Also being in the UK (I mis-spelt "tyre" for the Americans reading;-) you're right on point 2. The US doesn't much give a shit about fuel consumption (it's cheap) or performance (cars are all calibrated to give little power bcos that's apparently what American drivers like), and they only care about emissions to get through various regulations.
But in Europe we really do care about this stuff. We can't afford to run 15-20mph cars so engines have to be smaller and the vehicle has to be lighter, and we all want cars that go off the line like a rocket so they need to be properly tuned. I drove a 3l injected Ford Taurus one time in the US, which performed significantly worse in nearly every category (including acceleration) than the 1.4l carb Peugeot 309 I drive in the UK - the only improvement was braking due to ABS.
Yeah, Herbert's good. I used to like Heinlein at school, but since I've started re-reading, it all looks a bit too space-opera with added male-fantasy elements (nudity, freely-available sex, freely-available guns and knives).
Donaldson's Gap series is good in parts - trouble is, he really does tend to go on a bit! And the same old phrases crop up throughout which makes it a bit repetitive sometimes. But on a characterisation and plot level the Gap series is outstanding, with a dozen main characters, each with their own agendas and all trying to work out what the others are planning. Pretty awesome, if you've got the stamina to work through it.
Check out Rama for a really clunky read. I know there's some decent Clarke stuff. But to me it all seems too clinical, too much like he'd prefer to be writing a paper on it instead of telling a story.
I see what you mean about FW being the first out - sure, there wasn't anything to judge against. But I'm not sure it stands up too well against later versions of the theme (cf. Lord of the Rings which compares favourable to any other fantasy book).
Nope, he doesn't have the right to do so, and his government has made that clear by passing laws against it. If this news article is correct, he will be arrested and disbarred for conducting illegal experiments on ppl.
Certainly abuse _can_ take place, but it doesn't mean that "the world" will sit idly by. Josef Mengele and others conducted experiments on humans in WW2, and "the world" decided that they should be strung up for it.
What's the legal problem? The original person is one individual, the clone is another separate individual. No matter how strongly you may object to my continued existence, there's nothing you can do about it within the law!;-) Obviously you *could* shoot me, but then you'd be liable for murder as per normal.
However, you may be able to claim for assault against the person who took a sample of your cells to produce the clone.
The main problem is that many clones are deformed or stillborn. In lab animals this is not a problem; there's always another rat/pig/sheep to try. But in humans this is a disaster. It is not considered ethical to kill a baby if it has a severe deformity, so the carrying of clones to term creates the prospect of another thalidomide-type case, with hundreds or thousands of handicapped children produced.
Furthermore, most cloned embryos are miscarried on implantation, so this is a low-percentage gamble at best.
Sure, when it's perfected then it'll be a great technique for childless couples - as you say, just bcos someone's got the same DNA as you, it doesn't mean they'll be anything like you in personality. But until they've got it right, it's just too damn risky.
This excuse for a doctor has gone against all laws to do this. He's just wanting to get something to experiment on and get his name in the papers. The man is another Mengele and should be treated as such.
Thing is, it used to be that everything was in ROM, bcos ROM was the only cost-effective long-term storage mechanism. So your code and calibrations are all stored in one chip - you want to replace the chip, you also have to write your own engine control algorithm. Which is a seriously non-trivial exercise if you want to meet emissions regs and get modern levels of fuel economy.
But manufacturers are now switching to Flash. If there's a bug, you can reflash the controller with a new version of software (see recent reports on bugs in the Ford Focus and Renault Laguna software). Downside is that so can everyone else. So manufacturers have security protocols which prevent anyone who doesn't know the protocol from getting in. This is security-by-obscurity - the protocols are not particularly complicated but would be awkward to reverse-engineer, mainly due to an enforced lag between attempts which would seriously slow down any brute-force hacking (suppose there's 65536 combinations, and the box enforces 10s between attempts, then you're going to be there for over a week trying all combinations!).
However, it's incredibly easy for the auto-maker to prove that the software was modified if the controller survives the impact - simply read out the contents of the calibration and do a diff against the cal for that vehicle. Job done. The auto-maker has taken reasonable care to make it difficult for ppl to get access, if someone goes out of their way to turn their car into a deathtrap then the manufacturers have no liability.
Note that there _is_ some aftermarket tweaking that can be done; some settings are provided for dealers to change useful things like tire size, final drive ratio etc if the car gets components uprated. But even this is protected as well, so you have to take it to a dealer to get it changed. It may be a pain to pay a dealer to do something this trivial, but it stops ppl arbitrarily screwing around with the controller. For example, cars measure speed and distance by counting tire revs and scaling by the tire size, so you could mess it all up by setting that scaling wrong.
Just been bought FW for by birthday. Not bad, some interesting stuff, but it didn't seem like great or anything. Just another Vietnam-era "fighting-a-pointless-war" thing, plus teenage male fantasy stuff with compulsory promiscuity. Interesting ideas in changing society over time, but nothing outstanding ("Brave New World" but gay).
Trouble is, most SF authors are good at coming up with ideas but crap at writing. Witness Clarke, Asimov, Bova, Bear (and Crichton just about makes SF too) - all got great ideas and concepts, but lousy execution.
Off the topic, anyone know anything about Laurence M Janifer? I've got his book "Survivor", and that seems pretty good - pretty well-written, decent characterisation, basically an intelligent SF action book. Anyone know what his other stuff is like? I reckon that kind of thing would translate pretty well to screen.
This was news back in 2000. I guess it's news to ppl who weren't reading tech news back then.
And the TechTV "scoop" is just so much guff. What kind of lousy review doesn't even show pictures of this thing in action? The cynic in me says that they've just copied-and-pasted from a press release...
They're not body parts, because he functions without them in normal life. Many ppl have posted who say they've worked with him, and say that he doesn't actually wear all this kit for much of the time. So if he's already proved he can operate normally without the kit, then his claim that it's "damaging" him to be without it is just bullshit.
They didn't rip electrodes "out", they took off skin-contact electrodes held on by tape. So he's sueing over having some hair pulled off with the tape. Big fucking deal.
Sure, he has a right to get pissed over the airline changing its mind repeatedly over the conditions for allowing him on the plane. Sure, he has a right to be pissed at being strip-searched. Sure, he has a right to be pissed at the airline losing/damaging his equipment. But as for brain-damage or damage to his body - get real.
But Mann's electronics have no medical purpose. Furthermore, many witnesses who've worked with Mann over the last few years say that he doesn't wear his gadgets all the time (even for serious stuff like teaching), so he's perfectly capable of operating normally without them. This is not the case for Hawking.
Definitely. Having used an LCD monitor, I don't ever want to have to switch back to a CRT. Absolutely zero glare, so even if you're working opposite a window you have no problems seeing. And the difference in picture sharpness is not even worth discussing - there is no CRT anywhere with as good sharpness as an LCD.
Assuming you're running at the LCD's proper resolution, of course. There's a guy at work with a 1280x1024 LCD who runs it at 1024x768 and then complains about the picture quality! Well DOH! ever hear of Moire artifacts? apparently not...
Gandalf v. Saruman is the most original magic fight scene I've seen - would you prefer the cliched streams of light and shouting "by the power of Grayskull" or something? then watch D&D. LotR had Gandalf and Saruman using magic basically as a physical weapon to hurt each other (punch/kick/throw kind of effects) - different to what you expect, but there's nothing wrong with that.
LOTR is the first time in ages that I've seen fight scenes where the characters actually seem to be taking punishment - I can't think of a single film since Rocky 2 where the winner of a fight comes away with any damage, but Gandalf and Saruman both take punishment in their fight, and Aragorn comes away from the fight with the orc leader pretty beat up and staggering (obviously Boromir gets killed, but then we knew that was going to happen from the book). It's about being subtle and applying some realism, not about being flashy.
A good special effect should be seamless - the "Trinity freezes in mid-air" kind of shot may look nice but has no place in the film (the bullet-time effects OTOH are plot-related and _do_ belong). If it jumps up and down and screams "I'm an expensive computer-generated effect, look at me!!!!" then all it indicates is that the director is an immature wanker. The best application of SFX I've seen in years is the Star Wars re-edits, with stuff like windows added in the corridors in Bespin to see the world outside - that's so seamless you'd never notice unless you saw the originals, but it adds depth to the shots and makes it a better film.
Mmm. This is the classic method of getting to where you want to be - you start with the basics which will demonstrate some concept, then you put another layer on top of that to demonstrate another concept, and pretty soon you're talking a serious piece of kit.
OK, Brook's robots are only hunting light. But if he plugs in more processing power to give them other inputs to the decision-making process (eg. avoid water, seek other robots) then it starts getting pretty complex behaviour. I mean, the actions of a human when we're dying for a piss are pretty damn predictable! Sure it doesn't scale at 50-odd neurons, but up it to 500-odd neurons and it can start doing some interesting stuff.
Can humans take this into account? Most times a human will just keep doing what they've learned, even when it doesn't work. And we can't always be relied on to take the correct response, in fact when the sh*t hits the fan we're quite capable of making it worse!
The issue is "simply" to expand the domain in which an AI can work to beyond known-I/O systems. When someone comes up with this, it gets more interesting; the *same* controller can fly a 747, run a traffic light system *and* route your PCBs, it just needs to spend some time thinking about the problem to work out the I/O to the decision-making process. Which is exactly what a human does - we work out what we need to keep an eye on when we're doing something (for flying a plane, maybe airspeed, altitude and angle of bank) and work out how to get the system to behave whilst controlling that I/O set. And when something unexpected happens (eg. an engine fails), then the robot needs to work out that suddenly its expected I/O set isn't having the right effect, so it needs to expand its scope to try other things it had previously disregarded or taken as basic assumptions (eg. there are 4 working engines).
And right there you start getting onto some interesting philosophical problems, when the AI is behaving in the same way as a human...
It was actually more complex than that. US Robots used a *robot* to work out how to make humans less opposed to robots. The robot worked out that if you used robo-worms and robo-birds to help maintain the ecological balance, humans would get used to robots and tolerate them. As with you, I can't remember the title!:-)
Thing is, we don't fear them bcos they're locked away. I think if an 8 foot humanoid robot came stomping down the road tomorrow, ppl *would* be scared. And then there's the whole slavery thing which Asimov was into (and which Pratchett also covered in Feet of Clay) - if they're sentient, can we force them to work? And there's a third attitude you've missed which came along in the 1970s and 1980s, which is "f***ing robots stole my job", and Asimov made this one of the underlying causes of the anti-robot movement.
Asimov certainly has covered a lot of this area. The Caliban/Inferno series covered a bit more by hypothesizing robots which *weren't* forced to work but could choose their actions. It's a shame all these books are quite bad fiction - damn good ideas, but bad novels. Ho hum.
Memories of a sci-fi book called "The men from P.I.G. and R.O.B.O.T." which I read many years back. The second half of that (the "ROBOT" bit) covers something similar, with the lawman using swarms of insect-like monitoring probes.
Grab.
Re:How many do you think Two Towers is going to wi
on
LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
·
· Score: 2
Well, it's same as Empire Strikes Back. It just kind of ends, but you know there's another film which'll pick up the story. Nothing wrong with that, and ppl who don't get that are a bit dumb.
Grab.
Re:How many do you think Two Towers is going to wi
on
LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
·
· Score: 2
LotR vs Star Wars: based on current showing, I'd say that's a no-brainer, LotR all the way. Remember that Two Towers is the start of the major battle sequences. Can you think of much more impressive than the siege of Gondor and the Rohirrim riding, especially based on the evidence of the start of Fellowship with the elves and humans fighting Sauron? And the fight choreographer on LotR is so damn good, the Jedi fight scenes in SW just don't look a patch on it.
Eh? Lillienthal was successfully making heavier-than-air gliders to carry a man way back in 1870. He didn't know much about aerodynamics (the word hadn't even been invented then) - one crashed and killed the coachman who was flying it - but they worked OK. And everyone who came afterwards based their work on Lillienthal's experiments in aerodynamics.
Sure, there were plenty of jokers making a mess of things. But on the serious science front, the Wright brothers were just one of many ppl working on serious flying machines. The Wright brothers just happened to get theirs flying first, is all; if theirs had broken a crucial joint just before their first flight then maybe someone else would have the credit. But there's little doubt that without them, someone else would have come up with the goods. This isn't an "Einstein" moment where some genius comes up with a radically new theory, it's just a couple of engineers coming up with a working prototype shortly in front of their peers.
This new stuff though is just demonstrating an already well-known phenomenon. Ion-drive is already being worked on for the next generation NASA rockets. Trouble is, it's nowhere near warp drive.
Considering we know how to teleport stuff in labs, and know how to build warp drives on paper.
When did this happen?
"Teleportation" is currently under test using elementary particles. When it can transport more than an electron, let me know. To my knowledge, no report in any science journal has proposed that it can be used for transporting complete entities (eg. ppl, cargo). If you know otherwise, post a link - I'd be glad to be informed otherwise.
"Warp drives" use some interesting maths theories. No-one yet knows whether these will work in practise or even whether this is correct (remember that "theory" != "it works"). Certainly there's no concensus amongst physicists.
Imagine a planet 1000 times the size of the Earth, that gives it 1000 times the gravitational force too (unless it's significantly lighter than Earth, in which case the aliens are going to have problems getting the heavy metals required for much of this development). Certainly we wouldn't be much equipped to deal with their environment, and they might also have problems dealing with ours.
Evolution only equals "survival of the fittest" so long as only the fittest are allowed to breed. When ppl who are genetically prone to short sight, deafness, asthma and rheumatism survive to have kids, evolution no longer applies. It's funny, it took ages for evolution to become accepted, and now it's taking even longer for ppl to realise that the essential assumption, that the unfit die or are otherwise prevented from breeding, means that evolution is basically dead as far as humans are concerned. So a truly ancient species is more likely to be a race of cyborgs, whose body can't survive without a constant supply of a potent cocktail of drugs and total reliance on a life-support system.
Sure you can defy gravity. You just require energy expenditure. Airplanes defy gravity all the time. Big fat hairy deal. You just need something which produces an equal or greater upwards force than the force of gravity acting downwards.
Thing is though, there's a BIG difference between supplying a second force to counterbalance the force exerted by gravity, and actually reducing or negating the force exerted by gravity. The latter is what is meant by "antigravity", and that really is a big deal.
All the links above simply use a well-understood method of producing a second force, ie. electrostatic. It's not a trick any more than an airplane is a trick, but it's no more antigravity than the airplane.
If you wrote the Perl script on company time and/or on a company computer, then yes. If you wrote it in your own time AND on your own PC, then no. But ONLY if you've got your contract right...
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, my bad! Didn't see that link! :-)
Also being in the UK (I mis-spelt "tyre" for the Americans reading ;-) you're right on point 2. The US doesn't much give a shit about fuel consumption (it's cheap) or performance (cars are all calibrated to give little power bcos that's apparently what American drivers like), and they only care about emissions to get through various regulations.
But in Europe we really do care about this stuff. We can't afford to run 15-20mph cars so engines have to be smaller and the vehicle has to be lighter, and we all want cars that go off the line like a rocket so they need to be properly tuned. I drove a 3l injected Ford Taurus one time in the US, which performed significantly worse in nearly every category (including acceleration) than the 1.4l carb Peugeot 309 I drive in the UK - the only improvement was braking due to ABS.
Grab.
Yeah, Herbert's good. I used to like Heinlein at school, but since I've started re-reading, it all looks a bit too space-opera with added male-fantasy elements (nudity, freely-available sex, freely-available guns and knives).
Donaldson's Gap series is good in parts - trouble is, he really does tend to go on a bit! And the same old phrases crop up throughout which makes it a bit repetitive sometimes. But on a characterisation and plot level the Gap series is outstanding, with a dozen main characters, each with their own agendas and all trying to work out what the others are planning. Pretty awesome, if you've got the stamina to work through it.
Grab.
Check out Rama for a really clunky read. I know there's some decent Clarke stuff. But to me it all seems too clinical, too much like he'd prefer to be writing a paper on it instead of telling a story.
I see what you mean about FW being the first out - sure, there wasn't anything to judge against. But I'm not sure it stands up too well against later versions of the theme (cf. Lord of the Rings which compares favourable to any other fantasy book).
Grab.
Nope, he doesn't have the right to do so, and his government has made that clear by passing laws against it. If this news article is correct, he will be arrested and disbarred for conducting illegal experiments on ppl.
Certainly abuse _can_ take place, but it doesn't mean that "the world" will sit idly by. Josef Mengele and others conducted experiments on humans in WW2, and "the world" decided that they should be strung up for it.
Grab.
What's the legal problem? The original person is one individual, the clone is another separate individual. No matter how strongly you may object to my continued existence, there's nothing you can do about it within the law! ;-) Obviously you *could* shoot me, but then you'd be liable for murder as per normal.
However, you may be able to claim for assault against the person who took a sample of your cells to produce the clone.
Grab.
The main problem is that many clones are deformed or stillborn. In lab animals this is not a problem; there's always another rat/pig/sheep to try. But in humans this is a disaster. It is not considered ethical to kill a baby if it has a severe deformity, so the carrying of clones to term creates the prospect of another thalidomide-type case, with hundreds or thousands of handicapped children produced.
Furthermore, most cloned embryos are miscarried on implantation, so this is a low-percentage gamble at best.
Sure, when it's perfected then it'll be a great technique for childless couples - as you say, just bcos someone's got the same DNA as you, it doesn't mean they'll be anything like you in personality. But until they've got it right, it's just too damn risky.
Grab.
Yes. Human cloning.
This excuse for a doctor has gone against all laws to do this. He's just wanting to get something to experiment on and get his name in the papers. The man is another Mengele and should be treated as such.
Grab.
"Will"? It already does!
Thing is, it used to be that everything was in ROM, bcos ROM was the only cost-effective long-term storage mechanism. So your code and calibrations are all stored in one chip - you want to replace the chip, you also have to write your own engine control algorithm. Which is a seriously non-trivial exercise if you want to meet emissions regs and get modern levels of fuel economy.
But manufacturers are now switching to Flash. If there's a bug, you can reflash the controller with a new version of software (see recent reports on bugs in the Ford Focus and Renault Laguna software). Downside is that so can everyone else. So manufacturers have security protocols which prevent anyone who doesn't know the protocol from getting in. This is security-by-obscurity - the protocols are not particularly complicated but would be awkward to reverse-engineer, mainly due to an enforced lag between attempts which would seriously slow down any brute-force hacking (suppose there's 65536 combinations, and the box enforces 10s between attempts, then you're going to be there for over a week trying all combinations!).
However, it's incredibly easy for the auto-maker to prove that the software was modified if the controller survives the impact - simply read out the contents of the calibration and do a diff against the cal for that vehicle. Job done. The auto-maker has taken reasonable care to make it difficult for ppl to get access, if someone goes out of their way to turn their car into a deathtrap then the manufacturers have no liability.
Note that there _is_ some aftermarket tweaking that can be done; some settings are provided for dealers to change useful things like tire size, final drive ratio etc if the car gets components uprated. But even this is protected as well, so you have to take it to a dealer to get it changed. It may be a pain to pay a dealer to do something this trivial, but it stops ppl arbitrarily screwing around with the controller. For example, cars measure speed and distance by counting tire revs and scaling by the tire size, so you could mess it all up by setting that scaling wrong.
Grab.
Just been bought FW for by birthday. Not bad, some interesting stuff, but it didn't seem like great or anything. Just another Vietnam-era "fighting-a-pointless-war" thing, plus teenage male fantasy stuff with compulsory promiscuity. Interesting ideas in changing society over time, but nothing outstanding ("Brave New World" but gay).
Trouble is, most SF authors are good at coming up with ideas but crap at writing. Witness Clarke, Asimov, Bova, Bear (and Crichton just about makes SF too) - all got great ideas and concepts, but lousy execution.
Off the topic, anyone know anything about Laurence M Janifer? I've got his book "Survivor", and that seems pretty good - pretty well-written, decent characterisation, basically an intelligent SF action book. Anyone know what his other stuff is like? I reckon that kind of thing would translate pretty well to screen.
Grab.
This was news back in 2000. I guess it's news to ppl who weren't reading tech news back then.
And the TechTV "scoop" is just so much guff. What kind of lousy review doesn't even show pictures of this thing in action? The cynic in me says that they've just copied-and-pasted from a press release...
Grab.
They're not body parts, because he functions without them in normal life. Many ppl have posted who say they've worked with him, and say that he doesn't actually wear all this kit for much of the time. So if he's already proved he can operate normally without the kit, then his claim that it's "damaging" him to be without it is just bullshit.
They didn't rip electrodes "out", they took off skin-contact electrodes held on by tape. So he's sueing over having some hair pulled off with the tape. Big fucking deal.
Sure, he has a right to get pissed over the airline changing its mind repeatedly over the conditions for allowing him on the plane. Sure, he has a right to be pissed at being strip-searched. Sure, he has a right to be pissed at the airline losing/damaging his equipment. But as for brain-damage or damage to his body - get real.
Grab.
But Mann's electronics have no medical purpose. Furthermore, many witnesses who've worked with Mann over the last few years say that he doesn't wear his gadgets all the time (even for serious stuff like teaching), so he's perfectly capable of operating normally without them. This is not the case for Hawking.
Grab.
Definitely. Having used an LCD monitor, I don't ever want to have to switch back to a CRT. Absolutely zero glare, so even if you're working opposite a window you have no problems seeing. And the difference in picture sharpness is not even worth discussing - there is no CRT anywhere with as good sharpness as an LCD.
Assuming you're running at the LCD's proper resolution, of course. There's a guy at work with a 1280x1024 LCD who runs it at 1024x768 and then complains about the picture quality! Well DOH! ever hear of Moire artifacts? apparently not...
Grab.
Gandalf v. Saruman is the most original magic fight scene I've seen - would you prefer the cliched streams of light and shouting "by the power of Grayskull" or something? then watch D&D. LotR had Gandalf and Saruman using magic basically as a physical weapon to hurt each other (punch/kick/throw kind of effects) - different to what you expect, but there's nothing wrong with that.
LOTR is the first time in ages that I've seen fight scenes where the characters actually seem to be taking punishment - I can't think of a single film since Rocky 2 where the winner of a fight comes away with any damage, but Gandalf and Saruman both take punishment in their fight, and Aragorn comes away from the fight with the orc leader pretty beat up and staggering (obviously Boromir gets killed, but then we knew that was going to happen from the book). It's about being subtle and applying some realism, not about being flashy.
A good special effect should be seamless - the "Trinity freezes in mid-air" kind of shot may look nice but has no place in the film (the bullet-time effects OTOH are plot-related and _do_ belong). If it jumps up and down and screams "I'm an expensive computer-generated effect, look at me!!!!" then all it indicates is that the director is an immature wanker. The best application of SFX I've seen in years is the Star Wars re-edits, with stuff like windows added in the corridors in Bespin to see the world outside - that's so seamless you'd never notice unless you saw the originals, but it adds depth to the shots and makes it a better film.
Grab.
Mmm. This is the classic method of getting to where you want to be - you start with the basics which will demonstrate some concept, then you put another layer on top of that to demonstrate another concept, and pretty soon you're talking a serious piece of kit.
OK, Brook's robots are only hunting light. But if he plugs in more processing power to give them other inputs to the decision-making process (eg. avoid water, seek other robots) then it starts getting pretty complex behaviour. I mean, the actions of a human when we're dying for a piss are pretty damn predictable! Sure it doesn't scale at 50-odd neurons, but up it to 500-odd neurons and it can start doing some interesting stuff.
Grab.
Can humans take this into account? Most times a human will just keep doing what they've learned, even when it doesn't work. And we can't always be relied on to take the correct response, in fact when the sh*t hits the fan we're quite capable of making it worse!
The issue is "simply" to expand the domain in which an AI can work to beyond known-I/O systems. When someone comes up with this, it gets more interesting; the *same* controller can fly a 747, run a traffic light system *and* route your PCBs, it just needs to spend some time thinking about the problem to work out the I/O to the decision-making process. Which is exactly what a human does - we work out what we need to keep an eye on when we're doing something (for flying a plane, maybe airspeed, altitude and angle of bank) and work out how to get the system to behave whilst controlling that I/O set. And when something unexpected happens (eg. an engine fails), then the robot needs to work out that suddenly its expected I/O set isn't having the right effect, so it needs to expand its scope to try other things it had previously disregarded or taken as basic assumptions (eg. there are 4 working engines).
And right there you start getting onto some interesting philosophical problems, when the AI is behaving in the same way as a human...
Grab.
It was actually more complex than that. US Robots used a *robot* to work out how to make humans less opposed to robots. The robot worked out that if you used robo-worms and robo-birds to help maintain the ecological balance, humans would get used to robots and tolerate them. As with you, I can't remember the title! :-)
Thing is, we don't fear them bcos they're locked away. I think if an 8 foot humanoid robot came stomping down the road tomorrow, ppl *would* be scared. And then there's the whole slavery thing which Asimov was into (and which Pratchett also covered in Feet of Clay) - if they're sentient, can we force them to work? And there's a third attitude you've missed which came along in the 1970s and 1980s, which is "f***ing robots stole my job", and Asimov made this one of the underlying causes of the anti-robot movement.
Asimov certainly has covered a lot of this area. The Caliban/Inferno series covered a bit more by hypothesizing robots which *weren't* forced to work but could choose their actions. It's a shame all these books are quite bad fiction - damn good ideas, but bad novels. Ho hum.
Grab.
Memories of a sci-fi book called "The men from P.I.G. and R.O.B.O.T." which I read many years back. The second half of that (the "ROBOT" bit) covers something similar, with the lawman using swarms of insect-like monitoring probes.
Grab.
Well, it's same as Empire Strikes Back. It just kind of ends, but you know there's another film which'll pick up the story. Nothing wrong with that, and ppl who don't get that are a bit dumb.
Grab.
LotR vs Star Wars: based on current showing, I'd say that's a no-brainer, LotR all the way. Remember that Two Towers is the start of the major battle sequences. Can you think of much more impressive than the siege of Gondor and the Rohirrim riding, especially based on the evidence of the start of Fellowship with the elves and humans fighting Sauron? And the fight choreographer on LotR is so damn good, the Jedi fight scenes in SW just don't look a patch on it.
Grab.
Eh? Lillienthal was successfully making heavier-than-air gliders to carry a man way back in 1870. He didn't know much about aerodynamics (the word hadn't even been invented then) - one crashed and killed the coachman who was flying it - but they worked OK. And everyone who came afterwards based their work on Lillienthal's experiments in aerodynamics.
Sure, there were plenty of jokers making a mess of things. But on the serious science front, the Wright brothers were just one of many ppl working on serious flying machines. The Wright brothers just happened to get theirs flying first, is all; if theirs had broken a crucial joint just before their first flight then maybe someone else would have the credit. But there's little doubt that without them, someone else would have come up with the goods. This isn't an "Einstein" moment where some genius comes up with a radically new theory, it's just a couple of engineers coming up with a working prototype shortly in front of their peers.
This new stuff though is just demonstrating an already well-known phenomenon. Ion-drive is already being worked on for the next generation NASA rockets. Trouble is, it's nowhere near warp drive.
Grab.
Considering we know how to teleport stuff in labs, and know how to build warp drives on paper.
When did this happen?
"Teleportation" is currently under test using elementary particles. When it can transport more than an electron, let me know. To my knowledge, no report in any science journal has proposed that it can be used for transporting complete entities (eg. ppl, cargo). If you know otherwise, post a link - I'd be glad to be informed otherwise.
"Warp drives" use some interesting maths theories. No-one yet knows whether these will work in practise or even whether this is correct (remember that "theory" != "it works"). Certainly there's no concensus amongst physicists.
Imagine a planet 1000 times the size of the Earth, that gives it 1000 times the gravitational force too (unless it's significantly lighter than Earth, in which case the aliens are going to have problems getting the heavy metals required for much of this development). Certainly we wouldn't be much equipped to deal with their environment, and they might also have problems dealing with ours.
Evolution only equals "survival of the fittest" so long as only the fittest are allowed to breed. When ppl who are genetically prone to short sight, deafness, asthma and rheumatism survive to have kids, evolution no longer applies. It's funny, it took ages for evolution to become accepted, and now it's taking even longer for ppl to realise that the essential assumption, that the unfit die or are otherwise prevented from breeding, means that evolution is basically dead as far as humans are concerned. So a truly ancient species is more likely to be a race of cyborgs, whose body can't survive without a constant supply of a potent cocktail of drugs and total reliance on a life-support system.
Grab.
Sure you can defy gravity. You just require energy expenditure. Airplanes defy gravity all the time. Big fat hairy deal. You just need something which produces an equal or greater upwards force than the force of gravity acting downwards.
Thing is though, there's a BIG difference between supplying a second force to counterbalance the force exerted by gravity, and actually reducing or negating the force exerted by gravity. The latter is what is meant by "antigravity", and that really is a big deal.
All the links above simply use a well-understood method of producing a second force, ie. electrostatic. It's not a trick any more than an airplane is a trick, but it's no more antigravity than the airplane.
Grab.
If you wrote the Perl script on company time and/or on a company computer, then yes. If you wrote it in your own time AND on your own PC, then no. But ONLY if you've got your contract right...
Grab.