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Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them

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Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them

#121

Post by Animats »

EliRivers wrote: post #23
fencepost wrote: post #12

Visualizing and communicating how things will be used is very powerful and important. My memory may be faulty, but I think it's Alan Cooper's "About Face" that basically advised not just describing the interface and how it'll be used, but how Bob the 73 year old luddite who hates all computers is going to interact with it (context in flight movie systems). Creating characters and having them interact with technology…

I have a copy of About Face on my desk that I keep meaning to read, but I have read Alan Cooper's "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum" which definitely discusses an in-flight entertainment system to be used by, amongst others, an elderly gentleman who really has got better things to do than burrow through menus and directories to find a movie to watch. Could you be thinking of that? Maybe they both used that example…

I had an online discussion with him about that inflight entertainment system. I suggested just putting a channel selector knob on the thing. Flip through the movie posters, and if you stay on-channel for a few seconds, the movie starts. Then it turns out it has pay-per-view channels and has to have a whole payment interface, something he doesn't mention in the book.

Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them

#122

Post by elorant »

TheCowboy wrote: post #117
elorant wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well actually he never did, and that's the problem. If he had, we'd at least know his plan. But all he did was taking a gamble that went on and on for months dragging the economy to the bottom in the meantime. There was no planning for exiting the Euro, nothing at all. Just random thoughts here and there and a lot of bs talk. For example, the committee that was exploring the consequences of leaving the Euro and how t…

I've read all of your comments in this thread and you have a huge gap in your factual understanding. You should really just stop commenting as you're spreading outright falsehoods in some cases. Varoufakis didn't have the final say on if Greece left the Euro. It has been quite public that he disagrees with a lot about what unfolded, including the decision to remain given the outcome of negotiations. The idea that peo…

Varoufakis was the mastermind of the approach to extort the Germans as they would back off and approve a debt relief. It was his masterplan and that's why the Syriza party proposed to him to take the leading role in the negotiations from the position of the financing minister. This has repeatedly been confirmed by all parties, both Varoufakis and members of the government. There's a book coming in September from Varoufakis, called "Adults in the Room" and as certain parts have leaked to the press it has sparked a lot of conversation the last weeks where more and more details of what really happened back then come to surface. Varoufakis openly accuses Tsipras that he backed off of the agreed plan.

The result of such an approach was exiting the EU. To say that Varoufakis didn't called the shots on that is naive. Pretty much everyone understood that if we were to push Germans too much we might end out of the Euro. When Tsipras eventually realized that Junker and the EU had made contingency plans for such an occasion he came to his senses realizing that the bluff has been called. All these are documented in various sources.

The crisis most certainly existed before Varoufakis came into position and no one is blaming him for that. What we blame him for is that he never had a plan and dragged the negotiations for far too long which eventually ended-up with capital controls because we run out of money.

Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them

#123

Post by [deleted] »

doc_gunthrop wrote: post #118
thevardanian wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ok just because C-173 got Cronenberged there are still plenty of dimensions left. Sometimes rebooting is the only option.

Bit of a nitpick, but it's actually [C-137]( http://rickandmorty.wikia.com/wiki/Dimension_C-137 )

[deleted]

Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them

#125

Post by godelmachine »

tzs wrote: post #119

Companies commissioning stories has gone on for a long time. For example, the Isaac Asimov story "My Son, The Physicist" was commissioned by an electronics company to run in an ad in "Scientific American". Another Asimov example. "Think", IBM's in-house magazine, commissioned Asimov to write a story based on this quote from J. B. Priestly: > Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds b…

I had "My Son, The Physicist" in my 9th grade. The mom comes and suggests the son about "continuous conversation" with some astronaut's stuck on Jupiter's moon - Ganymede (if I am not wrong and remember correctly)

Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them

#126

Post by Bartweiss »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #105
Bartweiss wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CCP (the EVE Online people) have a whole team of economists also. My favorite story, though, is still epidemiologists studying the Corrupted Blood plague in WoW for real world lessons on bioterrorism.

Holy fuck that is awesome

It's a wild story.

The craziest part was that the players who intentionally spread the plague would retreat to other regions and log out in an attempt to incubate the disease across victim die-off and mod actions, then return to cities to reinfect people. That's what got epidemiologists hooked, because disease control in the face of enemy action is (fortunately) short on real-world data.

The question of how the plague could be resolved without server-level actions (which are obviously unavailable in the real world) is awfully interesting.

Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them

#127

Post by Apocryphon »

elorant wrote: post #102
Apocryphon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're advocating for your country to undergo the same sort of economic shock therapy that other states before have undergone?

Why, do you think that if we exit the EU things will become instantly better? It will be much, much worse for the foreseeable future. Greece isn't self-sustained. We import pretty much everything, from oil to fertilizers.

I'm not suggesting Grexit as the alternative, I'm just wondering if you think prior examples of IMF-driven shock therapy are the best model to emulate. There's a cost to every option. That said, I think you're suggesting something a little milder than what other countries have attempted.

Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them

#128

Post by elorant »

KGIII wrote: post #104
elorant wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What his predecessor tried to do. Fix the economy. Greece's problem isn't the debt per se, it's the fact that our economy isn't competitive. There's a lot of red tape, many professions are regulated (pharmacies are a prime example), we import way more things than we export, entrepreneurism is very low, public sector is corrupted, the insurance system is bankrupt, and a lot of things don't work as they should in a mod…

Just because I am not clear, are you suggesting that the pharmaceutical industry be unregulated? You don't want your pharmacy subjected to regulation? How about professional engineers and physicians?

The pharmaceutical industry has nothing to do with how many pharmacies will be allowed to operate. In Greece, up until recently, the government controlled how many pharmacies will open and where. Pharmacies ought to be owned by pharmacists. If say, a company wanted to open a chain of pharmacies all over the country they couldn't, unless all shareholders were pharmacists. And that's not all of the story, super markets for example weren't allowed to sell under the counter drugs like food supplements because there were exclusively handled by pharmacies.

This changed, partly, just in 2016 and it changed due to the agreements enforced by the memorandums we signed with lending parties.

The same applies to numerous professions, like notaries, taxi owners, customs agents, law firms, tour guides etc. That's what I mean by saying that the economy isn't competitive.

Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them

#130

Post by MattSayar »

schlipity wrote: post #112

This is actually part of the plot of the movie (Three Days of the Condor) and book (Six days of the Condor). The protagonist works at a CIA site where they read basically everything released and break down the plots to see if it has any strategic value and/or state secrets. If I had to guess, this still goes on at the state level, but this article is about making this sort of data (minus the state secrets awareness)…

Yeah this reminds me a lot of Michael Crichton's Sphere, which starts with a professor, funded by the military, who was tapped to analyze in great detail how to deal with first contact with aliens.
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