I for one already don't read the New York Times online. Their registration screens are a nightmare and BugMeNot doesn't seem to work there very often.

I have pumped WAY more than $1000 into my home-built, and I strongly suspect it doesn't show up in anybody's statistics.

Take a good look at what is going on in Iran and tell me this kind of surveillance is harmless. And make no mistake about it: These folks are interested in which laws YOU break, not which laws THEY break. Do you seriously think an "eye in the sky" would have stopped Rumsfeld from allowing the attack on the pentagon in September of 2001? Or the coup d'etat in November of 1963? This is about more power to the powerful, it's not about enforcing the jaywalking law.

Yes, I did read him in High School and upon attempting to reread him years later, he was virtually unreadable. But then I'm not sure I'd like the Three Musketeers today either, or the Bounty trilogy. I'm not sure it's about style, just worldview, I think. I pretty much stopped reading SF a good while again, though that had more to do with the availability of pretty much nothing other than swords and sorcery on the one hand and Dystopian cyberpunk on the other. But then, has there been anything in science lately that warrants any kind of gee-whiz fiction based on it?

As for Zelazny, he wrote some pretty good stuff other than the 2 Avalon series, the first of which was bearable, the second, not. He did some really good novels based on eastern religions in a future world. But Avalon brought in the bucks, which is almost always a writer's major concern.

[[NOTICE: THIS IS NOT FLAMEBAIT--at least it isn't meant to be]]

Actually, about all I remember about this novel other than the space station is that it was incredibly boring all the way to the even more boring space station sequence at the end: Gee, let's describe a trip on a miniature railroad in even more detail than Zelazny's descriptions of hellrides. Yes, it may have been prescient. But could it not have been readable too? Sorry, but I grew up reading Asimov, and enjoyed it, though he wasn't half as prescient. SF is escapist fiction with a little futuristic science thrown in. It's not supposed to be Scientific American Time Travel Edition. Oh well, mod me down if you wish.

Talk about changing the terms of the discussion in order to try to score points. Where did this mythological stove come from? What does it have to do with self image? Nothing!

Just what exactly do these Obamadroids think they are going to see you do while pissing in front of a camera? Am I missing something here? Perhaps it's time for some "preventive impeachment."

John Kennedy figured out how to do it...before they blew his brains out.

Actually, the REALLY ancient world was matriarchal and had temple harlots whose function was to transmit the REAL love of God(dess) to her followers. This had nothing to do with pornography, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of sexual repression. Also, I think you folks need to distinguish between the good ole' US of A and the rest of the world. USians seem to forget that their own peculiar attitudes are not representative of the present era.

I guess that wasn't a surveillance camera behind Winston Smith's mirror in 1984? The reviewer is a twit. And an obvious agent of the forces of Big Brotherism. Under what rock do they find these folks?

A good point. And the digitization work of Google has refreshed awareness of the meaning of surviving texts studied by the antiquarians of the 19th Century, especially the more heretical characters like Rev. Robert Taylor.

"Non-canonical gospels"? As opposed to pre-Christian Gnostic and related texts that shed light on the true origins of Christianity? Talk about using a razor blade to make subtle distinctions. And while we're on the subject, the digitization of 19th Century antiquarian works has brought back into the public debate ideas that are supported by surviving ancient texts but ignored by modern archaeologists who would rather dig up a pot than read a text in Greek or Coptic.

Papyrus was valuable at the time. Shopping lists would have been written on pieces of broken ceramics, not on papyrus. And even overdue bills can be instructive. Remember, most of the Minoan Linear B documents are just warehouse records.

Indeed.

And keep in mind what was going on at the time: The religion of Mithra was growing in the West; the Gnostics were a force to be reckoned with in Egypt; and the followers of the 1st Century BC Yeshu(a) the Nazar were slowly morphing into the so-called Christians. We may finally get a glimpse of the true historical origins of Christianity unvarnished by the official Church authorities, before and just after Constantine took the major religions of the Roman Empire and merged them into a single syncretistic faith.

John the Baptist=AD 5.
Yeshu(a) the Nazir=circa 102 BC.

http://neros.lordbalto.com/ChapterTwelve.htm

Trust me on this one.