From: Eirikur Hallgrimsson (eh@mad.scientist.com)
Date: Sat Jan 20 2001 - 23:12:14 PST
This sort of makes me wish I had a tv. What I need is a Tivo with
predictive powers. Did a phone interview with Tivo the other day and
had to tell them that I don't watch tv. They are pretty far in bed with the
crowd that wants total control over what you do with your digital media.
Well, I guess they think of it as THEIR digital media. You just have a
restricted viewing license. Their stuff runs on a pretty vanilla PowerPC
(soon to be MIPS, I hear) Linux. I get cognitive (or is that philosophical)
dissonance from it.
For a brilliant just-barely-alternate history take on the Cuban Missle
Crisis, there's one of 1999's outstanding novels, "Resurrection Day,"
by Brendan DuBois. I was young at the time, but my memory finds DuBois'
research impressive and his scenario chilling. It came out in paperback
fairly recently. The fiction of the period, notably "Fail-Safe" and "Seven
Days in May," is pretty good, too.
Eirikur
"History will record the fact that this bitter struggle reached its climax in
the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Let me then make clear as the President
of the United States that I am determined upon our system's survival and
success, regardless of the cost and regardless of the peril."
JFK, April 20, 1961
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