Links for 21-12-2006
Stuffstation EULA, transhumanist sects, cognitive enhancement round-up, ‘sleb biographies, robot rights, virgin births…
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“Given that I can’t write a decent short story to save my life and have sold three novels I don’t think short stories are not necessary to build a career as a novelist. Short stories and novels are very different kinds of wrting.”
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“Transhumanism is unique because it is so diverse. That’s why it never makes sense to label us as a religion or unified conspiracy – besides being mostly unreligious, transhumanists can barely agree on something long enough to cooperate towards it.”
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Monster link round-up from Brian Wang. Some great stuff in there.
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“I will not use this product (STUFFSTATION DELUXE) to produce information processing devices that meet the conditions for self-awareness spelled out in the Phoenix Protocols of 2017 (UN DOC041202017.42);” Heh!
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“It is unclear, however, what kind of object or objects exploded or merged to create the new black hole. The hybrid burst exhibits properties of the two known classes of gamma-ray bursts yet possesses features that remain unexplained.”
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“Flickeur (pronounced like Voyeur) randomly retrieves images from Flickr.com and creates an infinite film with a style that can vary between stream-of-consciousness, documentary or video clip.” This is a cool idea, well executed.
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“We didn’t get the connection with ‘Anthrax’ the band at first,” Douglas said. “The other band names were on the back and not on the same side as the Anthrax one was.” Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hahhah hhahha! Priceless.
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“The world needs an icon to rekindle our flagging fascination with manned spaceflight – and Captain Kirk should step up to the plate.” I’m not sure if this is a p*ss-take or not …
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“Already facing a legal challenge for alleged copyright infringement, Google Inc.’s crusade to build a digital library has triggered a philosophical debate with an alternative project promising better online access to the world’s books, art and historical
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Poetic-est. Headline. EVAR.
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“A Nokia Research team set out explore this topic during a July 2006 field study in Uganda with a brief to understand how people share mobile phones. The research builds on prior research from India, China, Nepal and Mongolia and Indonesia.”
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12 – The sleb effect“The publishing industry sometimes seems to hold the same view as the kids: i.e. that slebs are the most important people on the face of the planet.” And it’s bleeding the industry dry – the GOB reports.
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“During the period between the two World Wars, the Czechoslovak Republic was an important and prolific center for avant-garde book design.”
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“I discovered a URI called “data:” today which allows you to encode any amount of file data into a URL. This data could be an image, ascii text, xml data, you name it.” Neat little hack.
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15 – I just sold 3 books!“Tor has agreed to purchase the novel I just started, Sly Mongoose, as well as the next two novels that I write.” It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy – congratulations to Tobias Buckell!
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“Robots and machines are now classed as inanimate objects without rights or duties but if artificial intelligence becomes ubiquitous, the report argues, there may be calls for humans’ rights to be extended to them.”
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“Maybe females could live without males, at least for Komodo dragons. These behemoths of the reptile world can produce babies without fertilization by a male, scientists recently discovered.” Insert your own ‘Jesus Lizard’ joke here.
Tags: links
[...] And while we’re at it, how about a real virgin birth? Armchair Anarchist: “Insert your own