The following is a list of sigs I have had, or will have (in no particular order).

1. Well, my days of not taking Slashdot seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
2. I am a vampire. I may ponder, or mull, or mediate, consider, ruminate, or think about...
   ...but I never reflect.
3. Flying cars: Bringing stupid into the third dimension.
4. For there ain't no Bottle in all the world
   Like that dear little Bottle of mine.
5. It's not how much gold there is, but who's wielding it.
6. "This is E.G. Marshall inviting you to return to our Mystery Theater for another adventure in the Macabre. Until next time, pleasant dreams?"
7. If the lessons of history teach us any one thing, it is that no one learns the lessons that history teaches.
8. Woah... Frogger flashback!
9. What happened?
   He was starting to make sense. So I shot him.
10. Build a better mousetrap and patent lawyers will beat a path to your door, carrying cease and desist letters.
11. I'm gonna develop grass that only grows an inch and a half tall, and retire on the hush-money from the mower companies.
12. I resent that. I am not sleeping on the job. I'm thinking laterally... with my eyes closed.
13. adoxography: (n) 1. Skilled writing on an unimportant subject. 2. Any Slashdot posting.
14. What fun it is to laugh and sing a slaying song tonight!
15. If money is power, why don't we fix the dollar to the kilowatt?
16. Buy our vacuum cleaners. They really suck!
17. The pen was considered mightier than the sword until it was discovered that a sword could hack off a person's hands.

The following is a list of sigs I have had, or will have (in no particular order).

1. Is a Turing test valid if the human is an idiot? (From ivan256)
2. Lost: one compass. If found, please return to the guy wandering aimlessly in the woods.
3. The myth ain't busted 'till Savage and Hyneman blow something up.
4. "Despite being an elegant and technologically sound solution, I think IPv6 will be adopted universally within a few years." - Sybert42.
5. To destroy Paminella's tower, bake the hall in the candle of her brain.
6. Honey, I'll be honest with you. If I could think of an excuse that you would buy, I'd use it.
7. Maple Flu: A disease affecting Canadians; most prevalent when Canada Day (July 1) does not fall on a weekend.
8. Camping Tip: You can duplicate the warmth of a down-filled bedroll by climbing into a garbage bag with several geese.
9. Wild berries can be poisonous, or even cause hallucinations.
10. Camping Tip: In an emergency, a drawstring from a parka hood can be used to strangle a snoring tent mate.
11. Camping Tip: The guitar of the noisy teenager at the next campsite makes excellent kindling.
12. Patents force people to work around patents.
13. I ache therefore I am, or in my case, I am therefore I ache - Marvin the Paranoid Android
14. When you talk about damage radius, even atomic weapons pale before that of an unfettered idiot in a position of power.
15. Never ask a Canadian about global warming during the winter. They'll just say, "Bring it on!"
16. Camping Tip: Bear bells provide an element of safety for hikers in grizzly country. The tricky part is getting them on the bears.
17. Camping Tip: Navel lint makes a handy fire starter.
    Warning: Remove lint from navel before applying the match.
18. We used to watch 2D video on a 3D box. Now we watch 3D video on a 2D box.
19. Why is the sky blue?
    Well, molecules in the air scatter blue light from...
    I asked why, not how.
20. Tango Lima; Delta Romeo.
21. It's not how much gold there is, but who's wielding it.
22. "This is E.G. Marshall inviting you to return to our Mystery Theater for another adventure in the Macabre. Until next time, pleasant dreams?"
23. If the lessons of history teach us any one thing, it is that no one learns the lessons that history teaches.

The following is a list of sigs I have had, or will have (in no particular order).

1. "I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting" - My Dad
2. "Any landing you can walk away from is a good one" - Flight Sim Pilot
3. Life is an adventure
4. Wake up, Zeke! The day ain't gonna waste itself.
5. The chicken and the egg came at the same time... along with the toast and orange juice.
6. There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who are me, and those who wish they were me.
7. Life... It's what happens around you while you're busy reading Slashdot...
8. We don't inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
9. Can't sig now. Gotta read Slashdot.
10. But, you have access to the greatest source of knowledge in the universe.
    Well, I do talk to myself sometimes, yes.
11. "It is my firm belief that helicopters fly because they are so ugly that the ground repels them." - Pittance
12. Freedom is not just another word for doing whatever the US says.
13. Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from reading "Everything I needed to know about life" posters.
14. We have a blind date with destiny...
    ...and it looks like she's ordered the lobster.
15. Eyes sore and red from reading Slashdot long into the night?
    There's a Visine for that.
16. If my dad took a photo, would that make him a "papa"-razzi?
17. Before: 2 Sith, 100s of Jedi.
    After: 2 Sith, 2 Jedi.
    Qui-gon was right. Anakin did bring balance to the force.
18. Where can I get one of these?
19. Mental note: If you're going to clone a grand army, make sure the prototype is a good shot.

There's a new site called Phygg.com that is a cross between the arxiv physics feed and Digg.com in that you can read papers up for prepublication and then vote them up or down. I think this poses an interesting new step in peer review and academic journals in that it gives the public a chance to participate in reading and voting on papers. From there, the journals can separate the wheat from the chaff. While it's not exactly innovative (digg + arxiv = phygg), it'll be interesting to see if people take to it and how good the general public will be at reading lengthy physics papers. MIT's Tech Review has a short blog on the launching.

There's a neat site for Google Chrome users that shows how artists will be able to liberate themselves from Flash and use HTML5 when the standard is finalized and browser independent (if ever that happens). If you're bored and have five minutes and have speakers/headphones, I hope your childhood address shows enough up on here to make it worth your while. My parent's farmhouse had nothing but my hometown had a couple images that brought me back.

Of course prior to this we would have to use flash to enjoy the Aracade Fire's sites.

Hope someone else enjoys this as much as I do.

Tonight on Comedy Central, the first two episodes of the sixth season of Futurama were shown. It's been highly anticipated on Slashdot and as a fan I was satisfied with the return to television. I really liked the first episode and found the second episode mediocre.

*Spoiler Alert*

The first episode, Rebirth, had a lot of elements that Futurama episodes of yore contained that made me love it: social commentary, extrapolation of current technology into future technology, apparent deaths, sci-fi twists and a bit of character development. The trivial elements are certainly present like Fry's homeresque stupidity and cheap jokes but that's not something that distinguishes Futurama from other comedies. I think that the professor's quirky inventions and old age behavior remain strong in this series and for some reason never loses its humor with me. The professor can (and often does) invent anything that is necessary for the plot as well as sending the crew anywhere in the universe to deliver a package. Rebirth has a lot of those classic elements when the professor plays god with bringing the crew back to life as well as going to the cyclophage habitat planet to sacrifice Leela. If this sort of predictable formula annoys your or bores you, Futurama probably got old a while ago but for me the high quality of animation, music and voice acting really make willing to belly up for every contrived new world that is conjured. Rebirth also addresses Fry and Leela's loneliness and isolation but has a cheap cop out (the ones in love turn out to be robots) at the end to avoid any permanent character development at the end.

Episode Two, In-a-Gadda-Da-Leela, was less satisfactory for me because it dealt with an old card: Leela engaging in coitus with the Zapper (and his insecurities). While some parts made me smile, it just wasn't as funny or memorable as the older episodes. Some parts had their moments (Obi Wan Kenobi GPS with a different voice saying the wild cards was a favorite) but the overall story and plot didn't really pass muster for me. I enjoyed the cheesy black and white "The Transcredible Exploits of Zap Brannigan" (reminded me of many MST3K episodes) and of course you have to love Zap heavy episodes with his ill formed sentences and logic. But aside from that, we get a cookie cutter invention from the professor and nothing too impressive with the explanation and resolution of the V-Giny death sphere. I think a lot more could have been done with that.

All in all, not bad. I was hoping for more secondary characters that I've loved from the first four episodes like Roberto or Scruffy. These secondary recurring characters have always been a favorite of mine and a strength of the show. I guess I can't expect them to put one in every episode but I was disappointed there weren't a whole lot from the movies and none from these two episodes. Definitely worth my time to watch and for those of you outside the United States, you can find torrents out there online by searching for Futurama S06E01 and S06E02. I hope they make it all the way through this sixth season and I also hope Comedy Central ponies up for a lot more after that. If there's one show with usable potential, it's Futurama and its endless possibilities. I mean with the amount of money being dumped on other crappy shows, you'd think a fraction of that could be afforded for a show with a highly devoted following. Then again Firefly is long gone.

When it comes to understanding what the Communist Party of China is thinking, it seems one of the few inputs we have is two of China's state run news sites (their English mouthpieces): China Daily and (the official press agency of the PRC) Xinhua. What follows is a brief news analysis of articles from these two sites over the past two days (note I do not speak Chinese and am therefore only digesting news from China in English).

From an article on the fourteenth Jiang Yu, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, is quoted as saying:

And also on that day, they seemed to write off the hacker attacks on Google as a global problem while quoting an unnamed 'senior Chinese information official' (later given only as 'Wang') as saying:

This last article is quite interesting in that it shifts the attention back to pornography and illicit materials, blaming those squarely on other countries. It is assumed this is to reinforce their stated right to enforce censorship on Google. And even placing the onus on other countries to:

Of course, the China Daily article ends with verbage like 'providing a favorable environment for the healthy development of minors' and calls on the government to 'ensure that information flow on the Internet is smooth and timely, and secure and orderly.'

Now, on to today, the fifteenth of January. It seems the goal here is to deflate the impact that Google's exit would have. China Daily has a story of none other than Steve Ballmer's compliance saying:

Really, this article is a consolidation of American news reports on Microsoft's plans in China. A clear sign that Microsoft is willing to play ball, why can't Google?

Then later, the Ministry of Commerce attempts to take the wind out of Google's sails by saying that not only have they not heard anything from Google yet but:

China Daily also appears to call Google's bluff and curiously offers new quotes from the prior day's briefing with Jian Yu:

China Daily paraphrases experts as saying that the 'government will by no means compromise.' Another news article shows no support from the twenty other victims of the attack (aside from Yahoo, who hasn't been mentioned until now) that Google reported and they wrap that up with concerns that an exit from China will hurt Google's stock.

The best part might be the sour grapes editorial from a reader that claims 'Google.cn simply cannot compete with its main domestic rival, Baidu.com' which is completely true in search. But overlooks the previous day's comments from users as saying they were concerned about their Google mail, their access to Google Maps, Google docs and the slough of other services Google provides aside from search.

All of this sounds like a pretty firm "We're shocked you would consider this and don't understand why you are making such a mistake. We will continue to censor to protect our citizens and will not budge an inch for you. Ball's in your court." Well? Will Google act, stall or fold?

There are now at least five Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes up on Hulu! They are "The Starfighters (Mike)," "Secret Agent Super Dragon (Joel)," "Monster A-Go-Go (Joel)," "The Rebel Set (Joel)," and "The Giant Gila Monster (Joel)." Could we be lucky enough to enjoy the rest of MST3K on Hulu in the future?

Like a lot of countries, Australia doesn't quite know what to make of Scientologists. Okay, some Aussies just can't stand 'em. Australia's Daily Telegraph sends about an effort called Youth for Human Rights, a thinly veiled Scientologist front launched to teach kids about human rights. So, if L. Ron Hubbard (scifi author and founder of the Church of Scientology) made your list of Human Rights leaders, where would you put him? This "informative" resource puts him ahead of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. I little bit of legwork casts more evidence of Youth for Human Rights real motives. With a whois turning up registration at 1332 L Ron Hubbard Way. Are you familiar with that address? Xenu-Directory is. So what's the problem? Well, these videos and booklets are being distributed and aimed at Year 6 students and there's absolutely no indication in the material that this is linked to the Church of Scientology. In fact, a warning has gone out to not use any of these materials inside the classroom. Perhaps Australia's inquiry by Senator Xenu ... I mean Xenophon into the CoS is long overdue and it's time everyone look more closely at their international efforts.

Back in 2007, Slashdot covered a story about Media Rights Technology suing everyone for not implementing DRM. Ha ha, weird right? Okay, fast forward to today and it looks like BlueBeat.com (owned by MRT) is under a lot of fire for selling Beatles tunes and I'll bet EMI is having a field day with that. Most interesting about that is that "The ID3 tags of the Beatles songs sold on BlueBeat.com list âoe2009 BlueBeat.comâ as the copyright holder." Okay, that's another topic entirely.

My question is simple though ... what is going on with BlueBeat.com? BlueBeat offers a large selection of MP3s for 25 cents (only 160 kbps though) and you can stream entire albums as many times as you want on their site. So I began my investigative googling looking for MRT to be owned by someone in Germany or Russia and to be completely illegal in the US. But it seems to be a legit operation out of Santa Cruz, CA. So what gives? I mean, BlueBeat has the same crazy terms of service that iTunes does which they can change at anytime but there are so many things wrong with this picture:

1. A music service undercutting everyone else by 75%.
2. A DRM-less product from a company that initially sued everyone for not using DRM -- a company called Media Rights Technology!
3. You can stream whatever you want from the site, whole albums or songs!
4. The company doing this is in the United States of America. Where individuals are fined to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars for sharing songs. What then, does BlueBeat imagine will happen to them legally?

So what am I missing here? Has MRT lost it? Is this a marketing tactic where they receive a DMCA take down, adhere to it and send e-mails to users asking them to delete their MP3s as their ToS says they can do? And from there just keep hosting songs that labels are too lazy to DMCA away? Something stinks but if you bought 100 songs for 25 dollars from BlueBeat and then kept using them, who would be breaking the law? You or BlueBeat?

I don't actually have anything to say. Kathleen is due any day, and I'm looking forward to a few weeks of staying home, getting poor sleep, and changing diapers.
But mostly I'm testing to see if journal saving works properly.

We've made some significant updates to the submission/journal system. Visiting Submissions and Journals yields a new form that allows stuff like tags to the data types. There are a number of annoying bugs, but for the most part the dust is starting to settle. More notes will be coming, but this journal entry is really just me putting the final test on the new Journal form.

I need a place to have a full on rant about this. My Slashdot Journal is as good as any.

Is it so much to ask, that in 2009, the video game industry as a whole would have figured some way around the problem of home routers and getting devices behind them to communicate with devices behind other home routers. Yes, I know, it's not a trivial issue. WAN/LAN IPs, DNS, End to end connectivity, Ports, TCP, UDP, protocols and connections, planes trains and automobiles. Yes, it's not an easy thing to accomplish.

But you've had ten fucking years!!! Or as near as makes no difference.

How many times have I had to reset, reconfigure and reinstall routers? How many times have I had to click through those infuriating HTML configuration pages, one form at a time, in an effort to add, port by port, protocol by protocol, game by game, each and every little irritating requirement just to get the fucking game I bought to play online like Mechwarrior 2 did flawlessly back in 1997!?!?!?!?

I've cracked. I admit it. The final straw was this latest gem from Team Fortress 2, a game I don't even play(I basically manage the router for 5 people). I had to set up port forwarding and QoS (Whatever the fuck that is) just to let the gods damned game to play properly.

• UDP 27000 to 27015 inclusive (Game client traffic)
• UDP 27015 to 27030 inclusive (Typically Matchmaking and HLTV)
• TCP 27020 to 27050 inclusive (Steam downloads)
• TCP 27015 (SRCDS Rcon port)

61 ports. Sixty One ports. And that's just for the forwarding, never mind the QoS malarky. Yeah, Fuck you too Valve. And want to know the best part? It's a server based game!! Why in fuck's name do I need to do any of this?! Oh give me lag any day of the week.

But to be fair, it's not just Value. Far, far from it. It's not even PC developers, each mandating their own custom crafted set of ports and protocols to enable online play behind a router. No, consoles too have gotten in on the game. Take these gems required for the Playstation Network.

• TCP Ports: 80, 443, 5223
• UDP Ports: 3478, 3479, 3658

TCP port 80. Otherwise known as the HTTP port. Great. And what's this? TCP 443. You mean the HTTPS port. Great choice guys. Yeah, thanks for that. I'll forward those right away.

Come on Microsoft. You've been computing specialists for over 30 years. What's needed to run Xbox live behind a router?

• TCP Ports: 80, 53, 3074
• UDP Ports: 88, 53, 3074

Great classy. I lover that overlap with PSN on the Port 80 thing. Can't have them hogging HTTP entirely, especially since you control the DNS ports now. Awesome. Complete clusterfuck. Why doesn't one of you mandate port 22 altogether, so my entire network will be totally inaccessible from outside for anyone not using a game's console.

Oh well, I guess at least with consoles you only have to forward one set of ports for all games right... right?

In order to play GTA IV via the PS3 network you will need to open the following ports on your router:

• UDP ports: 6672, 28900
• TCP ports: 8000-8001, 27900, 28900

AAAAGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!! LEAVE ME ALONE!!!! I'm not a network administrator! I don't have any certs from Cisco!! No! I can't use IPTABLES!! How would I get Linux onto the router in the first place?! What do you want?! Blood?!?! I just want to play games!!!

And don't talk to me about UPnP! Just don't. As far as I can tell, the Useless, Painful 'n Pointless protocol's only meaningful function is to establish connections between devices which confirm UPnP is available, but then don't work anyway. I've never once managed to get a single game to work using it. It has never worked and it will never work. Most companies don't even mention it. They skip straight to port forwarding, gleefully rolling off their own in house list of obnoxious ports.

You know what this is like? It's like every video game publisher and company is trying to stake it's claim to ranges of ports and protocols. By insisting on their own original, capricious and dogmatic set of connection requirements, it's as though Sony, Microsoft, EA, Valve and all the rest are trying to enforce by fiat what would normally require an RFC to be made official. Namely, the assignment of a port. Companies are literally carving out their own space on what is supposed to be a no ownership zone. And trust those armchair experts at Wikipedia, to stick these turf claims in a Registered Ports List. "Oh but, the unregisted ones are in blue OMF". FUCK YOU! There are only 65000 ports, which is too few to risk being lost to this bullshit.

So that's why I think this NAT business hasn't been resolved. Moving the video game industry to a solid standard whereby games automatically established connections(and hang the technical difficulties), would mean that companies would have to give up their little slice of that very relatively small pie of 65000 port numbers. These are corporations we're talking about, and giving up something that big, that central to the functioning of the entire internet, even if it's just a squatters claim, is not a step any of them are willing to take.

So, in my opinion, we're going to be stuck with this NAT port forwarding bullshit for quite some time yet. I fully expect more and more games to lay claim to ever larger pastures of unsettled port space, and continue to do so until the whole spectrum is so fully overloaded that people's routers or patience simply snap under the strain. Mine certainly has.

Mercifully, my ISP seems to allow PPPoE over a router, which thankfully the PS3 and Xbox360 both support. True, it exposes them to the elements in a way having them behind a router would not, but I really don't care any more. NAT is the fucking devil, and I've had enough of having my crank yanked as a pawn in this port squatting farce, so it's a WAN IP for me.

At least until all the IPv4 address run out and I have to set up all this shit again of IPv6 addresses.

We've discussed Eastern District of Texas court in more than a few stories about patent cases. To illustrate what kind of problem we're talking about here, a local Legal Journal has given us last week's review of cases filed in regards to patents in Eastern District of Texas.

They include:

• Aircraft Technical Publishers vs. Avantext Inc. et al which entails 'the reproduction of computer-based information and data concerning the airworthiness requirements and other directives relating to non-commercial aircraft.'
• Realtime Data LLC dba IXO vs. Morgan Stanley et al which entails 'the rights to four U.S. patents relating to data compression.' (6,624,761, 7,161, 506, 7,400,274, 7,417,568)
• SFA Systems LLC vs. 1-800-Flowers.com Inc. et al which entails an Integrated Computerized Sales Force Automation System. And how do you infringe on that? 'By making and using supply chain methods, sales methods, sales systems, marketing methods, marketing systems and inventory systems.' SFA claims, "As a result of the above Defendants' infringement of the '525 Patent, SFA has suffered monetary damages ... in an amount not yet determined, and will continue to suffer such monetary damages in the future unless Defendants' infringing activities are permanently enjoined by this court," the complaint states."

Three cases every week should clog up the system. One has to wonder at the number of case titles ending with "et al" and also in relationship to software patents. A patent system that allows patents for data compression combined with Eastern District of Texas Court might be what we need for this powder keg to ignite and the power drunken sot that is the USPTO admit it has a problem.

Stanislaw Lem was arguably the greatest non-English science fiction writer before his death three years ago and left behind many science fiction novels with messages of satire and intrigue. The Futurological Congress is no different. The book has several motifs throughout it but I found the most prominent to be that we are living in an increasingly medicated society whereby the future may be wonderfully dystopian--in that the horrors of our existence are simply hidden by drugs on top of drugs on top of drugs. With a movie due out shortly by director Ari Folman, it seems like a good time to revisit this often overlooked short classic sci-fi work.

Our hero and narator, Ijon Tichy should be a familiar name to Lem fans or anyone familiar with Lem's Space Diaries in either English or Polish. Tichy acts as a mechanism of sanity in many of Lem's novels just trying to figure out what the devil is up with a messed up planet he lands on or a particular device/person. By this manner, Lem allows himself much discovery on the reader's behalf and by these means can relay the current state of events to the reader without jarringly interrupting the natural flow of things too much. Through this novel's course of Tichy's discoveries, I was suspended from being disturbed by spoon fed explanations most of the time but the word play that occurred in this particular story got to be a bit much and tedious for a sub-150-page paperback hence a missing point in its score.

Tichy is now a member of the Futurological Association and is invited to attend the Eighth Futurological Congress in Nounas, Costa Rica. From the get go, Lem is full of satire with the immediate lampooning of such self-appointed associations (and maybe even academia) by pointing out that there are two kinds of individuals in these associations: the ones that attend every single meeting/conference and those that don't leave their offices period.

One of the themes throughout the book is a borderline anti-American sentiment about the development of munitions and bombs. I'm familiar with Lem's ability to criticize both sides of the Cold War in a single paragraph although The Futurological Congress seems to focus more heavily on American military and pharmaceutical faults. Lem must have been well aware of kidnappings in Latin America when he wrote this book because that's one aspect he got right about the future of that area. Due to heavy activist presence in Costa Rica trying to capture and ransom Americans, a military attache is accompanying the U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica to speak at the congress but in the middle of his speech an unfortunate delegate from India reaches into his breast pocket to grab a handkerchief to wipe his nose. This delegate standing next to Tichy is immediately dispensed with by the bodyguards of the ambassador and, thanks to 'humanitarian ballistics,' Tichy only gets a spattering of blood on him instead of the bullet passing through the target and injuring more people.

Some background on Lem may help you understand this satire. He was born a Catholic Pole with Jewish ancestry and seemed to run the gauntlet of oppression. He survived World War II with fake papers as a mechanic/welder and due to his "bourgeois origin" could not study at the Polytechnic during Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland after the end of the war. He became an Atheist stating, "for moral reasons ... the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created ... intentionally." Knowing this, his satire and bitter critique of all things may not surprise you. On his way to the conference--aside from meeting an orgy of liberated publishers--he encounters an 'anti-papist' who is a Catholic on his way to kill the Pope with a gun of a massive caliber. The anti-papist's surprising motive is none other than The Holy Bible where Abraham is ordered to kill his son Isaac by God. Except that the anti-papist would be killing a father, the most holiest father. And this would be a great personal sacrifice and the "utmost of martyrdom" as the anti-papist "would suffer terrible torment and his soul eternal damnation." Again, Lem predicts today's world, we have no limit of people eager to misinterpret scriptures of any religion.

Back to the conference--since there's 168 attendees from 64 different countries, each person gets four minutes to present their paper. And everyone is only really interested in their own work and telling everyone else about it in a bit of a narcissistic way. This leads the first member to spend his four minutes thusly:

The Futurologists in this novel are probably best described as each one being a less optimistic Ray Kurzweil in that they all seem to be spouting their own version of obstacles humanity is soon to face and consequently their ideas to remedy it. For instance the second delegate from Japan unveils a 10,000:1 model of a housing complex some 800 stories tall with self sustaining everything and mobile in the ocean! It's the future! In fact, everything is recycled! Even the food is recycled waste and excrement from the people. The sausage left out in the hall is actually reconstituted human waste (at which point everyone in the audience stops eating and shuffles the food underneath their seats). This sets the tone for a few of the minor themes of the novel and gives you an idea of how Lem takes subtle jabs at everyone. For example another United States delegate takes the floor to talk about population problems that are rapidly developing. He outlines seven solutions: "mass media and mass arrests, compulsory celibacy, full-sale deeroticization, onanization, sodomization, and for repeated offenders--castration." The book makes other references to population control and one character notes that continuing trends of population would eventually result in human beings exploding outward at the speed of light. Nature is addressed in an equally hilarious means as later in the book all animals have been extinct and replaced with what appear to be better controlled robots.

While in his room, Tichy makes the mistake of drinking the water and discovers that the water is spiked with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. He assumes it's the work of the revolutionaries and decides not to tell anyone but as the violence outside escalates and he mentions it to a fellow futurologist, he discovers that it is the rise of chryptochemocracy! With the hotel's staff, he quickly equips a gas mask as it becomes clear that chemical warfare is afoot ... of a psychedelic nature. Planes are called in equiped with LTN bombs. LTN stands for "Love Thy Neighbor" which is pretty indicative of today's munitions and their goals with surgical strikes. Hilariously enough, the very hotel in which the congress is convening is immediately bombed by mistake.

After pages of chemical warfare that affect the crowd's temperament and counter chemicals that affect the crowd's temperament, Tichy and a friend find oxygen tanks and masks and descend to the sewers where the hotel staff is relaxing comfortably with their own oxygen tanks and masks.

Unfortunately, Tichy and his companion do not have enough oxygen to last the night and therefore must take shifts suffering hallucinations. What follows from this point is a series of hallucinations that Tichy has ending in him coming to in the sewer. Tichy has several of these bizarre hallucinations ending in him being shot by revolutionaries in the sewer. He comes to certain that he is still hallucinating and refuses to believe anyone he is not. As a result, they freeze him until they can find a cure for his mental illness and he is unthawed many years later in a reality where 'psychemicals' keep everyone happy. This overmedicated society disgusts and frightens Tichy at times. It has gotten so bad that a company now exists where you can order a psychem that allows you the satisfaction of doing evil upon another person. Murder's no longer a problem, you just get reanimated. The worst possible offense is using psychems on an individual without their consent.

Tichy attempts to adapt and I couldn't help but be reminded of Fry in Futurama with similar humor employed nearly thirty years before it. As Tichy reconnects with his futurologist friend (people stopped dying as technology caught up a la Kurzweil), he discovers something unsettling about the drugs everyone is taking. He discovers that there's mascons that act as blockers to your senses and replace it with a superficial reality. And we start to understand why everything is so mysteriously idyllic while at the same times animals have been extinct for many years and the planet is at an overburdening 26 billion people. Tichy's friend hands him two vials that will unblock the layers of mascons. You see, the 'architects' of this current psychem reality have patched and repatched side effects of psychems and mascons with more psychems and mascons in the air and water supply! I'll leave The Matrix-like vials and harsh transition from utopia to dystopia for people interested in reading the book.

This book was a joy to read and although the very end is a bit dissatisfying to me, the satire and pessimism inherent to Lem's writings have influenced me and continue to influence me heavily. I like to think that Lem borrowed from sci-fi writers like Philip K. Dick and that other science fiction authors like Douglas Adams have borrowed from Lem despite the language barrier and difference in culture. While Lem may not be the icon that Lovecraft, Clarke and Asimov have become, I certainly hope that people recognize his large corpus of works for more than just Solaris as I've enjoyed many novels by him. Lem offers a rare dark comedy in science fiction with The Futurological Congress.

You can pick up the English version of The Futurological Congress at Amazon . And catch the Ari Folman movie where the present day will be live action while the unfathomable future will be animated to adapt to the stark impossibilities the book portrays.