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nagareochiru

Childhood's End - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • The idea of humanity reaching an end point through transformation to a higher form of existence is the main idea behind the concept of the Omega Point and of the technological singularity.
Danny Thorne

Blizzard Entertainment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • Despite offers from the bnetd developers to integrate Blizzard's CD key checking system into bnetd, Blizzard claims that the public availability of any such software package facilitates piracy, and moved to have the bnetd project shut down under provisions of the DMCA.[citation needed] As this case is one of the first major test cases for the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation became involved, for a while negotiations were ongoing to resolve the case without a trial. The negotiations failed however, and Blizzard won the case on all counts: the defendants were ruled to have breached both StarCraft's End User License Agreement (EULA) and the Terms of Use of Battle.net.
nagareochiru

The Illustrated Man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

    • nagareochiru
       
      To be perused more completely later; a few of the stories point to current trends in child care's and foreign relations' respective relationships to technology.
  • "The Veldt" — Two parents use an artificial "nursery" to keep their children happy. The children use the high-tech simulation nursery to create the predatorial environment of an African veldt. When the parents threaten to take it away, the children lock their parents inside where they are mauled and killed by the "harmless" machine-generated lions of the nursery.
  • "The Highway" — A community of simple-minded people living by a highway in rural Mexico go on living their normal, idyllic lives as the highway fills with people fleeing a nuclear war. The story ends with some travellers they help telling them about the nuclear war, and how the world is ending. After the travelers leave, the confused resident briefly wonders what "the world" is, and then continues with his life.
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  • "Zero Hour" — Children across the country are deeply involved in an exciting game they call 'Invasion'. Their parents think it's cute until it turns out that the invasion is real and aliens are using the children to help them get control of Earth.
Danny Thorne

BitTorrent (protocol) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • a typical BitTorrent download will gradually rise to very high speeds, and then slowly fall back down toward the end of the download. This contrasts with an HTTP server that, while more vulnerable to overload and abuse, rises to full speed very quickly and maintains this speed throughout.
  • To share a file or group of files, a peer first creates a "torrent." This small file contains metadata about the files to be shared and about the tracker, the computer that coordinates the file distribution. Peers that want to download the file first obtain a torrent file for it, and connect to the specified tracker, which tells them from which other peers to download the pieces of the file.
Danny Thorne

DMCA | Electronic Frontier Foundation - 0 views

  • In practice, the DMCA and DRM have done nothing to stop "Internet piracy." Yet the DMCA has become a serious threat that jeopardizes fair use, impedes competition and innovation, chills free expression and scientific research, and interferes with computer intrusion laws. If you circumvent DRM locks for noninfringing fair uses or create the tools to do so, you might be on the receiving end of a lawsuit.
nagareochiru

Fahrenheit 451 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • It is a critique of what Bradbury saw as an increasingly dysfunctional American society, written in the early years of the Cold War.
  • Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship; he states that Fahrenheit 451 is a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which ultimately leads to ignorance of total facts.[3]
  • Anyone caught reading books is, at the minimum, confined in a mental hospital, while the books are taken away and burned; at the maximum, the penalty is a sentence to immediate death. The main books that are not allowed are those, of great and famous works of literature, by many famous writers, such as Dickenson, Poe, Twain, and others.
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  • Captain Beatty claims that society, in its search for happiness, brought about the suppression of literature through an act of self-censorship and that the totalitarian government merely took advantage of the situation.
  • Mechanical Hound The mechanical hound exists in the original book but not in the 1966 film. It is an emotionless, 8-legged killing machine that can be programmed to seek out and destroy free thinkers, hunting them down by scent. It can remember as many as 10,000 scents of others it is tracking down. The hound is blind to anything but the destruction for which it is programmed. It has a proboscis in a sheath on its snout, which injects lethal amounts of morphine or procaine.
  • In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.[6]
nagareochiru

CG Jung Page - The Birth of the Bomb: Leo Szilard - 0 views

  • Shortly before his intuition about an atomic bomb, Leo Szilard had been reading The World Set Free by H. G. Wells--a novel about a German invasion of France and the use of atomic bombs in a global war, a novel written in 1913 but set in the 21st century. Wells called his radioactive element Carolinum: "once its degenerative process had been induced, [Carolinum] continued a furious radiation of energy, and nothing could arrest it." In 1913, Wells was already writing about radioactive decay, half-lives, burning cities, even about deforestation, diminishing supplies of coal and oil, and the rush toward bankruptcy. And he inspired Szilard. Wells wrote--and Szilard read--of the final achievement of a world government and the abolition of atomic weapons--the "world set free." "The catastrophe of atomic bombs shook men...," Wells wrote, "out of their old-established habits of thought." And it was H.G. Wells who gave us the phrase, "a war to end all war."
nagareochiru

The War of the Worlds - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • Wells depicts the Martians firing spacecraft to Earth from a giant space gun, a common representation of space travel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bearing similarity to the modern spacecraft propulsion concept of mass drivers.
  • Military theorists of that era had many speculations of building a "fighting-machine" or "land dreadnought" (as the Royal Navy called this hypothetical machine on which some experiments were made just before the First World War). Wells's concept of the Martian tripods, fast-moving and equipped with Heat-Rays and black smoke, represents an ultimate end to these speculations, although Wells also presents a less fantastical depiction of the armoured fighting vehicle in his short story "The Land Ironclads". [1] [2]
  • On a different field, the book explicitly suggests that the Martians' anatomy may reflect the far future development of mankind itself — i.e. that with the increasing development of machines, the body is largely discarded and what remains is essentially a brain that "wears" a different (mechanical) body for every need, just as humans wear the clothes appropriate to a particular weather or work.
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