Topics pertaining to science and technology, current or future.
Remember the SOPA drama last week? It has given MPAA not-quite-lobbyist Chris Dodd a bad case of foot-in-mouth: he publicly threatened politicians who’d taken MPAA money for not doing what the MPAA wanted. On national television, no less. Un-freakin’-believable. And just this side of actually criminal. Dodd is a former senator — he should know …
Considering the poor accuracy of professional science fiction authors even in “near-future” SF, this guy‘s track record is nothing short of amazing. Too bad he can’t be around to enjoy his success, but when you’re making predictions for a century hence, that’s a bit problematic. 🙂
Wow. I didn’t expect anything like what happened, and apparently neither did anyone else — including the MPAA. From the e-mail I received from FightForTheFuture.org: The MPAA (the lobby for big movie studios which created these terrible bills) was shocked and seemingly humbled. “‘This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,’ MPAA …
A medical breakthrough in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria! In a nutshell, these things render such bacteria vulnerable to antibiotics again, and it looks like bacteria have no way to defend themselves. 🙂 This is the kind of science I love to hear about.
As you may have noticed, this site — along with thousands of others — was blacked out today, to protest the SOPA and PIPA bills. If you’re an American Internet user and haven’t heard of them before, what rock have you been hiding under? Go find out what it’s all about (this page might help), …
So you’ve got an unmanned flying drone with deadly weapons, controlled by ground stations that could be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Of course you run it with the most popular and least secure operating system on the planet! I mean, what could possibly go wrong? I’ve said it before, in all-caps and bold …
Continue reading ‘“US killer spy drone controls switch to Linux”’ »
In honor of the year’s first Friday the thirteenth: it’s not bad luck when you bring it on yourself. 😉
From this article: […] This is why one of the great contributions of science fiction is its ability to create monsters and technologies from the ether. When they show up out of nowhere, they challenge us to think more broadly and to make new connections. […] That’s one of the things — maybe the main thing …
Continue reading ‘“Locating Change: Science and Technology Controversies”’ »
Twenty years ago, headlines like this one wouldn’t have even been imaginable.
That’s not data models, it’s women who model clothing. 🙂 There was a near-future SF novel I read many years ago (I don’t recall which one) that posited that actors would be replaced almost entirely by computer-generated models. We’re already seeing the precursors of it — all the Pixar releases, for instance. And characters in …
Continue reading ‘“H&M Under Fire for Using Fake, Computer-Generated Models”’ »