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It's free but not in this way
Nov. 3rd, 2010 11:47 pmI'm just reading Robert Sawyer WWW: Wake and it's main protagonist is a blind girl who undergoes a procedure to restore her sight. She is given implant that gets installed behind her eyeball and an external unit that reinterprets the visual input. Which is pretty the same as the actual procedure that give (at least some) sight to 3 patients in Germany. Just the kind of blindness is different (and it's wireless in the book). It's eerie. This graphics could've been the illustrations for the book. This is exactly how I imagined it. The 'where is my jetpack or flying car' feeling is so prevalent that I get this weird feeling when the sf things come about and hit me with 'it's 21st century get used to it'. :)
Adam Whitehead's post on the Game of Thrones location shooting in Malta made it to io9. After all this years of hangigng on same message boards it feels nice to know that his dedication gets recognised. Although he probably doesn't even know it yet as he was probably asleep already. Now that Europe already switched from summer to winter time and US still has till DST till Sunday the time difference an hour less then it usually is. Still it's 7 hours difference between California and England. I however wonder why io9 keeps putting stuff about it on their site when it's fantasy. I have a feeling that fantasy is disallowed unless they really, really like it.
I admit I get why they chose Malta. Nice climate, English is an official language and the member of EU, Schengen and eurozone. It was used by crusaders and was the seat of Knights of Malta. It also was possessed by Arabs for long enough for Maltese to belong to that language family. I'm sure there is plenty of locations fit for almost any part of ASoIaF world.
In much more creepy republishing news John Scalzi learned that there are people who make money publishing wikipedia articles about him (and I suppose other subjects too). I know the people publishing and selling their fanfiction are frowned upon but at least they go through a trouble of writing something. This is wrong on so many levels. All the people who got scammed into buying stuff you can freely read online. And for price of $12.72 one can get two normal books. And as Scalzi says I doubt this is fair use of wikipedia material. I actually hope wikipedia sues them and gets a lot of money out of it. They need it to keep being awesome and free.
Adam Whitehead's post on the Game of Thrones location shooting in Malta made it to io9. After all this years of hangigng on same message boards it feels nice to know that his dedication gets recognised. Although he probably doesn't even know it yet as he was probably asleep already. Now that Europe already switched from summer to winter time and US still has till DST till Sunday the time difference an hour less then it usually is. Still it's 7 hours difference between California and England. I however wonder why io9 keeps putting stuff about it on their site when it's fantasy. I have a feeling that fantasy is disallowed unless they really, really like it.
I admit I get why they chose Malta. Nice climate, English is an official language and the member of EU, Schengen and eurozone. It was used by crusaders and was the seat of Knights of Malta. It also was possessed by Arabs for long enough for Maltese to belong to that language family. I'm sure there is plenty of locations fit for almost any part of ASoIaF world.
In much more creepy republishing news John Scalzi learned that there are people who make money publishing wikipedia articles about him (and I suppose other subjects too). I know the people publishing and selling their fanfiction are frowned upon but at least they go through a trouble of writing something. This is wrong on so many levels. All the people who got scammed into buying stuff you can freely read online. And for price of $12.72 one can get two normal books. And as Scalzi says I doubt this is fair use of wikipedia material. I actually hope wikipedia sues them and gets a lot of money out of it. They need it to keep being awesome and free.
