Sounds like all the Thinkpads and most of the Apple lappies I've had over the years. The stickers are a bit different...mostly either political, Anime/Manga or F/OSS related. But yeah, not a business look, more "geek in the house" look. My new Lenovo Ideapad is still virgin...for now. But it will look like "Ms. Geek's current lappie" soon enough. X60T was a really nice machine.
Must not forget, then, "Stand On Zanzibar" which posits what life would be like on a crowded, '60s-inflected world in 2010. Brunner did get one thing right: a worldwide, 24/7 news network called Engrelay Satelserv, English-language Relay Satellite Service. Say it with me in your best imitation of James Earl Jones: THIS IS CNN. From the perspective of two years after 2010 it reads more like a dip into an alternate Earth which zagged where ours zigged sometime in the '70s. Brunner was a genius.
James Hong is also still around. And I met both Hong and Joseph Turkel at San Diego Comic-Con in 2007. Hong was getting a lot of love not just for Dr. Chew, but also for that immortal dude he played in "Big Trouble In Little China." But Turkel was barely visited, so we got to talk. Politics, Blade Runner, Old Hollywood, and other cool subjects. He signed an 8 x 10. I paid for it, because he was donating his share of the money to Doctors Without Borders, a truly deserving cause. He asked me "OK, what Tyrell quote do you want on it?" Since it was a picture of Tyrell with Batty before Batty sent Tyrell to his deserved demise, and since it was one of the best lines in the movie, I had him write "Revel in your time!" He appreciated the choice too. "Yeah, you never quite have enough time to do everything you want to do. We really are all replicants...not willing to accept just the years we have." It was poignant, because even though he seemed really vital and mentally active, Turkel was getting on in years.
I really am not happy with this. Although having Ridley Scott on board gives me wan hope this isn't going to totally suck, the prospect of a huge tentpole movie with a CGI retrofitted Los Angeles and everything in 3 FRIGGIN D just hurts when I think of it. I would prefer to see them completely strip it down, make it an almost indie movie which puts the action in the Los Angeles that exists RIGHT NOW, because there have been enough things added to the Downtown LA skyline that look like Blade Runner since the movie came out, and more is coming. If you don't believe me, google LA Live and The Library Tower. The Wilshire Grand Hotel is going to be torn down and replaced with a skyscraper that will have video walls.
Blade Runner was too special to remake. I hope this doesn't happen, like Keanu Reeves as Spike Spiegel in a live-action Cowboy Bebop won't happen, or Leonardo diCaprio in a white-washed version of Akira. But if it does, Ridley Scott will probably not allow the quality level to go too far down.
And this particular political party also has a vested interest in denying anthropogenic climate disruption. So they defund weather satellites. How utterly convenient!
BTW, this comment: for example, if there were a heavily Democrat-leaning city on a gulf coast protected only by an out-of-date levee should be fixed thusly: for example, if there were a heavily Democratic Party-leaning city on a gulf coast protected only by an out-of-date levee
The same political party in question likes to call their opposite number the DemocRAT party. They spit it out like weeks-old leftovers. They want people to associate the Democratic Party of the United States of America with Rattus rattus norvegicus. Sort of like how Radio Rwanda associated the Tutsi tribe with cockroaches.
1.) The ESPER scene in Blade Runner was epic. Remember, this was back in the day when the hot setup was a 5-slot IBM PC running DOS. GUI? WTF is that? Voice recognition? Ummm...did not exist. 2.) Having the ESPER spit out an SX-70 picture at the end of the sequence is just the piece de resistance. 3.) Come on! It was freakin' BLADE RUNNER.
Good real life computing movie: (with a little dramatic license) Pirates of Silicon Valley. One that is absolutely begging to be made: Pirates of Silicon Valley II: Just For Fun. Wherein a college kid from Finland drives both Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer nuts, Bill Gates falls for one of his project managers, and a gumdrop shaped, Bondi blue little all-in-one computer saves Apple.
Actually that would be quite cool...Sam Flynn takes over Encom, and he eventually thinks his crap don't stink. And furthermore he has millions of fanboys exquisitely sensitive to his Reality Distortion Field.
The Tron sequel idea I had would have had Kevin Flynn basically becoming a Bill Gates-esque zillionaire with a Jobsian fanboy following. He eventually rewrites and unleashes the MCP on the Internet cloud because he craves complete ownage. However, there is a young Eastern European hacker kid who steps up and saves the Cloud...and the world. Yeah, the young hacker would be kinda sorta based on Linus Torvalds.
However, that story was better and less hokily done as Summer Wars. When Funimation unleashes that in theatres...GO. Actually, come to think of it, Summer Wars was what Tron: Legacy should have been. And Oz is so much more visually interesting than The Grid 2.0.
Every computer outside the Grid was running Mac OS X. Didn't you recognize the Darwin command line? No big thing: Steve Jobs is the biggest shareholder in Disney now so he gets mad props. That's the way that goes.
Actually having to go into Flynn's Arcade on the way to Flynn's secret office is one of my favorite scenes in the movie. I gather that you were in diapers in 1982. I was 18. Tron was big stuff for geeks of my generation.
Oh yeah, you didn't notice the most telling nostalgia object in young Sam Flynn's room? Mac Classic. Pristine.
There is already a gaming system in place that is ideal for a Firefly game, and it's not the same one the "official" Firefly/Serenity game used. It's called "Traveller." And it's in the process of being reborn.
The Japanese have been developing this for decades. They knew a demographic bomb was going to go off, and they knew that nurses were going to need some help in dealing with the elderly. So there are now production power suits geared towards assisting nurses in lifting patients.
Also there is a very strong possibility this technology can be applied to assistive systems for paraplegics and quadriplegics. Imagine someone who was "sentenced to the Chair" for the rest of their lives being able to walk again. I mean, neither application is particularly sexy, not like super-soldiers and being able to do the last battle in Aliens for real, but I would say that this would be a boon for humanity far greater than any military application.
Then again sometimes "good enough" is: I am typing this to you on an Acer netbook. It cost me $200. It is better than a micro-lappie from 2000 which I also have as part of my collection: a ThinkPad 240. It was the netbook of its day and cost...$3,000 US in 2000 dollars.
Late '90s? Feh, SNL started sucking after Eddie Murphy outgrew it. And even at that point, it had seen better days. Really, the best years of SNL were the first 3 or 4.
God no, the cheesiest of the MGM sci-fi movies of the 1970s. I think the only reason why people remember it fondly is the fap factor. Jenny Agutter and Farrah Fawcett. In shiny toga-like Dacron mini-dresses.
However, as others have pointed out downthread, the book was actually way better than the movie and the even cheesier 1-season-wonder TV series told it. Maybe now it will be finally done justice, like Ridley Scott will probably do with Brave New World.
Here's how you fix it: 1.) You re-tool Medicare to widen its coverage, in preparation for what will actually save it: 2.) You open Medicare to everyone. Until 65, Medicare is a buy-in system. You will actually have to pay for it. Just like you pay for an insurance policy. Actuarially-sound price scales are created, with sliding scales derived from them for income sensitive pricing. Basically Medicare becomes an option on the "Exchanges" that will be up and running beginning in 2014.
And how will this fix Medicare? 1.) A flood of young, healthy people ditch their private insurance for this "public option" that provides better value for the money. Medicare has a 5% overhead rate. The private insurers take something like 30 cents out of every dollar paid in premiums for overhead and promotional costs. 2.) This pool of new, young blood in the Medicare program spreads the risk and re-balances the pool of insured. 3.) This will not harm private insurers one bit: instead of trying to sell people insurance policies they sell people "MediGap" policies that cover the things Medicare won't. Like gynecological and obstetric care, for instance...you can bet this new expanded Medicare will not touch women's health issues...third rail time.
There, fixed it for you.
I'll throw in a bonus: I'll fix Social Security too. Did you know there is a ceiling on income taken by FICA? After a certain point, your income is not subject to FICA taxation. You know how to fix Social Security and not have to worry about it for another century? You remove the ceiling and subject all earnings to FICA taxation. Bada bing bada bang Social Security is solvent. You take that money and put it in that lock box Al Gore was going on about in 2000, so that Republican raiders can't get their grubbies on it. Fixed that for you too.
Of course. Of freaking course. Just get rid of OTA broadcast completely, and force people to pony up for satellite, cable, or TV over IP Fiber. (FiOS or U-Verse)
Thanks to multipath interference, I am one of that 12% who get less channels with OTA Digital. KTLA (CW) running "This" network on its sideband channel and KCET (PBS) with its three sideband channels does not make up for losing KTTV (Faux) and KCOP (Also owned by Faux but run as a My-TV affil) for good; and occasionally losing KABC (ABC/Disney) and KCAL (Indie owned by CBS) when the stars are aligned wrong.
Europe has a much more robust OTA Digital system than ATSC...seriously, man, we fail again.
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Sounds like all the Thinkpads and most of the Apple lappies I've had over the years. The stickers are a bit different...mostly either political, Anime/Manga or F/OSS related. But yeah, not a business look, more "geek in the house" look. My new Lenovo Ideapad is still virgin...for now. But it will look like "Ms. Geek's current lappie" soon enough. X60T was a really nice machine.
And now Meg Whitman is finishing the job.
They also collect uber-fail CEOs.
Must not forget, then, "Stand On Zanzibar" which posits what life would be like on a crowded, '60s-inflected world in 2010. Brunner did get one thing right: a worldwide, 24/7 news network called Engrelay Satelserv, English-language Relay Satellite Service. Say it with me in your best imitation of James Earl Jones: THIS IS CNN. From the perspective of two years after 2010 it reads more like a dip into an alternate Earth which zagged where ours zigged sometime in the '70s. Brunner was a genius.
James Hong is also still around. And I met both Hong and Joseph Turkel at San Diego Comic-Con in 2007. Hong was getting a lot of love not just for Dr. Chew, but also for that immortal dude he played in "Big Trouble In Little China." But Turkel was barely visited, so we got to talk. Politics, Blade Runner, Old Hollywood, and other cool subjects. He signed an 8 x 10. I paid for it, because he was donating his share of the money to Doctors Without Borders, a truly deserving cause. He asked me "OK, what Tyrell quote do you want on it?" Since it was a picture of Tyrell with Batty before Batty sent Tyrell to his deserved demise, and since it was one of the best lines in the movie, I had him write "Revel in your time!" He appreciated the choice too. "Yeah, you never quite have enough time to do everything you want to do. We really are all replicants...not willing to accept just the years we have." It was poignant, because even though he seemed really vital and mentally active, Turkel was getting on in years.
I really am not happy with this. Although having Ridley Scott on board gives me wan hope this isn't going to totally suck, the prospect of a huge tentpole movie with a CGI retrofitted Los Angeles and everything in 3 FRIGGIN D just hurts when I think of it. I would prefer to see them completely strip it down, make it an almost indie movie which puts the action in the Los Angeles that exists RIGHT NOW, because there have been enough things added to the Downtown LA skyline that look like Blade Runner since the movie came out, and more is coming. If you don't believe me, google LA Live and The Library Tower. The Wilshire Grand Hotel is going to be torn down and replaced with a skyscraper that will have video walls.
Blade Runner was too special to remake. I hope this doesn't happen, like Keanu Reeves as Spike Spiegel in a live-action Cowboy Bebop won't happen, or Leonardo diCaprio in a white-washed version of Akira. But if it does, Ridley Scott will probably not allow the quality level to go too far down.
And this particular political party also has a vested interest in denying anthropogenic climate disruption. So they defund weather satellites. How utterly convenient!
BTW, this comment:
for example, if there were a heavily Democrat-leaning city on a gulf coast protected only by an out-of-date levee
should be fixed thusly:
for example, if there were a heavily Democratic Party-leaning city on a gulf coast protected only by an out-of-date levee
The same political party in question likes to call their opposite number the DemocRAT party. They spit it out like weeks-old leftovers. They want people to associate the Democratic Party of the United States of America with Rattus rattus norvegicus. Sort of like how Radio Rwanda associated the Tutsi tribe with cockroaches.
Or 4Chan.xxx . Or nsfw.xxx . The possibilities are nearly endless!
Definite win. I wouldn't visit it, but man, that's awesome.
1.) The ESPER scene in Blade Runner was epic. Remember, this was back in the day when the hot setup was a 5-slot IBM PC running DOS. GUI? WTF is that? Voice recognition? Ummm...did not exist.
2.) Having the ESPER spit out an SX-70 picture at the end of the sequence is just the piece de resistance.
3.) Come on! It was freakin' BLADE RUNNER.
Yup! Fresh out of EdNet! :P
Good real life computing movie: (with a little dramatic license) Pirates of Silicon Valley.
One that is absolutely begging to be made: Pirates of Silicon Valley II: Just For Fun. Wherein a college kid from Finland drives both Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer nuts, Bill Gates falls for one of his project managers, and a gumdrop shaped, Bondi blue little all-in-one computer saves Apple.
Best. Hacker. In media. Evar.
Edward Wong Howe Pepalu Tivruski The Fourth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKVor_sX2cg
Actually that would be quite cool...Sam Flynn takes over Encom, and he eventually thinks his crap don't stink. And furthermore he has millions of fanboys exquisitely sensitive to his Reality Distortion Field.
The Tron sequel idea I had would have had Kevin Flynn basically becoming a Bill Gates-esque zillionaire with a Jobsian fanboy following. He eventually rewrites and unleashes the MCP on the Internet cloud because he craves complete ownage. However, there is a young Eastern European hacker kid who steps up and saves the Cloud...and the world. Yeah, the young hacker would be kinda sorta based on Linus Torvalds.
However, that story was better and less hokily done as Summer Wars. When Funimation unleashes that in theatres...GO. Actually, come to think of it, Summer Wars was what Tron: Legacy should have been. And Oz is so much more visually interesting than The Grid 2.0.
Every computer outside the Grid was running Mac OS X. Didn't you recognize the Darwin command line? No big thing: Steve Jobs is the biggest shareholder in Disney now so he gets mad props. That's the way that goes.
Actually having to go into Flynn's Arcade on the way to Flynn's secret office is one of my favorite scenes in the movie. I gather that you were in diapers in 1982. I was 18. Tron was big stuff for geeks of my generation.
Oh yeah, you didn't notice the most telling nostalgia object in young Sam Flynn's room? Mac Classic. Pristine.
Get off my frakkin lawn, youngling.
There is already a gaming system in place that is ideal for a Firefly game, and it's not the same one the "official" Firefly/Serenity game used. It's called "Traveller." And it's in the process of being reborn.
The Japanese have been developing this for decades. They knew a demographic bomb was going to go off, and they knew that nurses were going to need some help in dealing with the elderly. So there are now production power suits geared towards assisting nurses in lifting patients.
Also there is a very strong possibility this technology can be applied to assistive systems for paraplegics and quadriplegics. Imagine someone who was "sentenced to the Chair" for the rest of their lives being able to walk again. I mean, neither application is particularly sexy, not like super-soldiers and being able to do the last battle in Aliens for real, but I would say that this would be a boon for humanity far greater than any military application.
[aol] Me too! [/aol]
Here.
Mod up insightful.
Then again sometimes "good enough" is: I am typing this to you on an Acer netbook. It cost me $200. It is better than a micro-lappie from 2000 which I also have as part of my collection: a ThinkPad 240. It was the netbook of its day and cost...$3,000 US in 2000 dollars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Thinkpad_240
Late '90s? Feh, SNL started sucking after Eddie Murphy outgrew it. And even at that point, it had seen better days. Really, the best years of SNL were the first 3 or 4.
And yeah, get the F off my lawn, whippersnappers.
God no, the cheesiest of the MGM sci-fi movies of the 1970s. I think the only reason why people remember it fondly is the fap factor. Jenny Agutter and Farrah Fawcett. In shiny toga-like Dacron mini-dresses.
However, as others have pointed out downthread, the book was actually way better than the movie and the even cheesier 1-season-wonder TV series told it. Maybe now it will be finally done justice, like Ridley Scott will probably do with Brave New World.
Here's how you fix it:
1.) You re-tool Medicare to widen its coverage, in preparation for what will actually save it:
2.) You open Medicare to everyone. Until 65, Medicare is a buy-in system. You will actually have to pay for it. Just like you pay for an insurance policy. Actuarially-sound price scales are created, with sliding scales derived from them for income sensitive pricing. Basically Medicare becomes an option on the "Exchanges" that will be up and running beginning in 2014.
And how will this fix Medicare?
1.) A flood of young, healthy people ditch their private insurance for this "public option" that provides better value for the money. Medicare has a 5% overhead rate. The private insurers take something like 30 cents out of every dollar paid in premiums for overhead and promotional costs.
2.) This pool of new, young blood in the Medicare program spreads the risk and re-balances the pool of insured.
3.) This will not harm private insurers one bit: instead of trying to sell people insurance policies they sell people "MediGap" policies that cover the things Medicare won't. Like gynecological and obstetric care, for instance...you can bet this new expanded Medicare will not touch women's health issues...third rail time.
There, fixed it for you.
I'll throw in a bonus: I'll fix Social Security too. Did you know there is a ceiling on income taken by FICA? After a certain point, your income is not subject to FICA taxation. You know how to fix Social Security and not have to worry about it for another century? You remove the ceiling and subject all earnings to FICA taxation. Bada bing bada bang Social Security is solvent. You take that money and put it in that lock box Al Gore was going on about in 2000, so that Republican raiders can't get their grubbies on it. Fixed that for you too.
Of course. Of freaking course. Just get rid of OTA broadcast completely, and force people to pony up for satellite, cable, or TV over IP Fiber. (FiOS or U-Verse)
I knew that was coming, dammit.
Thanks to multipath interference, I am one of that 12% who get less channels with OTA Digital. KTLA (CW) running "This" network on its sideband channel and KCET (PBS) with its three sideband channels does not make up for losing KTTV (Faux) and KCOP (Also owned by Faux but run as a My-TV affil) for good; and occasionally losing KABC (ABC/Disney) and KCAL (Indie owned by CBS) when the stars are aligned wrong.
Europe has a much more robust OTA Digital system than ATSC...seriously, man, we fail again.
I think they already have that, it's called moe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_(slang)