Well, I had Cat's Cradle queued up as my next audiobook. Fortunately I'm currently listening to DUNE so by the time I begin Vonnegut, I will hopefully have forgotten the spoiler.

...my commercial is a brain fuck because even though you want to, you can't make fun of me like you did the other fat geeky guy because I'm cute.

The Digitech vocalist 4 generates harmonies on the fly using input from the instrument being played. Guitar/piano is patched into the unit and it extracts the harmonies based on the chord I'm playing. IMO-It works as long as it's not overused in the performance.

I have real-time auto tune on my digitech vocalist 4. The only song I've ever used it on was Purple Rain, because it gave exactly the desired effect. It's actually quite easy to tell when someone is using it -it does sound jumpy and automated although much less so than even 5 yrs ago, the real shit-kicker will be when the algorithm is improved to the point where the average ear cannot distinguish that the machine is doing the pitch,timing, formant and dynamics.

Chances are you would get a substantial discount for choosing the model with the adcam in the first place.

...for kurzweilAI.net

I'm reminded of how impressed I was upon hearing Christine Peterson's talk at the 2007 Singularity Summit where she addresses the same issue on how science desperately needs a stronger voice in politics.

2007 Singularity Summit

As this speech was given at Eliezer Yudkowsky's summit-some of you will undoubtedly want to riff on the merits of speculation that occur there. However, her suggestions during the talk are overall on firm ground and seem to apply to what has happened here.

I for one welcome our new Geeky-Politica Overlords...cough,cough...

I believe that was Bill's initial reaction to nanotechnology...what was yours? Perhaps he has settled down now that he has had a decade or so to think it over?

When comparing Crichton with Verne, please don't forget that the latter was a sci-fi pioneer who lived in the 19th century.

There was no excuse for Prey...IMO it desperately sucked..especially as the laypersons introduction to the nascent field of Nanotechnology at the turn of this century.