20 Mar
2008
20 Mar
'08
3:50 a.m.
>> It is sad that he has passed on. He was a
brilliant, visionary man
>> that, luckily for us, left a legacy of great writings that will
>> live on.
> True. But if I remember authors right, 2001 never did come true.
But geostationary communications satellites did.
Nor did 1984 - however, meanwhile, I hear people call
Orwell an
optimist.
Anyway, the old SF visionaries are leaving us. Asimov, Lem, now
Clarke;
the golden times of SF disappear.
Concerning 2001: I doubt I really want to have a HAL9000.
Nothing wrong with the hardware, it had been programmed to be a
serial murderer under certain conditions. Deliberate, not even a bug
and of course contrary to the laws of robotics. Somewhat like HAL,
sadly my father has dementia and likes reciting nursery rhymes (and
gets them wrong), which gets under the skin of the other residents of
his nursing home and he had a fight with an old lady who broke his
glasses and he hit her with his walking stick. The staff took the
stick away and later we got a call to say he had had a fall, hardly
surprising.
Gone slightly off topic there a bit, sorry.
Does anyone here have a use for a BROKEN wide format Hewlett Packard
ink jet printer? I think we got it in 2000, so not ten years old
quite yet but useful for printing schematics if you have the
knowledge/patience to repair it. It might even be a current model,
things move slowly in the wide format side of things where low
volumes force design costs to be recouped over longer periods.