Point remains: if it did come from Mars, you'd have to figure out how it got there, too. Occam's Razor. If it become clear that life couldn't have started on Earth, then it's time to look into the extraterrestrial origin theory.
I don't remember a "fourth" law, but I do remember the nonsense about the "zeroeth" law in Robots and Empire. Asimov should have left that series alone after Robots of Dawn.
Until very recently.......The only viable Business OS on the PC was Microsoft Windows
You don't remember the CP/M years, I gather?:-) Actually, there was a lot of resistance to the DOS -> Windows upgrade when it happened, too. I still have users who want to use DOS applications in XP when there are perfectly good Windows (and Linux, and BSD, and OS X) equivalents, despite the erraticness of running them under Windows, despite the fact that one is even interfering with their Windows apps, because that's what they're comfortable with.
Why isn't parent a 5 yet? This is the only possible explanation for those god-awful ads, the elimination of everything space in favor of mumbo-jumbo, etc.: Sci Fi wants the crystal power crowd. Probably the current management are crystal power types.
Yes, but what he was talking about was recurssion with the B-arc on a segment of the Golgafrichan population. Besides, they landed on prehistoric earth.
He was merely saying that NASA should send the US 1/3 middle class away. It really has nothing to do with Adams, but read the parent-parent-parent when he originally brought up the B-arc. Is it B Arc or B-Arc? I am drawing a blank.
So we'd merely be the pentultimately useless 2/9 of the Golgrafrinchan population, then. Still doesn't say much for us.
Three Gorges Damn - before they close it up. Until then, it will be one of the most beautiful places in the world.
Trans-Siberian railroad. Just because.
Lewis and Clark Bridge, St. Charles, MO / Alton, IL.
See the Nova special, Superbridge, first. And close to the Gateway Arch, too.
WTC site. Damn, that thing took hits from two jetliners and it stayed up long enough to get most (not all, alas) of the people out?
Sears Tower, Chicago.
Assembly building at KSC.
The list goes on and on.
The Euhermizing (rationalizing) interpretation of the Trojan horse as a siege engine is an oldie but goody in Homeric scholarship. The "consistent detail" is mostly stuff that was inspired by Homer (e.g., the account in the Aeneid) or by the cyclic poets who imitated Homer (as he used the oral traditions he found), and so isn't exactly independent evidence; even the pottery with visual depictions of the Trojan horse seem to be illustrations of the epic cycle. It seems plausible to me; specifically, I wonder if images depicting the siege engines were misunderstood by the epic tradition before Homer as depicting a giant horse, so that by the time Homer got the story (which he only recounts in passing in the Odyssey; the Iliad ends some time before the fall of Troy, the Odyssey starts 10 years after, but includes Odysseus' tale which goes back to the weeks after the fall and also Menelaus' account of the night in the Horse; the full-on story was in the other cyclic poems, which even ancient critics didn't think were Homer's work, and in the much later Post-Homericum that was derived from the cycle).
Anyway, the alphabetic script was adopted in Greece around the same time as Homer (there's even a book suggesting, with a high degree of scholarly credibility but little agreement from scholars, that the Greek alphabet was adopted for the purpose of recording Homer from the recitations of Homer himself or the Homeridae, the guild of singers who formed to preserve the Homeric stories "Homer and the Invention of the Greek Alphabet"), at the end of the so called "dark age," and so there's no reason to believe that Homer or his predecessors would have been able to "read" any genuine accounts of the real war (yes, around the time you suggested) when Homer lived vaguely around 700 bc.
Yet the lotos-eaters did not determine upon destruction for my companions, but to them gave lotos to eat.
(The Greek is represented using betacode, a long-standing way of doing Greek in ASCII).
lwtoi=o is the Homeric genitive of lw/tos, as per Richard John Cunliffe, p. 253 of A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect. Outside ascii, lw/tos is spelled lambda,omega,tau,omicron,sigma, or as transliterated, 'lotos'. This is also how e.g. Tennyson spelled in (in his poem, "The Lotos - Eaters", the title of which translates the word Lwtofa/goi (Lotophagoi) in the first line I cited from the Odyssey). "Lotus" is the Latinized spelling, and so is not incorrect, but is less correct than "lotos". If you want to be pedantic.
Not that this matters, but hey, I couldn't let that one rest, man. I'll take the karma hit.
To get back on topic, the earliest genuine science fiction is Lucian (Greek, about 2nd c. ad, to Homer's 8th c. bc.). And of course there's that Kepler story about going to the moon the earliest "modern" SF story (though hardly SF by our standards).
For recent science fiction, though, you can't beat Dune, you're right.
So let me get this straight- we have a record # of homeless people in the US, food pantries are empty, massive budget cuts for the poor(social services, medicare, etc.)......but a bunch of people donated $200,000 to go towards paying to make A TV EPISODE, for a FOR PROFIT cable network?
I take it you've never bought a video tape, b ut only give away all your disposable cash to charity?
For the record - I donate $20/paycheck directly to United Way, plus hundreds more throughout the year; I also spent a hundred or two on Farscape this year. Maybe I'll donate an additional $20 to say "screw you" to SciFi.
You're kidding, right? You thought that misbegotten piece of 4-hour long crap was Dune? I feel sorry for you, I really do.
For the record, SciFi has been pouring plenty of money into stuff like Taken (which I will not watch; Spielberg's CE3K crossed with X-Files but without the big-budget mothership or John Williams' score? Why bother?) and "rescuing" old shows like Stargate. It's clear that they are more interested in wooing the crystal-power crowd (John Edwards, that's SciFi?) with Egyptian-gods-as-aliens (I b et that's how they sold Stargate to the network) than in anything having more than a remote connection to space.
I won't watch them anymore; I may actually wait until season 4 of Farscape comes out on DVD rather than give SciFi the ratings.
I'm not saying I want them to be guilty, just guessing at the outcome.
I A N A L, all the below is uninformed opinion.
The initially trial isn't what's interesting in a case like this, as odds are everyone will agree that Elcomsoft is guilty under the law as written. What is interesting is the appellate process: is the law as written valid law under constitutional tests? And to test that, you've got to have a guilty verdict first: in the US, only appellate courts can rule on the constitutionality of a law, and noone can bring a court case unless they are an interested party - which in this case means Elcomsoft needs a guilty verdict before they have standing for a case at the appellate level.
Clarke described, in a scientific paper to an audience in the broadcast engineering industry, the use of satellites in geosynchronous orbit to relay communications signals beyond line-of-sight. The idea he described worked fine with existing technology - once it was in place. It was only dependent upon launch capabilities (which took a little more time to be invented). All the other technologies were pre-existing (transceivers, antennae, etc.).
Key thing to that story, though, is that the survival of a genuinely good person, better than most of us could hope to be, ends up allowing absolute evil to be victorious. Ethics after Oppenheimer.
In one sense, Greek epic literature is sci-fi (The Illiad; The Odyssey).
Good posting, except for mis-spelling the name of the Iliad. Does your classification of the Odyssey as SF change if you consider the possibility that Homer intended his readers to question the story Odysseus told to the Phaeacians (the whole bit about the Lotos eaters, the Cyclopes, etc.)?
Yes, Dune, though the series gradually loses steam (today I wouldn't bother reading anything after Children of Dune, and would recommend only the original to someone who isn't a SF fan).
But as for Dune itself, it's head and shoulders above most other SF books. Only Man in the High Tower, Fiasco, and a few other books approach it.
Re: Tarkovsky's Solaris vs. Soderberg's Solaris
on
Review: Solaris
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· Score: 2
Then, in 1972 (especially for a Russian viewer), this probably could express dehumanization and solitude of the technological world. It's kind of ironic that seeing a car driving through an endless urbanistic maze makes an average modern viewer think "hey, nothing worth mentioning is going there".
Tarkovsky probably made the scene along the freeways so long to express how long and boring the flight from earth to Solaris was (iirc, Lem makes a big deal of that in the book, without describing anything that happens on the trip, and in the Tarkovsky movie, the only spaceflight shown is from orbit to the station [remember, the station is NOT in orbit, but is hovering a few miles over the Ocean]). Rather like Kubrick made the first few scenes aboard Discovery in 2001 boring and banal (the chess game).
Slashdot Mirror
Point remains: if it did come from Mars, you'd have to figure out how it got there, too. Occam's Razor. If it become clear that life couldn't have started on Earth, then it's time to look into the extraterrestrial origin theory.
its overall rendering quality and its support for Web standards made it the browser to beat in our tests.
Really? Standards like ISO 10646-1? Let's see:
Internet Explorer for Mac: No Unicode
Mozilla: BMP and Plane 1 support (maybe more; that's what I've seen)
I just use IE for the sites that are too stupid to code to W3C standards like they ought to.
I know this is for OS X, and the OS on the iPod is different, but what about using IP-over-Firewire for IP synching of iPods?
Two words: "Steven" Calvin. Replace Susan Calvin with Will Smith as a detective. Shudder. I hope not, but the thought won't go out of my head.
I suppose the other possibility is that it's the story about the robot with the "weakened" first law, who kills a human by inaction.
I don't remember a "fourth" law, but I do remember the nonsense about the "zeroeth" law in Robots and Empire. Asimov should have left that series alone after Robots of Dawn.
Until very recently.......The only viable Business OS on the PC was Microsoft Windows
You don't remember the CP/M years, I gather? :-) Actually, there was a lot of resistance to the DOS -> Windows upgrade when it happened, too. I still have users who want to use DOS applications in XP when there are perfectly good Windows (and Linux, and BSD, and OS X) equivalents, despite the erraticness of running them under Windows, despite the fact that one is even interfering with their Windows apps, because that's what they're comfortable with.
And, c'mon... COBOL is EASY. Java has a much steeper initial learning curve. And COBOL is faster.
But COBOL ruins the mind.
Why isn't parent a 5 yet? This is the only possible explanation for those god-awful ads, the elimination of everything space in favor of mumbo-jumbo, etc.: Sci Fi wants the crystal power crowd. Probably the current management are crystal power types.
Yes, but what he was talking about was recurssion with the B-arc on a segment of the Golgafrichan population. Besides, they landed on prehistoric earth. He was merely saying that NASA should send the US 1/3 middle class away. It really has nothing to do with Adams, but read the parent-parent-parent when he originally brought up the B-arc. Is it B Arc or B-Arc? I am drawing a blank.
So we'd merely be the pentultimately useless 2/9 of the Golgrafrinchan population, then. Still doesn't say much for us.
Gee, that's a real Freudian slip, eh? Three Gorges Dam, obviously. And the other fellow with the better posting on it hadn't hit submit yet, I think.
Three Gorges Damn - before they close it up. Until then, it will be one of the most beautiful places in the world.
Trans-Siberian railroad. Just because.
Lewis and Clark Bridge, St. Charles, MO / Alton, IL. See the Nova special, Superbridge, first. And close to the Gateway Arch, too.
WTC site. Damn, that thing took hits from two jetliners and it stayed up long enough to get most (not all, alas) of the people out?
Sears Tower, Chicago.
Assembly building at KSC.
The list goes on and on.
You folks didn't quite understand Adams right. We are the useless third of the Golgafrinchan's population. That's about 6 Billion, guys.
It's called "Pretty Good Privacy" for a reason. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for most purposes.
The Euhermizing (rationalizing) interpretation of the Trojan horse as a siege engine is an oldie but goody in Homeric scholarship. The "consistent detail" is mostly stuff that was inspired by Homer (e.g., the account in the Aeneid) or by the cyclic poets who imitated Homer (as he used the oral traditions he found), and so isn't exactly independent evidence; even the pottery with visual depictions of the Trojan horse seem to be illustrations of the epic cycle. It seems plausible to me; specifically, I wonder if images depicting the siege engines were misunderstood by the epic tradition before Homer as depicting a giant horse, so that by the time Homer got the story (which he only recounts in passing in the Odyssey; the Iliad ends some time before the fall of Troy, the Odyssey starts 10 years after, but includes Odysseus' tale which goes back to the weeks after the fall and also Menelaus' account of the night in the Horse; the full-on story was in the other cyclic poems, which even ancient critics didn't think were Homer's work, and in the much later Post-Homericum that was derived from the cycle).
Anyway, the alphabetic script was adopted in Greece around the same time as Homer (there's even a book suggesting, with a high degree of scholarly credibility but little agreement from scholars, that the Greek alphabet was adopted for the purpose of recording Homer from the recitations of Homer himself or the Homeridae, the guild of singers who formed to preserve the Homeric stories "Homer and the Invention of the Greek Alphabet"), at the end of the so called "dark age," and so there's no reason to believe that Homer or his predecessors would have been able to "read" any genuine accounts of the real war (yes, around the time you suggested) when Homer lived vaguely around 700 bc.
I think you are expanding your definition of SF quite a bit; in the Campbell years, science fiction was a story that took some scientific fact as a basis and extended it to tell a story about how that scientific fact might change life. But of course we've gone beyond that, now. Certainly Homer would be of interest (particularly the Odyssey, which is the story of Odysseus' return 10 years after the war, and includes "his" account of his travels; less so the Iliad, which is an account of a few weeks in the last year of the war) for SF fans - more so than, e.g., Vergil. If you're interested in this stuff, go to the Perseus website and click on the Classics link. Perseus includes two different (older, and mediocre; one by Samuel Butler) translations of each poem. You might also want to see TBL Webster's book on Homer and the Mycenaean past (don't remember the title, but you'll find it at ABE).
Good posting, except for the mis-spelling of the word Lotus. :)
Nice try, but according to the fons et origo:
Ou)d' a)/ra Lwtofa/goi mhdonq' e(ta/roisin o)/leqron
h(mete/rois, a)lla/ sfi do/san lwtoi=o pa/sasqai.
Odyssey, Iota 92-93
Yet the lotos-eaters did not determine upon destruction for my companions, but to them gave lotos to eat.
(The Greek is represented using betacode, a long-standing way of doing Greek in ASCII).
lwtoi=o is the Homeric genitive of lw/tos, as per Richard John Cunliffe, p. 253 of A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect. Outside ascii, lw/tos is spelled lambda,omega,tau,omicron,sigma, or as transliterated, 'lotos'. This is also how e.g. Tennyson spelled in (in his poem, "The Lotos - Eaters", the title of which translates the word Lwtofa/goi (Lotophagoi) in the first line I cited from the Odyssey). "Lotus" is the Latinized spelling, and so is not incorrect, but is less correct than "lotos". If you want to be pedantic.
Not that this matters, but hey, I couldn't let that one rest, man. I'll take the karma hit.
To get back on topic, the earliest genuine science fiction is Lucian (Greek, about 2nd c. ad, to Homer's 8th c. bc.). And of course there's that Kepler story about going to the moon the earliest "modern" SF story (though hardly SF by our standards).
For recent science fiction, though, you can't beat Dune, you're right.
So let me get this straight- we have a record # of homeless people in the US, food pantries are empty, massive budget cuts for the poor(social services, medicare, etc.)... ...but a bunch of people donated $200,000 to go towards paying to make A TV EPISODE, for a FOR PROFIT cable network?
I take it you've never bought a video tape, b ut only give away all your disposable cash to charity?
For the record - I donate $20/paycheck directly to United Way, plus hundreds more throughout the year; I also spent a hundred or two on Farscape this year. Maybe I'll donate an additional $20 to say "screw you" to SciFi.
You're kidding, right? You thought that misbegotten piece of 4-hour long crap was Dune? I feel sorry for you, I really do.
For the record, SciFi has been pouring plenty of money into stuff like Taken (which I will not watch; Spielberg's CE3K crossed with X-Files but without the big-budget mothership or John Williams' score? Why bother?) and "rescuing" old shows like Stargate. It's clear that they are more interested in wooing the crystal-power crowd (John Edwards, that's SciFi?) with Egyptian-gods-as-aliens (I b et that's how they sold Stargate to the network) than in anything having more than a remote connection to space.
I won't watch them anymore; I may actually wait until season 4 of Farscape comes out on DVD rather than give SciFi the ratings.
I'm not saying I want them to be guilty, just guessing at the outcome.
I A N A L, all the below is uninformed opinion.
The initially trial isn't what's interesting in a case like this, as odds are everyone will agree that Elcomsoft is guilty under the law as written. What is interesting is the appellate process: is the law as written valid law under constitutional tests? And to test that, you've got to have a guilty verdict first: in the US, only appellate courts can rule on the constitutionality of a law, and noone can bring a court case unless they are an interested party - which in this case means Elcomsoft needs a guilty verdict before they have standing for a case at the appellate level.
I'm Russian and can conform that you should use 'ya' in this case. Solaris would probably be pronounced as Soleeris by a Russian speaker.
So you're saying it should be transliterated as Solyaris?
Clarke described, in a scientific paper to an audience in the broadcast engineering industry, the use of satellites in geosynchronous orbit to relay communications signals beyond line-of-sight. The idea he described worked fine with existing technology - once it was in place. It was only dependent upon launch capabilities (which took a little more time to be invented). All the other technologies were pre-existing (transceivers, antennae, etc.).
Key thing to that story, though, is that the survival of a genuinely good person, better than most of us could hope to be, ends up allowing absolute evil to be victorious. Ethics after Oppenheimer.
In one sense, Greek epic literature is sci-fi (The Illiad; The Odyssey).
Good posting, except for mis-spelling the name of the Iliad. Does your classification of the Odyssey as SF change if you consider the possibility that Homer intended his readers to question the story Odysseus told to the Phaeacians (the whole bit about the Lotos eaters, the Cyclopes, etc.)?
Yes, Dune, though the series gradually loses steam (today I wouldn't bother reading anything after Children of Dune, and would recommend only the original to someone who isn't a SF fan).
But as for Dune itself, it's head and shoulders above most other SF books. Only Man in the High Tower, Fiasco, and a few other books approach it.
Then, in 1972 (especially for a Russian viewer), this probably could express dehumanization and solitude of the technological world. It's kind of ironic that seeing a car driving through an endless urbanistic maze makes an average modern viewer think "hey, nothing worth mentioning is going there".
Tarkovsky probably made the scene along the freeways so long to express how long and boring the flight from earth to Solaris was (iirc, Lem makes a big deal of that in the book, without describing anything that happens on the trip, and in the Tarkovsky movie, the only spaceflight shown is from orbit to the station [remember, the station is NOT in orbit, but is hovering a few miles over the Ocean]). Rather like Kubrick made the first few scenes aboard Discovery in 2001 boring and banal (the chess game).