True. But ballistic-weapon snipers have that sort of problem too. They'll figure out something.
Anyhoo, snipers aside, just using it (or the next-gen version) as a short-range pistol is pretty nasty. No chemical residue on the gunman after firing. No ballistics tests possible -- no bullets. Pretty useful for all sorts of bad.
Pity it's on Slashdot. We can count the seconds until the ATF shuts down the site. Then start the countdown until an emergency-speed law is enacted to make these things narcotic-illegal.
Of course, police and the military have had laser weapons in prototype form, along with electrical cannons, sonic blasters and other new ways to slaughter civies if necessary. Just a matter of time.
But WE won't be allowed the weapons. Zero noise. No auto-triangulation of your location. No smoke. No chemical residue. No EVIDENCE. Nope, it will be for the Darth Vaders in homeland security. Beautiful for assassins as well.
As for power. Um, wear a backpack with a large array of batteries, with a power cord plugging into the gun's battery slot. And a charging cord, suitable for plugging into walls. Or carry the power pack in a briefcase. Fuel cells will really crank up the utility.
Increase the juice another order of magnitude, and these things are deadly.
They were also inevitable. Buy 'em whilst you can! It won't be long 'til the knock on the seller's door.
That's because women going to the Gap can choose among hundreds of different skirts, jackets, coats, shoes, and lots of small sparkly thingies.
Men get 3 types of pants, the same shirt in four colors, socks, and some t-shirts - a number of which are billboards for the store. The designers try, but what men really want is to look the same way every day for the rest of our lives. Variety is too much for us to handle, and invites suspicion that one might be gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Ah, but Gollum was a hobbit, and Tolkien once, during a commercial break, told an interviewer that hobbits were humans. Short and furry footed, but still of the race of men. HIPAA applies specieswise.
"Tape a piece of paper to your forehead, jackass."
And what would happen to your liberty after that? Einstein, the idea is that you are under house arrest, or on probation, or serving time outside of prison, or just up for monitoring because you pissed someone off politically. Covering up the pickup would not be an option. Well, it is an option, sort of like cutting off your leg cuff monitor or refusing to check in with a parole officer. Free will, sure, but some large men in Darth Vader armor will come for you pretty damn quickly.
Now, the science fiction brainstorming would be: how do you fake out the feed without the wardens getting wise?
Supposing the penalty for whatever crime they choose would be to have several permanent cameras and audio pickups mounted on, oh, a hat, or a pair of glasses, transmitting a data feed wirelessly to a court-mandated hard drive array you must wear on you belt? Or maybe the camera and audio pickups could be made flat enough for a "third eye" circuitry tattoo on your forehead, and the recorder could be solid state, embedded surgically in your body, or bonded to your skin? Whereever you go, there they are, watching you, whenever they like. Probably automatically alerting your warden whenever key words are spoken. Hook it up to a GPS, and we're ready for our terror-war future.
The porn industry may adopt tech first, but totalitarianism is always a close second or third.
There's nothing "liberal" about Liberman. Being a Democrat doesn't make you automatically "liberal". He's to the right of Richard Nixon. Gore and his wife aren't exactly from Berkeley, either. Clinton was pretty middle-of-the-road: he supported the V-chip and the cursed copyright law changes. Liberal points of view about freedom of speech can exist in either party, and ditto the itch to control what people are saying about their naughty bits. And frankly, if you want to be elected to public office nationally, you can't buck the Bible Belt too hard. You won't get elected dogcatcher early in your career, let alone a congressman or a President. Democracy has its bad points. People who have lots of kids tend to be conservative, and they constitute a majority large enough to swing the country their way.
If I've learned anything about the Microsoft trials, it's that it's perfectly OK to break the law as long as you don't get caught.
You can learn much more by the aftermath of the Microsoft trials: You can be guilty, be convicted, then run along free, if the President's brain trust doesn't like the anti-monopoly laws.
Apparently you can selectively nullify laws you don't agree with, if your name is Ashcroft.
But don't try it at home. Copy a movie, and you'll get a prison sentence more heinous than that you'd get if you'd committed manslaughter.
Um, it was "humor", as I was quoting Bill O'Reilly, who actually does that to people on his television program. Screams at 'em to shut up, cuts the microphone on the guest, and proceeds to "outdebate" them while they sit helpless. Then he ends the segment with a triumphant smirk. The falafel comment went over the head of anyone who doesn't know about O'Reilly's recent sexual harrassment settlement. It's about a falafel. Really. Not kidding.
I'm on your side. That was why I put the little "sad" face on the comment.
Hm. Those brakes, even if inspected, could have failed at some point after inspection. Not to mention that students beat Free Stuff to death, because they are still 12 years old in some ways. And a lot of people think mechanical things are magical anyway. They just expect them to work all the time.
I always ride a bike in traffic with the simultaneous thoughts in mind: the bike can fail at any second, and everyone is trying to kill me. Yep, I don't make much speed in city riding. 10 miles per at the most. But I stay alive.
It's another way of screaming, "SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!":( You're lucky they can't shut off your microphone, and rant at you as you sit helplessly by.
Cut to commercial. Should be one about falafels, if there is any justice.
"We don't agree with copyright law, so we think we ought to be allowed to violate the law with impunity and that anyone who enforces the law in their own interests is a Greedy Bastard."
Yes. And that "law" was a series of such purchased in the last ten years or so -by clowns- when no one was looking. I don't believe in the validity of purchased criminalization of what used to be a civil matter, conviction of which required monetary loss! I go by the law pre-Sonny Bono/DMCA era, not this police state horse manure being slammed around the world now.
And the Greedy Bastards are indeed rich, and indeed greedy.
"also means they've bought the right to copy and re-market it"
Bingo. The material is not sold. It is not "remarketed". And we used to have the "right" to make non-sold copies and give it to our friends. It was a grey area of the law. SELLING it is piracy, of course.
I don't think a free society can survive the police state necessary to monitor every wired and wireless internet connection, every telephone call, every move by "suspicious" characters data warehoused and searchable by PRIVATE CORPORATIONS. I don't really care about downloading movies. I care that the US is building the infrastructure "Prohibition III: The Final Chapter" across the entire planet. Those police powers coupled with permanent monitoring of individual actions will spell the death of freedom everywhere in the world. Those tools are the tools of totalitarianism: it is an inevitability that once granted such powers, the governments-cum-industries of the world will use them to their own enrichment.
Damn the IP laws. Damn the state that grants such powers to private corporations.
So, it's been illegal to tape movies broadcast on television, all along? Illegal to tape radio? Illegal to copy your own VHS tapes?
No, it wasn't illegal! It never was. But the **IAs are convincing everyone it always was, and everyone is chanting, with glassy eyes, "it is illegal to copy... it is illegal to copy... it is illegal to copy..."
America's memory hole is frightening. Our actions are becoming borderline insane, because we can't remember ANYTHING in the past unless someone in power tells us it happened. Copyright "crime", civil liberties evaporating, confusion about who attacked us on 9/11, reelecting a proven fraud... madness.
Oh, I'm not saying that it can log your listening habits; it can't -- now. But it means $$ to the advertisers to track cu$tomer$, and the services will slowly add on the capability, probably rolled up with roadside assistance with GPS capability.
Then future agents will track what you listen to. They can't help themselves. The Patriot Act and the intelligence "reform" bill wet their appetites for monitoring subversives. With digital cable boxes watching what you watch, and satellite radio logging what you listen to, Fatherland Security listening to your internet and telephone traffic, how exactly are we "free"?
Janet didn't look all that happy in that clip, and Timberlake also had the oh-go-what-happened look. Something went wrong, on his end or hers. I don't think it was supposed to happen as it did. What was planned, I don't know. They probably have been instructed to shut up by all involved. Perhaps someday one of them will breath a sigh of relief and tell us what the hell the problem was!
If you purchase a license to decode a satellite radio broadcast, you're on a list. Just mentioning that because, in free radio, no method exists to database the listeners.
It's just a small step to set up a method to catalog when, where, and who was listening to a given broadcast. It's a microscopic next step for the government, or your boss, or your local private investigator to have access to that data.
If this isn't important to anyone, then I am truly sorry for the nation I used to be proud of. Look, anonymous speech is protected by law, but anonymous listening is not. The freedom to speak to power anonymously is useless if the intended listeners are afraid that their attention would be noted.
Right now you need a license by the Feds to publish works on American soil written by "terrorist sympathizers" abroad. They give that a broad definition. The FBI and other intelligence services are definitely infiltrating anti-administration groups to take down names, and in some cases to incite the groups to illegal activity.
Free radio and TV made the 20th century's flowering of new thought possible. Take it away, and there's no medium for people to listen anonymously to "subversive" thought. Monitored internet and satellite radio ain't no substitute.
Arg. I proclaim there was no Janet Jackson debacle. There was a manufactured debacle on the sadly (now) right-wing cable news channels, right wing radio and most importantly a few "decency" (right wing churches SEE: southern, baptist, fundamentalist ) groups flooded the FCC with complaints. In 2003, 99.8 percent of the complaints come from the Parents Television Council. Here's a sample:
What Powell did not reveal--apparently because he was unaware--was the source of the complaints. According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003--99.8 percent--were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group.
This year, the trend has continued, and perhaps intensified.
Through early October, 99.9 percent of indecency complaints--aside from those concerning the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl halftime show broadcast on CBS-- were brought by the PTC, according to the FCC analysis dated Oct. 1. (The agency last week estimated it had received 1,068,767 complaints about broadcast indecency so far this year; the Super Bowl broadcast accounted for over 540,000, according to commissioners' statements.)
A small fundamentalist group is, with Bush and Powell's avid help, bringing down a blanket of censorship on America.
Sadly, even if the volunteers keep up their websites, they won't have the massive capability that suprnova.org had to screen out bad files through the moderators. The moderators volunteered to screen the submitted seeds for bad names, invalid files, and MPAA and RIAA stooge spam.
**IA's next step will be to flood the remaining torrent link pages with bad seeds, making the system untenable.
Exxeem was the successor to Bittorent. Let's hope the people who are developing it aren't scientologied to the point where they won't want to even try.
:) Nope. He had a PhD in Chemistry. He got a job teaching biochemistry, a subject in which he actually was not expert. In his autobiography, he explains that he read six chapters ahead in the textbook, and winged it.
Um, her point was that almost everyone in the book was not fair-skinned. I've read 30's/40's SF my whole life, and it was very, very rare to see an explicitly non-white protagonist.
Her points about this aspect of the production were, one, that she populated EarthSea prodominately with dark skins because in real life this is the case, as European fair skin is rare in the world. Secondly, this was undone for the series for no apparent reason other than to avoid alienating white male viewers.
Trivia for tonight: didja know that in Heinlein's I Shall Fear No Evil, Eunice, the body donor for the old man, was black? Heinlein said he was amused that no one picked up on the hint. I myself never found the passage, 'cause the book was so incredibly loooooooonnnnnnnngggggg I never reread it.
Well, I myself thought it was a wash when they named it the "SciFi" channel. I know this is a hoary old dispute, but people who grew up with literary science fiction groan and wither when people use that term. It's "Science Fiction", or SF; "Sci-Fi" is a term used by marketing people.
Here's a working breakdown:
SF (Speculative Fiction): Term first used, if I'm not mistaken, by Harlan Ellison. Inclusive of science fiction, alternative histories, comics, fantasy. Someone once mentioned that all mainstream literature could be considered a subgenre of SF.
Science Fiction: Stories predicated by someaspect of real science, baldly stated. Although the main spar of all stories involve human interaction, in SF the story cannot violate scientific understanding. Exceptions are granted, of course: you can have gimmes for science not yet known. That's basic. But don't overdo that.
Fantasy: Not based on science, necessarily. More in tune with dreams than science fiction stereotypically is.
I've always said the basic difference between science fiction and fantasy is this: science fiction stories are based on improbable conjecture, but still is within the bounds of reality, but fantasy is based on impossible conjecture. Science: hyperspace drives. Fantasy: dragons in the Dark Ages of Europe.
SciFi: the fun stuff. 50's flicks. Godzilla. Battlestar Galactica. Anthing labeled "science fiction" in the popular media is scifi. SciFi uses science fictions's props, but does not use science. It invokes science fiction's integrity without doing the hard work. No SCIENCE in SciFi, no disciplined interpretation of reality. Star Trek is scifi. No? Really, the entire universe speaks English? Or universal translators can listen to three sentences of unknown language from a new species, then produce graduate-level philosophical translations on the fly?
Space Opera: (ref: Horse Opera) A subdivision of scifi. Like horse operas of the 50's, which worked cowboy cliches to death, space opera uses scifi cliches as props. The main example, the supreme exemplar of all time: Star Wars. There ain't no science fiction at all in Star Wars. There ain't no SCIENCE in Star Wars. Change the scifi costumes to swords and sorcery garb, and the story doesn't even need to change.
SciFi can be fun, but the sad truth is that in damned near everyone's minds, scifi IS science fiction. Or as some put it, "science fiction fantasy", the ultimate in no-nothing terminology [grind teeth grind teeth]. This isn't about elitism, it's about precision in understanding what one is talking about. Ursula writes good science fiction, and likewise excellent fantasy - but never does she write scifi.
There isn't enough science fiction in movie or TV to fill up even six hours of SciFi programming. No one's made any.
Slashdot Mirror
True. But ballistic-weapon snipers have that sort of problem too. They'll figure out something.
Anyhoo, snipers aside, just using it (or the next-gen version) as a short-range pistol is pretty nasty. No chemical residue on the gunman after firing. No ballistics tests possible -- no bullets. Pretty useful for all sorts of bad.
Well, it was inevitable. The first laser pistol.
Pity it's on Slashdot. We can count the seconds until the ATF shuts down the site. Then start the countdown until an emergency-speed law is enacted to make these things narcotic-illegal.
Of course, police and the military have had laser weapons in prototype form, along with electrical cannons, sonic blasters and other new ways to slaughter civies if necessary. Just a matter of time.
But WE won't be allowed the weapons. Zero noise. No auto-triangulation of your location. No smoke. No chemical residue. No EVIDENCE. Nope, it will be for the Darth Vaders in homeland security. Beautiful for assassins as well.
As for power. Um, wear a backpack with a large array of batteries, with a power cord plugging into the gun's battery slot. And a charging cord, suitable for plugging into walls. Or carry the power pack in a briefcase. Fuel cells will really crank up the utility.
Increase the juice another order of magnitude, and these things are deadly.
They were also inevitable. Buy 'em whilst you can! It won't be long 'til the knock on the seller's door.
That's because women going to the Gap can choose among hundreds of different skirts, jackets, coats, shoes, and lots of small sparkly thingies.
Men get 3 types of pants, the same shirt in four colors, socks, and some t-shirts - a number of which are billboards for the store. The designers try, but what men really want is to look the same way every day for the rest of our lives. Variety is too much for us to handle, and invites suspicion that one might be gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
"*not gay."
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Ah, but Gollum was a hobbit, and Tolkien once, during a commercial break, told an interviewer that hobbits were humans. Short and furry footed, but still of the race of men. HIPAA applies specieswise.
"Tape a piece of paper to your forehead, jackass."
And what would happen to your liberty after that? Einstein, the idea is that you are under house arrest, or on probation, or serving time outside of prison, or just up for monitoring because you pissed someone off politically. Covering up the pickup would not be an option. Well, it is an option, sort of like cutting off your leg cuff monitor or refusing to check in with a parole officer. Free will, sure, but some large men in Darth Vader armor will come for you pretty damn quickly.
Now, the science fiction brainstorming would be: how do you fake out the feed without the wardens getting wise?
"But who would want their life recorded?"
Think of this:
What if were done against your will?
Supposing the penalty for whatever crime they choose would be to have several permanent cameras and audio pickups mounted on, oh, a hat, or a pair of glasses, transmitting a data feed wirelessly to a court-mandated hard drive array you must wear on you belt? Or maybe the camera and audio pickups could be made flat enough for a "third eye" circuitry tattoo on your forehead, and the recorder could be solid state, embedded surgically in your body, or bonded to your skin? Whereever you go, there they are, watching you, whenever they like. Probably automatically alerting your warden whenever key words are spoken. Hook it up to a GPS, and we're ready for our terror-war future.
The porn industry may adopt tech first, but totalitarianism is always a close second or third.
There's nothing "liberal" about Liberman. Being a Democrat doesn't make you automatically "liberal". He's to the right of Richard Nixon. Gore and his wife aren't exactly from Berkeley, either. Clinton was pretty middle-of-the-road: he supported the V-chip and the cursed copyright law changes. Liberal points of view about freedom of speech can exist in either party, and ditto the itch to control what people are saying about their naughty bits. And frankly, if you want to be elected to public office nationally, you can't buck the Bible Belt too hard. You won't get elected dogcatcher early in your career, let alone a congressman or a President. Democracy has its bad points. People who have lots of kids tend to be conservative, and they constitute a majority large enough to swing the country their way.
"her: well it always works when i double click."
Well, she has a valid point. The car always goes when you step on the pedal on the right. You go with what works.
"He's clearly stealing movies by copying DVD's that aren't his"
There are some movies missing? Serious charge, that.
If I've learned anything about the Microsoft trials, it's that it's perfectly OK to break the law as long as you don't get caught.
You can learn much more by the aftermath of the Microsoft trials: You can be guilty, be convicted, then run along free, if the President's brain trust doesn't like the anti-monopoly laws.
Apparently you can selectively nullify laws you don't agree with, if your name is Ashcroft.
But don't try it at home. Copy a movie, and you'll get a prison sentence more heinous than that you'd get if you'd committed manslaughter.
Lawful != right. Wrong != unlawful.
Um, it was "humor", as I was quoting Bill O'Reilly, who actually does that to people on his television program. Screams at 'em to shut up, cuts the microphone on the guest, and proceeds to "outdebate" them while they sit helpless. Then he ends the segment with a triumphant smirk. The falafel comment went over the head of anyone who doesn't know about O'Reilly's recent sexual harrassment settlement. It's about a falafel. Really. Not kidding.
I'm on your side. That was why I put the little "sad" face on the comment.
Hm. Those brakes, even if inspected, could have failed at some point after inspection. Not to mention that students beat Free Stuff to death, because they are still 12 years old in some ways. And a lot of people think mechanical things are magical anyway. They just expect them to work all the time.
I always ride a bike in traffic with the simultaneous thoughts in mind: the bike can fail at any second, and everyone is trying to kill me. Yep, I don't make much speed in city riding. 10 miles per at the most. But I stay alive.
"A thief breaking his collarbone may be more obvious, but he may very well be more expensive in the long run, too."
Hmp. I'd say, "Prove to me that I loosened the bolt. Mr Goodwrench here was the one with the tool kit. Maybe he likes to experiment with minimalism."
It's another way of screaming, "SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!" :( You're lucky they can't shut off your microphone, and rant at you as you sit helplessly by.
Cut to commercial. Should be one about falafels, if there is any justice.
"We don't agree with copyright law, so we think we ought to be allowed to violate the law with impunity and that anyone who enforces the law in their own interests is a Greedy Bastard."
Yes. And that "law" was a series of such purchased in the last ten years or so -by clowns- when no one was looking. I don't believe in the validity of purchased criminalization of what used to be a civil matter, conviction of which required monetary loss! I go by the law pre-Sonny Bono/DMCA era, not this police state horse manure being slammed around the world now.
And the Greedy Bastards are indeed rich, and indeed greedy.
"also means they've bought the right to copy and re-market it"
Bingo. The material is not sold. It is not "remarketed". And we used to have the "right" to make non-sold copies and give it to our friends. It was a grey area of the law. SELLING it is piracy, of course.
I don't think a free society can survive the police state necessary to monitor every wired and wireless internet connection, every telephone call, every move by "suspicious" characters data warehoused and searchable by PRIVATE CORPORATIONS. I don't really care about downloading movies. I care that the US is building the infrastructure "Prohibition III: The Final Chapter" across the entire planet. Those police powers coupled with permanent monitoring of individual actions will spell the death of freedom everywhere in the world. Those tools are the tools of totalitarianism: it is an inevitability that once granted such powers, the governments-cum-industries of the world will use them to their own enrichment.
Damn the IP laws. Damn the state that grants such powers to private corporations.
So, it's been illegal to tape movies broadcast on television, all along? Illegal to tape radio? Illegal to copy your own VHS tapes?
No, it wasn't illegal! It never was. But the **IAs are convincing everyone it always was, and everyone is chanting, with glassy eyes, "it is illegal to copy... it is illegal to copy... it is illegal to copy..."
America's memory hole is frightening. Our actions are becoming borderline insane, because we can't remember ANYTHING in the past unless someone in power tells us it happened. Copyright "crime", civil liberties evaporating, confusion about who attacked us on 9/11, reelecting a proven fraud... madness.
Oh, I'm not saying that it can log your listening habits; it can't -- now. But it means $$ to the advertisers to track cu$tomer$, and the services will slowly add on the capability, probably rolled up with roadside assistance with GPS capability.
Then future agents will track what you listen to. They can't help themselves. The Patriot Act and the intelligence "reform" bill wet their appetites for monitoring subversives. With digital cable boxes watching what you watch, and satellite radio logging what you listen to, Fatherland Security listening to your internet and telephone traffic, how exactly are we "free"?
Janet didn't look all that happy in that clip, and Timberlake also had the oh-go-what-happened look. Something went wrong, on his end or hers. I don't think it was supposed to happen as it did. What was planned, I don't know. They probably have been instructed to shut up by all involved. Perhaps someday one of them will breath a sigh of relief and tell us what the hell the problem was!
If you purchase a license to decode a satellite radio broadcast, you're on a list. Just mentioning that because, in free radio, no method exists to database the listeners.
It's just a small step to set up a method to catalog when, where, and who was listening to a given broadcast. It's a microscopic next step for the government, or your boss, or your local private investigator to have access to that data.
If this isn't important to anyone, then I am truly sorry for the nation I used to be proud of. Look, anonymous speech is protected by law, but anonymous listening is not. The freedom to speak to power anonymously is useless if the intended listeners are afraid that their attention would be noted.
Right now you need a license by the Feds to publish works on American soil written by "terrorist sympathizers" abroad. They give that a broad definition. The FBI and other intelligence services are definitely infiltrating anti-administration groups to take down names, and in some cases to incite the groups to illegal activity.
Free radio and TV made the 20th century's flowering of new thought possible. Take it away, and there's no medium for people to listen anonymously to "subversive" thought. Monitored internet and satellite radio ain't no substitute.
Arg. I proclaim there was no Janet Jackson debacle. There was a manufactured debacle on the sadly (now) right-wing cable news channels, right wing radio and most importantly a few "decency" (right wing churches SEE: southern, baptist, fundamentalist ) groups flooded the FCC with complaints. In 2003, 99.8 percent of the complaints come from the Parents Television Council. Here's a sample:
What Powell did not reveal--apparently because he was unaware--was the source of the complaints. According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003--99.8 percent--were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group.
This year, the trend has continued, and perhaps intensified.
Through early October, 99.9 percent of indecency complaints--aside from those concerning the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl halftime show broadcast on CBS-- were brought by the PTC, according to the FCC analysis dated Oct. 1. (The agency last week estimated it had received 1,068,767 complaints about broadcast indecency so far this year; the Super Bowl broadcast accounted for over 540,000, according to commissioners' statements.)
A small fundamentalist group is, with Bush and Powell's avid help, bringing down a blanket of censorship on America.
Sadly, even if the volunteers keep up their websites, they won't have the massive capability that suprnova.org had to screen out bad files through the moderators. The moderators volunteered to screen the submitted seeds for bad names, invalid files, and MPAA and RIAA stooge spam.
**IA's next step will be to flood the remaining torrent link pages with bad seeds, making the system untenable.
Exxeem was the successor to Bittorent. Let's hope the people who are developing it aren't scientologied to the point where they won't want to even try.
Isaac Asimov had a PhD in Biochemistry
:) Nope. He had a PhD in Chemistry. He got a job teaching biochemistry, a subject in which he actually was not expert. In his autobiography, he explains that he read six chapters ahead in the textbook, and winged it.
Um, her point was that almost everyone in the book was not fair-skinned. I've read 30's/40's SF my whole life, and it was very, very rare to see an explicitly non-white protagonist.
Her points about this aspect of the production were, one, that she populated EarthSea prodominately with dark skins because in real life this is the case, as European fair skin is rare in the world. Secondly, this was undone for the series for no apparent reason other than to avoid alienating white male viewers.
Trivia for tonight: didja know that in Heinlein's I Shall Fear No Evil, Eunice, the body donor for the old man, was black? Heinlein said he was amused that no one picked up on the hint. I myself never found the passage, 'cause the book was so incredibly loooooooonnnnnnnngggggg I never reread it.
Well, I myself thought it was a wash when they named it the "SciFi" channel. I know this is a hoary old dispute, but people who grew up with literary science fiction groan and wither when people use that term. It's "Science Fiction", or SF; "Sci-Fi" is a term used by marketing people.
Here's a working breakdown:
SF (Speculative Fiction): Term first used, if I'm not mistaken, by Harlan Ellison. Inclusive of science fiction, alternative histories, comics, fantasy. Someone once mentioned that all mainstream literature could be considered a subgenre of SF.
Science Fiction: Stories predicated by someaspect of real science, baldly stated. Although the main spar of all stories involve human interaction, in SF the story cannot violate scientific understanding. Exceptions are granted, of course: you can have gimmes for science not yet known. That's basic. But don't overdo that.
Fantasy: Not based on science, necessarily. More in tune with dreams than science fiction stereotypically is.
I've always said the basic difference between science fiction and fantasy is this: science fiction stories are based on improbable conjecture, but still is within the bounds of reality, but fantasy is based on impossible conjecture. Science: hyperspace drives. Fantasy: dragons in the Dark Ages of Europe.
SciFi: the fun stuff. 50's flicks. Godzilla. Battlestar Galactica. Anthing labeled "science fiction" in the popular media is scifi. SciFi uses science fictions's props, but does not use science. It invokes science fiction's integrity without doing the hard work. No SCIENCE in SciFi, no disciplined interpretation of reality. Star Trek is scifi. No? Really, the entire universe speaks English? Or universal translators can listen to three sentences of unknown language from a new species, then produce graduate-level philosophical translations on the fly?
Space Opera: (ref: Horse Opera) A subdivision of scifi. Like horse operas of the 50's, which worked cowboy cliches to death, space opera uses scifi cliches as props. The main example, the supreme exemplar of all time: Star Wars. There ain't no science fiction at all in Star Wars. There ain't no SCIENCE in Star Wars. Change the scifi costumes to swords and sorcery garb, and the story doesn't even need to change.
SciFi can be fun, but the sad truth is that in damned near everyone's minds, scifi IS science fiction. Or as some put it, "science fiction fantasy", the ultimate in no-nothing terminology [grind teeth grind teeth]. This isn't about elitism, it's about precision in understanding what one is talking about. Ursula writes good science fiction, and likewise excellent fantasy - but never does she write scifi.
There isn't enough science fiction in movie or TV to fill up even six hours of SciFi programming. No one's made any.