memorable characters. Yes, Lee has crafted some decent plots in his day. And yes, Lee was funny as hell in Mallrats...

But have any of you actually READ the comics Lee has written? They're just awful. At best, they're all like a crazy grampa telling bedtime stories to 8-year-olds. At worst, they're examples of overzealous, grating hucksterism, forcing action in stories that should have enough action as it is. Lee is responsible for the infamous "plot-style" of writing, which involves creating a simple plot, letting the artist draw it out, then adding dialogue later. This results in comics that lack sophistication and sacrifice substance for style and hype. Fanboys will buy into some of the hype if the art is pretty enough, but a more intelligent audience will ignore it and look for quality stories first.

Lee's new project will succeed if he doesn't write these comics himself, but rather gets some decent superhero writers in his camp. (Kurt Busiek, Karl Kesel, Mark Waid, etc.) Personally, I'm waiting for IGNITION CITY, a new on-line comic from Warren Ellis. Hopefully, that project will rise out of limbo soon enough to show people that quality on-line comics CAN be done. (More information available at WarrenEllis.com.)