Core Dump

When I saw the script, I realised that what the writer had done was kill the books, cut them up, take out an eye here, a leg there, and stick these bits into a totally different story, stitching it all together with catgut and hokum. They were going to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a silly plot based on sex and violence.

By their fashion choices, their affected poverty, their disdain of all the material things beyond the struggling class's reach -- nice suits and ties, clean haircuts, SUVs -- the American Left seems to be literally mocking you at the same time that it tries to take away your Old Navy bone, and they add to the mockery by telling you that keeping you away is all for your own good, pointing to obscure statistics about stagnant real wages, wealth transfer, and so on. As if you don't know what's what. What's what is this: what you can afford. In Louisville, among the real bedrock suckers, I realized that those who attack Wal-Mart -- whether socially-committed activists or upper-class left-wing Manhattanites (like Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickled And Dimed) -- must be living with the certainty that they're never going to need Wal-Mart. I too attacked Wal-Mart until I moved Stateside. Then I needed it, no matter how much its hands were soaked in blood.

Microsoft has never intended to compete on a level playing field. Instead they have tipped the field to favor themselves, sacrificing product quality and user benefit over and over again. This strategy is coming to the end of its useful life.

So here's the deal, folks. If you want to see a new Trek series that's
true to Gene's original creation, helmed by myself and Bryce, with
challenging stories, contemporary themes, solid extrapolation, and the
infusion of some of our best and brightest SF prose writers, then you
need to let the folks at Paramount know that.

Perhaps the most curious thing about Lovecraft is that much of what aficionados love about his work is exactly those things his detractors list as faults. Take, for example, the fact that while Lovecraft is usually described as a forefather of modern horror fiction, his stories are, to put it bluntly, not very scary. (Edmond) Wilson complained, with perfect justification, that Lovecraft ladled on the frightful adjectives and adverbs when describing -- or even just hinting at -- the nightmarish realizations that typically confront his protagonist at a tale's climax.

As Joyce Carol Oates has written, "The Colour out of Space" succeeds in creeping us out where much of Lovecraft's fiction fails because it is "subtly modulated" instead of merely sensational. A whisper works much better than a shriek. The story also feels closer to the heart of Lovecraft's own fears than some of its more cosmic brethren. Although the parallel to radiation poisoning seems obvious, "The Colour out of Space" was written in 1927 and really reflects a more deeply rooted dread of contamination, disease and degeneration. These are the predominant motifs in Lovecraft's imaginative life.

Great, healthy companies not only dominate the market, but share of mind. Look at Apple these days. But when was the last time you thought about Microsoft, except in frustration or anger? The company just announced a powerful new search engine, designed to take on Google -- but did anybody notice? Meanwhile, open systems world -- created largely in response to Microsoft's heavy-handed hegemony -- is slowly carving away market share from Gates & Co.: Linux and Firefox hold the world's imagination these days, not Windows and Explorer. The only thing Microsoft seems busy at these days is patching and plugging holes.

The A.G.C. is a piece of computing history. It had a one-megahertz processor, one kilobyte of random-access memory and 12 kilobytes of read-only memory. By contrast, typical desktop computers today have about 1,000 times the processor speed and about 500,000 times the RAM, and have dropped ROM for hard drives with millions of times the capacity.

The ASR chip contains approximately 5,000 microscopic solar cells that convert light into electrical impulses. The purpose of the chip is to replace damaged photoreceptors, the "light-sensing" cells of the eye, which normally convert light into electrical signals within the retina. Loss of photoreceptor cells occurs in persons with retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and other retinal diseases.

I could have tried to write the entire Baroque Cycle in Jacobean English, but at some point I’d have had to ask myself, “Who am I kidding? Everyone knows this was written in the 21st century.” The sensibility from which it’s written is that of the high-tech modern world. To purge the whole cycle of all traces of modern English would have seemed forced and absurd. So I just wrote it in whatever language seemed best to get the story across, which in some places was modern-sounding English and in other places was period English.

"The New Year dawned with the global family closely following the unfolding tragedy via satellite television and the Web. As the grim images from Banda Aceh, Chennai, Galle, and elsewhere replaced the traditional scenes of celebrations, I realized that it would soon be 60 years since I conceived the communications satellite (in Wireless World, October 1945 -- I still think it was a good idea).

I was also reminded of what Bernard Kouchner, former health minister of France and first UN governor of Kosovo, once said: "Where there is no camera, there is no humanitarian intervention." Indeed, how many of the millions of men and women who donated generously for disaster relief would have done so if they had only read about it in the newspapers?"

The most common remark I've heard from teachers was that the chapter on evolution was assigned as reading but that virtually no discussion in class was taken," said Dr. John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, an evangelical Christian and a member of Alabama's curriculum review board who advocates the teaching of evolution. Teachers are afraid to raise the issue, he said in an e-mail message, and they are afraid to discuss the issue in public.