My recollection of the Heinlein version was that service was a requirement of voting and the government had to bend things for people with limitations... But he may have approached the theme in various ways in various books.

The version I would favor would have involve options, but the length of time would vary to balance things out. If they want more people in the military, then they shorten the time period until they attract more people. However I'm not sure if that approach would lead to mathematical convergence or divergence...

Quoted against the censor mods. On the substance, I won't be surprised if the main result is a bunch of "Your check must be in the mail" lawsuits from companies waiting for the check...

But that may be a side effect of reading Facebook about another CEO who doesn't seem so nice?

You piqued my curiosity, but not enough to do a bunch of reading on the lack of clarity...

However I will say that I think there is a kind of creativity which involves combining older ideas in new ways.

Sorry, but no more time just now, so I guess this should be filed under "mostly an ACK".

Z^-1

Mostly the ACK, but perhaps my personal problem that I have not been interested in any of those three stories, though I may have read a book version of Jurassic Park... I'm pretty sure I've seen a book called "The Godfather" and that the cover said it was related to the movie, and I can't recall any book version of Fight Club. I'm not sure if it matters, but were these books written before or after the movies? My thesis would be that a seminal book will get squeezed when it becomes a movie, but going the other way it will be hard for the book based on the movie to expand the ideas and stay on script, so to speak.

I don't watch many movies. Never watched many, and far fewer lately. However I am unable to recall an example of a movie that I thought was better than the book. Most often I felt like the movie eliminated many of the imaginative possibilities of the book. Largely a matter of bandwidth? Movies flood the zone, filling both the visual and audio channels and requiring almost all of your mental capacity to keep up. More so as the effects have become more special and dazzling. For books you have to do most of the mental work yourself and I think that's a fundamentally healthy kind of mental exercise.

Do you have some movie in mind that you think was better than the book?

Calculate the size of the required solar panel as you get farther from the sun and notice that AC is brainfarting again.

I sure hoped for some when we all needed it.

Interesting replies, and thanks. Should I add the note that Lenovo bought the ThinkPad business from IBM as part of that branch of the corporate histories?

Actually the frightening part of the story is that the fastest was remotely operated. Humans today, but operated by a malignant ASI tomorrow. Well, hopefully not tomorrow. I'd prefer not to see the end of this story and I'm hoping to be around tomorrow and even for a few more years. But RSN?

Too many books could be cited, but it's not like today's Slashdotters seem to have much interest in books. Can't resist a recent one with high relevance to this story: Army of None by Paul Scharre about autonomous weapons. Yes his focus was on the autonomous ones, which look bad, but I think they will obviously be lighter, faster, and just more dangerous if the intelligence part is remote, hidden, and harder to attack.

Why would the ASI do it? Would you trust us humans with your survival? As we grub about for money and sex? Just now working on "Facebook Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Nuclear Reactors" about how we humans are getting used as fuel in viral websites that aren't ending well... And I can't think of any website these days that is doing much to make me into a better person. But do I need that as much as Zuck? So I believe some wannabe Bond villain is going to unleash his malevolent ASI when it promises something like "Today I could kill all the other ASIs" or "I can get all the money in the world for you."

Ask your city managers to prohibit drones.

Drones are dangerous. We have heard of only a few serious accidents. If drone delivery continues, there will be many more accidents, including a package delivered by a drone hitting someone.