"Asimov will be left spinning in his grave!" The sci-fi legend's true believers cursed our July cover story, appalled by the faithless film adaptation of I, Robot and the suggestion that their idol's writing style was less than divine. Others were simply ticked that their beloved robots didn't make our "Hot Bots" list. Typical lament: "How - HOW - could you have omitted the droids in Blade Runner?!" (Please just don't sick Roy Batty on us, OK?)
Also throwing conniptions were Canadians chafed by "The Trillion-Barrel Tar Pit." "On numerous matters, you Americans treat us like dogshit," bemoaned one Maple Leafer. "Now you discover we have more oil than Saudi Arabia. Much more. So we are your 'friendly neighbour to the north!' Wow!! We are just thrilled to bits!!!" Talk about sweet crude.
Lastly, thanks to the reader who ripped the mag's "worst trait":
"a narcissistic technophilia blind to the suffering of the world." But enough about you - check out the cool new spybot in Fetish!
The Gods Themselves
The photo of Isaac Asimov ("Rise of the Machines," Wired 12.07) made me feel very sad - we were dear friends and were always making fun of each other.
I'm sure you heard the story about a plane in danger of crashing and how one of the passengers tried to distract himself by reading one of Isaac's stories. I followed this up immediately by saying the reason he did that was, if the plane did crash, death would have been a merciful release. I believe Isaac often repeated this story.
Arthur C. Clarke
Colombo, Sri Lanka
I have to warn you that statements like "Asimov's stories aren't brilliant" and "His work is a kind of proto-fiction" won't sit well with fans, especially in an article plugging a movie that throws away Asimov's essential story in favor of a special effects-driven film to fit the summer blockbuster form. He may not have been John Steinbeck, but his books have a fascination and epic brilliance that is unmatched in the genre. Proof of his genius is in such stories as "Nightfall," with its strongly developed characters and intense human emotions, or the Foundation series, with unparalleled depth of development and unification on a grand scale.
Nick Slabaugh
Elizabethtown, Indiana
Your writer Cory Doctorow quotes I, Robot director Alex Proyas saying, "It's the most faithful cinematic reworking of Asimov's stories to date, true to the spirit and ideas, yet reenvisioned." Really? From the trailer and reviews I've read, it sounds as if those robots break the hell out of the First Law, which means that Proyas ignored Asimov's point and may as well have called the movie Robots Gone Wild. Why give Hollywood the benefit of the doubt? See any of the Philip K. Dick adaptations for sufficient reason to stay home.
Michael Dinsmore
Gaithersburg, Maryland
Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds
The buffed bots of the future won't amount to more than a molehill without a quantum leap in reasoning ("The Humanoid Race," Wired 12.07). I want a software algorithm that can understand context rather than a remote-controlled machine that can stand on one foot. In the humanoid race, my money is on Google, not Sony.
Jonas Lamis
Austin, Texas
Your robot stories show the future is not far away. Think about the implications! Manufacturing could return to the US if it were done by robots (assuming the bots don't get out of control and inadvertently destroy the world). Work would be performed faster because robots don't need breaks, food, or sleep. Robots might even be able to repair themselves, eliminating more human jobs.
Robots will begin with the repetitive and physical jobs but quickly graduate to more difficult tasks. Of course, if high-end jobs migrate overseas and lower-end jobs go to robots, where does that leave all the displaced workers? Maybe the age of leisure and easy living (like in The Jetsons) will have finally arrived! On the other hand, we might face another Luddite revolution.
Bob Jones
Millbrae, California
Open Wide
Darl McBride is just the latest to argue that protecting intellectual property will, in the long run, encourage innovation rather than stifle it ("The Linux Killer," Wired 12.07). But the problem with the Richard Stallman model of development - carefully checking legal rights as you creep along - is that it assumes that abundant creative energy is lying around just waiting to be harnessed. Nothing is further from the truth; genuinely good ideas are rare. Linus Torvalds' model allowed good ideas to flourish by not requiring the creative people to stop and check themselves. Yes, perhaps someone should have done the legal footwork, but without Torvalds' model there would be no Linux. How can I say this with such assurance? Look at GNU.
Chia-Pei Chang
Chicago, Illinois
Hey, let's save all the prose and identify Darl McBride and Mike Anderer for what they are: assholes who produce nothing, own nothing, but who sue as if they did.
Chris Rikli
Lincoln, Nebraska
Northern Exposure
Brendan I. Koerner comments, "So forget those scraps over prescription drug prices and trade policy - Canada has never looked like such a pal" ("The Trillion-Barrel Tar Pit," Wired 12.07).
Yeah, we're pals, for sure. Canadians can also forget the nasty unpleasantness of softwood logging disputes and wheat tariffs. It's all in the past. Nafta under the bridge. What kind of terms will be shoved - oops, did I say that out loud? So sorry. What I mean is, how wonderful it is to do business with our friends from the south. We're pals.
Greg Lindenbach
Vancouver, British Columbia
I found your article on the Athabasca "tar pit" interesting but more than a bit misleading. I was a manager for the US Department of Energy on the Synfuels project at the Laramie Energy Technology Center for several years. Koerner had many of his facts correct but was evidently not aware of factors that directly impact the use of tar sand as a source of petroleum (aka sweet crude). First, unlike standard petroleum, the chemistry of tar sand bitumen is nonstoichiometric - the ratios of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen do not come in even numbers. This may seem trivial, but without considerable posttreatment, nearly all petroleum derivatives would be unusable in, for example, cars and planes. Second, all tar sand, both in Canada and the US, contains a small but significant amount of heavy metals, including those that almost immediately stop catalytic converters from operating.
Ken Goldstein
Kaneohe, Hawaii
Please Don't Squeeze the Escalade
OK, RFIDs aren't the mark of the beast ("Attention Shoppers," Wired 12.07). But the twisted view they will present to marketers holds the potential for creating far worse things that go bump in the night.
When RFID tags are installed in SUVs equipped with bizarrely huge engines, 25 cupholders, and a man with a foreign accent to tuck drivers in at night, will carmakers see real-time RFID data and conclude that the ordinary pickup truck is dead? RFIDs will merely confirm to the beastie boys what they wanted to hear to begin with.
I wonder, when nanotags are woven into each of the 300 sheets on a toilet paper roll, will they scream "Eureka!" at the sight of all that real-time data and shout, "We have seen the marketers, and they are us!"
Richard E. Giovanelli
Amherst, Virginia
Mmm, Outsourcing
I take issue with Jason Pontin's stance that outsourcing is generally good for the US economy (View, "The Micro-Multinational," Wired 12.07). Outsourcing is akin to making a skyscraper taller by taking material from its lower floors. At first glance outsourcing is a brilliant idea: Pay someone in India $12,000 a year to do the same thing someone in the US gets $70,000 for. Cut costs to the point that you have an edge over competitors, and the consumer gets a high-quality product for less money. The problem is that if everyone starts doing it, the consumer won't be able to buy the product, because he will have just gotten laid off from his job because of outsourcing.
Byron Katz
Atlanta, Georgia
Bill Gates Owes You Money!
I loved the article about the email-forwarding hoax; it brought back a lot of memories ("FW: Send This Article to 10 Friends and Win Quick Cash Now!" Wired 12.07). I was on the Microsoft information security team back when it all started and answered abuse@microsoft.com at the time. I got flooded. What were we doing to stop it? Who started it? Were we going after the source? We had people begging us to do something as it crashed their mail servers. It was an amusing time - at least in retrospect. It's amazing how something like this lives on.
Mike Lyman
Huntsville, Alabama
Measuring Up
Regarding "Know Your Limits" (Infoporn, Wired 12.07): As a new reader of your otherwise great magazine, which unabashedly caters to America's techno-intelligentsia, I am rather perturbed by your insistence on the antediluvian use of inches and degrees Fahrenheit. When is America going to join the other 95 percent of the human race and finally go metric?
James Olcese
Tallahassee, Florida
According to "Know Your Limits," the maximum distance we can see is 15 billion light-years. Hmm This assumes there's a chunk of matter 15 billion light-years away from us worth looking at. If that were the case, how would it have gotten there, assuming the big bang theory is correct and that matter travels slower than the speed of light? Rather, it's possible that we can see an infinite distance and that the universe is probably much smaller than 15 billion light-years.
Andy Roberts
Melrose, Massachusetts
Sweatshop
Found (Wired 12.07) confuses electric energy with electric power and peddles the false notion that cyclists could produce meaningful amounts of electric energy and earn a few dollars an hour for their efforts.
Residential consumers buy electric energy by the kilowatt-hour. Electric power is simply the rate of energy production or consumption and is measured in watts. The retail price of a kilowatt-hour of electric energy is between 10 and 20 cents. A good cyclist can deliver 200 watts of power for a period of time that depends on the cyclist's conditioning, earning a below-sweatshop wage of less than 1 penny per hour (assuming a typical wholesale cost of 4 cents per kilowatt-hour). And, having pedaled 10 hours for 8 cents of earnings, a good cyclist would have to pedal for another five hours to heat the water for a hot shower.
Joseph P. Pugarelli Jr.
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Undo
• Spin Control: The Freehand Mg yo-yo is more than 99 percent magnesium (Fetish, Wired 12.07).
• What a Concept: The background image in "Double-Barreled Development" (Play, Wired 12.07) is a conceptual design, by Bungie Studios, for Marathon.
