Zen Buddhism has been built around this concept for centuries. I've found Zen and Mahayana Buddhism in general to be pretty fascinating because their philosophies are based entirely on questioning the senses and reasoning from both first principles *and* empirical observations—a synthesis that can sometimes lead to…

This is completely bad-assed. I cannot WAIT to see this film!

That is TOTALLY cool.

Africa as a technological powerhouse? Not unless there's been some sort of techno-Singularity-driven cognitive-imperialist reconquest and reconstruction of the entire continent from the environmental level to the social.

OK, I'm sold. I'm a sucker for anything set in a haunted mental hospital.

ANY form of sentient creature—organic or digital—cannot be *made* sentient: self-awareness and recursive consciousness can't be created using any specific code structure. But a code structure can be used to produce a kernel of awareness which can be *taught* to become fully sentient given the proper guidance—i.e., you…

HELL. YEAH.

This film sounds pretty bitchin'. I love paranoid, They're Out To Get You films.

I LOVED The Snow Queen when I was in highschool. It may be one of the very, very few "feminist" sci-fi novels I've ever read that I actually liked—probably because Ms. Vinge understands how to work with symbolism and character development without coming across as "preachy." I will have to revisit this novel and its…

Fortunately, I live in southwestern Pennsylvania, where there are *plenty* of abandoned mines and—even better—geologically-stable limestone caverns.

Well...considering Greg Bear is still alive and actively writing, I say he's entitled to claim ownership of his work. As much as I despise the way the copyright system is currently set up, I *do* believe living author's have ever right to own the rights to their work...whether or not it's all over BitTorrent.

So awesome...but why'd they waste its potential playing the goddamned Sex Pistols, for Babbage's sake! Play some freakin' Glen Miller on that sucker!

Wiswall was an ancestor of the Whateleys of Dunwich. Zephaniah Wiswall, the Reverend's third son, left Duxbury in a huff after arguing with his father concerning his (Zeph's) investigations into "wycked mysteryes" and moved to the Dunwich area, where he married and had a family of his own. His daughter, Cora, married…

@LittleDragon: Actually, we would NEVER be able to survive unaided on the surface of Rhea unless we were to park some kind of mobile fusion-powered microsun in orbit around the moon. However! We'd have plenty of O2 on hand to keep up partial pressure in quite a few subsurface installations for a pretty long time.

More like the CO2 is not being *produced* by anything at all, but is simply present mingled with the water ice on the moon's surface, and is being released via magnetospheric radiation just as the O2 is.

@Pope John Peeps II: Oh, HELL no! We have *everything* to do with it! Technosingularities just don't "happen" on their own. Even if the next big one is driven by, say, superpowered Digital Intelligence, those DIs and all the soft/hardware technologies used to support or initialize them will have been built or…

Amanda Seyfried....Soooo hot. Want to touch the heinie.

Number 5 makes me think of Peter Watts' Rifters trilogy.

Greg Egan is probably the coolest writer on the planet. The dude is like The King of Geeks, *and* writes extremely awesome fiction as well! I nominate him for a position of one of the Architects of the Singularity.