At the Creative Arts Emmys on Wednesday night, The Mandalorian not only scored its first Emmy but also won the first Emmy for Disney+. Deadline reports: As a brand new streamer, this year marks the first year of eligibility for Disney+. The Mandalorian has racked up a staggering 15 Emmy nominations with 8 of those trophies being handed out tonight. Outstanding Special Visual Effects is the first win for the sci-fi series that stars Pedro Pascal as the titular masked hero and introduced the world to Baby Yoda -- which won everyone's hearts. This win will likely be the first of many tonight and at Sunday's ceremony. The Mandalorian is also up for Outstanding Drama Series as well as Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance for Taika Waitti's role as droid IG-11 and Outstanding Guest Actor In A Drama Series for Giancarlo Esposito's performance as Moff Gideon.

Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow (also a former EFF staffer and activist) explains why he's crowdfunding his new audiobook online. Despite the large publishers for his print editions, "I can't get anyone to do my audiobooks. Amazon and its subsidiary Audible, which controls 90% of the audiobook sales, won't carry any of my audiobooks because I won't let them put any of their digital rights management on it.

"I don't want you locked in with their DRM as a condition of experiencing my work," he explains in a video on Kickstarter. "And so I have to do it myself."

He's promising to sell the completed book through all the usual platforms "except Audible," because "I want to send a message. If we get a lot of pre-orders for this, it's going to tell something to Amazon and Audible about how people prioritize the stories they love over the technology they hate, and why technological freedom matters to people.

"It's also going to help my publisher and other major publishers understand that there is an opportunity here to work with crowdfunding platforms in concert with the major publishers' platforms to sell a lot of books in ways that side-step the monopolists, and that connect artists and audiences directly."

it's the third book in a series which began with the dystopian thriller Little Brother (recommended by Neil Gaiman) and continued with a sequel named Homeland. ("You may have seen Edward Snowden grab it off his bedstand and put it in his go bag and go into permanent exile in Hong Kong in the documentary Citizen 4," Doctorow says in his fundraising video.) The newest book, Attack Surface, finds a "technologist from the other side" — a surveillance contractor — now reckoning with their conscience while being hunted with the very cyber-weapons they'd helped to build. "There are a lot of technologists who are reckoning with the moral consequences of their actions these days," Doctorow says, adding "that's part of what inspired me to write this...

"Anyone who's been paying attention knows that there's been a collision between our freedom and our technology brewing for a long time."

Just three days after launching the Kickstarter campaign, Doctorow had already raised over $120,000 over his original goal of $7,000 — with 26 days left to go. And he also promises that the top pledge premium is for real....

$10,000	You and Cory together come up with the premise for his next story in the "Little Brother" universe.
$75 or more	All three novels as both audiobooks and ebooks
$40 or more	All three novels as audiobooks
$35 or more	All three novels as ebooks
$25 or more	The audiobook and the ebook of Cory's new novel, Attack Surface
$15 or more	The audiobook for Attack Surface
$14 or more	The new book Attack Surface in ebook format as a .mobi/.epub file
$11 or more	The second book in the series, Homeland, in ebook format as a .mobi/.epub file
$10 or more	The first novel in the series in ebook format as a .mobi/.epub file
$1 or more	Cory will email you the complete text of "Little Brother," the first book in the series, cryptographically signed with his private key

A reader shares a report from Space.com: It's been an incredible 54 years since "Star Trek" first debuted. On Tuesday (Sept. 8), actors from across the multi-decade franchise will celebrate an online "Star Trek" day with panels and discussions, while discussing the series' emphasis on diversity. More than three hours of free virtual panels will play at the Star Trek Day website here starting at 12 p.m. PDT (3 p.m. EDT or 1900 GMT). The multi-hour online event comes in the wake of a CBS announcement Sept. 2 that "Star Trek" will feature its first nonbinary and transgender characters in Season 3 of "Star Trek: Discovery," which premieres Oct. 15. Adira will be a nonbinary character played by non-binary actor Blu del Barrio, while transgender actor Ian Alexander will play Gray.

CBS All Access also pledged to donate $1 for every person who tweets the hashtag #StarTrekUnitedGives on Tuesday between 12 a.m. and 11:59 a.m. PDT (between 3 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 8 and 2:59 a.m. Wednesday, Sept. 9 EDT, or between 0700 Tuesday, Sept. 8 and 0659 Wednesday, Sept. 9 GMT). The donations will go to "organizations who do the real-world work of championing equality, social justice and the pursuit of scientific advancements," CBS said in a statement. The organizations include the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering and the Equal Justice Initiative. The article has included the full schedule for the event.

Entrepreneur magazine writes: Although his days are presumably filled with Tesla, SpaceX, cyber pigs and lots and lots of tweeting, it seems Elon Musk also finds the time to make reading part of his routine. The billionaire businessman is known for sharing (and oversharing) all his recommendations and thoughts on Twitter, so it's no surprise that books are part of that.

Most Recommended Books compiled a list of all the books Musk has commented on in the past several years, and you can see all 61 here. But if you're short on time today, click through to see 11 of the most interesting picks from his list.
The list includes Peter Thiel's 2014 best-seller Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, as well as business magnate Richard Branson's 2011 book Screw Business As Usual.

Musk also calls a 2004 biography of Howard Hughes "a cautionary tale," and a 2005 biography of Stalin "One of the few books so dark I had to stop reading." And for a 2011 biography of Catherine the Great, he wrote "I know what you're probably thinking ... did she really f* a horse?"

His favorite books about space include John Drury Clark's Ignition! as well as Modern Engineering for Design of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines. But there's also Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. ("My favorite spaceship ever is in [this book].") And he calls Isaac Asimov's Foundation series "fundamental to [the] creation of SpaceX."

Also on the list is Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (which Bill Gates also named as one of his 10 favorite books about technology) as well as Frank Herbert's Dune, which Musk calls "Brilliant," while noting that Herbert "advocates placing limits on machine intelligence." In fact, for eight different books on the list he'd added the same cautionary warning: "Hopefully not too optimistic about AI."

He also says he read Karl Marx's Das Kapital at the age of 14, and also read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (which Musk called "a counterpoint to communism and useful as such, but should be tempered with kindness.")

But Musk says his favorite book ever is J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Sci-fi franchise Star Trek is set to introduce its first transgender and non-binary characters. The characters are to appear in the third series of Star Trek: Discovery, producers said on Wednesday. The trans character, Gray, will be played by trans actor Ian Alexander, and likewise non-binary Adira will be portrayed by Blu del Barrio. "Star Trek has always made a mission of giving visibility to underrepresented communities," said a producer. The show's co-runner and executive producer Michelle Paradise added: "It believes in showing people that a future without division on the basis of race, gender, gender identity or sexual orientation is entirely within our reach."

Data from the nonprofit National UFO Reporting Center, which records UFO-related events, shows that sightings are up 51 percent so far this year compared to the same period in 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The New York Post reports: Among the 5,000 sightings recorded this year, 20 percent of them occurred in April -- the height of the COVID-19 crisis and lockdown, according to the news outlet. Peter Davenport, 72, who has directed the organization since 1994, says his phone has been ringing off the hook with reports of extraterrestrial accounts. Davenport of the city of Harrington in Washington state, collects firsthand accounts through his website and by phone and has been answering 25 to 50 calls a day.

Netflix today announced its plans to turn Cixin Liu's "Three-Body Problem" trilogy into an original, English-language science fiction series. From a report: The show will be executive produced and written by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (the "Game of Thrones" showrunners signed a multi-year deal with Netflix last year that is reportedly worth more than $200 million), along with Alexander Woo, who previously served as showrunner for "The Terror: Infamy." "The Last Jedi" director Rian Johnson and his producing partner Ram Bergman are on board as executive producers (Benioff and Weiss spent some time working on a since-abandoned Star Wars trilogy), while Liu and his American translator Ken Liu (no relation) will serve as consulting producers. "I have the greatest respect for and faith in the creative team adapting The Three-Body Problem for television audiences," said Cixin Liu in a statement. "I set out to tell a story that transcends time and the confines of nations, cultures and races; one that compels us to consider the fate of humankind as a whole. It is a great honor as an author to see this unique sci-fi concept travel and gain fandom across the globe and I am excited for new and existing fans all over the world to discover the story on Netflix."

According to Variety, the sci-fi series "Altered Carbon" has been canceled at Netflix, after airing just two seasons. From the report: The second season of the sci-fi series aired on the streaming service back in February, while the first season aired in 2018. An anime special titled "Resleeved," which was set before the events of Season 1, was released in 2019. The series was based on the novel of the same name by Richard K. Morgan. It followed the adventures of interstellar warrior Takeshi Kovacs, who was played by Joel Kinnaman in Season 1 and by Anthony Mackie in Season 2. "Altered Carbon" took place in a futuristic world where the human mind has been digitized and a person can transfer their consciousness from one body to the next. According to an individual with knowledge of the decision, the decision to cancel the show was made due to Netflix's traditional approach of cost versus viewership of a series.

An anonymous reader quotes Rolling Stone: To mark what would have been author Ray Bradbury's 100th birthday on August 22nd, the Library of Congress, the Los Angeles Public Library and libraries from across the nation have banded together for a virtual "read-a-thon" dedicated to Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

Actors William Shatner and Rachel Bloom, authors Susan Orlean, Marlon James and Neil Gaiman and dozens more will each introduce or read a portion of the landmark 1953 novel. "Those segments, and a few from celebrity guests, will be edited into one continuous reading of the entire book, creating four hours of thought-provoking entertainment. Some readers will record from their homes, others from their hometown," organizers of the Read-a-Thon said in a statement. The event will premiere on August 22nd at 4:30pm EST at the Ray Bradbury Read-a-Thon site. the four-hour stream will rebroadcast there until September 5th.

"Self-driving cars are bullshit," writes Cory Doctorow: I'm a science fiction writer, so I quite enjoy thinking about self-driving cars. They make for really interesting analogies about data, liability, self-determination, information security and openness... But I'm a science fiction writer and that means I can tell the difference between "thought experiments" and "real things." Alas, the same cannot be said of corporate America.

For example, according to its own IPO filings, Uber can only be profitable if it invents fully autonomous vehicles and replaces every public transit ride in the world with them. Elon Musk — a man whose "green electric car company" is only profitable thanks to the carbon credits it sells to manufacturers of the dirtiest SUVs in America, without which those planet-killing SUVs would not exist — makes the same mistake. Musk wants to abolish public transit and replace it with EVs (he says that public transit makes you sit next to strangers who might be serial killers, which tells you a lot about his view of humanity).

Now, both Uber and Musk are both wrong as a matter of simple geometry. Multiply the space occupied by all those AVs by the journeys people in cities need to make by the additional distances of those journeys if we need road for all those cars, and you run out of space... these fairy tales require so much credulity to be taken seriously that they strain even the car-addled imaginations of American automotive culture, and also rely on the irrational exuberance inspired by imaginary self-driving cars to propagate and persist.

But that exuberance is sorely misplaced. Machine learning systems have brittle and unpredictable failure modes that can be triggered by accident or deliberately. The unconstrained problem of navigating busy cities with unquantifiable human activities is insoluble with ML.

Or, at least, it's insoluble if you care about whether cars kill even more people in even less predictable ways than they do now...
Doctorow adds that a key plot point in the third book in his "Little Brother" series (coming out in October) is "subverted, lethal autonomous vehicles." But Doctorow also shares a link to his short story "Car Wars," commissioned by Deakin University to explore the sociotechnological issues around autonomous vehicle.

It begins with a high school warning parents about students performing "dangerous modifications" to their car in violation of new federal laws -- three student vehicles were already confiscated for "operating with unlicensed firmware." (And "one of those cases has been referred to the police as the student involved was a repeat offender.")

But as the school launches its random vehicle firmware audits, a developer sends a desperate message to his followers on Twitter about something even more disturbing that's happening in real-time...

According to The New York Times, a secretive task force called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force is expected to release new and alarming findings that may involve vehicles made of materials not of this plant. From the report: Despite Pentagon statements that it disbanded a once-covert program to investigate unidentified flying objects, the effort remains underway -- renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, where officials continue to study mystifying encounters between military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles. Pentagon officials will not discuss the program, which is not classified but deals with classified matters. Yet it appeared last month in a Senate committee report outlining spending on the nation's intelligence agencies for the coming year. The report said the program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, was "to standardize collection and reporting" on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, and was to report at least some of its findings to the public every six months. While retired officials involved with the effort -- including Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader -- hope the program will seek evidence of vehicles from other worlds, its main focus is on discovering whether another nation, especially any potential adversary, is using breakout aviation technology that could threaten the United States.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who is the acting chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told a CBS affiliate in Miami this month that he was primarily concerned about reports of unidentified aircraft over U.S. military bases -- and that it was in the government's interest to find out who was responsible. He expressed concerns that China or Russia or some other adversary had made "some technological leap" that "allows them to conduct this sort of activity." Rubio said some of the unidentified aerial vehicles over U.S. bases possibly exhibited technologies not in the U.S. arsenal. But he also noted: "Maybe there is a completely, sort of, boring explanation for it. But we need to find out."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: San Diego Comic-Con -- like just about every large conference, convention, and gathering in 2020 -- has had to switch to an online-only virtual format this year due to the continuing pandemic. Media companies that usually have a large presence at events like SDCC worked hard to create streaming alternative content -- but it seems they forgot to tell their copyright bots.

ViacomCBS kicked things off today with an hour-long panel showing off its slew of current and upcoming Star Trek projects: Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, and Strange New Worlds. The panel included the cast and producers of Discovery doing a read-through of the first act of the season 2 finale, "Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2." The "enhanced" read-through included sound effects, effects shots, and storyboard images meant to bolster the actors as they delivered lines from their living rooms and home offices. Even if the presentation didn't look like a real episode of Discovery to the home viewer, it apparently sounded close enough: after the Star Trek Universe virtual panel began viewers began to lose access to the stream. In place of the video, YouTube displayed a content ID warning reading: "Video unavailable: This video contains content from CBS CID, who has blocked it on copyright grounds." After being blacked out for about 20 minutes, the panel was restored, and the recording of the virtual panel has no gaps in playback.

A fifteen-year-old cartoon is an unlikely contender for most-watched show in America. And yet when "Avatar: The Last Airbender" arrived on Netflix, in May, it rose through the ranks to become the platform's No. 1 offering, and even now it remains a fixture in the Top Ten for the U.S. From a report: The series first ran from 2005 to 2008 on Nickelodeon, and swiftly made a name for itself as a politically resonant, emotionally sophisticated work -- one with a sprawling but meticulously plotted mythos that destined the show for cult-classic status. Last summer, after "Game of Thrones" flubbed its finale, fans and critics held up "Avatar" as a counterexample: a fantasy series that knew what it wanted to be from the beginning. Like all such stories, "Avatar" (created by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, and no relation to the James Cameron blockbuster) demands some exposition. In a world where nations are defined by their connection to one of the four elements -- water, earth, fire, and air -- maintaining the peace falls to the Avatar, the only person who can achieve mastery of them all. Just as the Fire Nation launches an attack, he vanishes.

The series begins a century later, when a twelve-year-old boy named Aang is discovered and revived by a pair of Water Tribe teen-agers -- and the Fire Nation is well on its way to global conquest. The first two episodes are largely what you'd expect: world-building punctuated by moments of whimsy. In the third, Aang returns to the temple where he was born to find the aftermath of a genocide. He is, he discovers, both the Avatar and the last of the Air Nomads. Where earlier shows might have hinted at such an atrocity for adult viewers' benefit, "Avatar" is overt, taking seriously its young audience's capacity to confront the consequences of endless war. Moral ambiguity abounds, and people from all nations see the conflict as, variously, an opportunity or a tragedy; there are Earth Kingdom citizens who have become cynical or apathetic after generations of fighting, and those from the Fire Nation who are fully capable of doing good. Aang, like the monks who raised him, is a pacifist at heart, but the series makes it clear that his is not the only way of bringing balance to the world. On the eve of his confrontation with the Fire Lord, one of his past lives -- a warrior named Kyoshi, who has killed would-be conquerors before -- counsels that "only justice will bring peace."

cold fjord writes: Sir Ian Holm, a classically trained actor celebrated for his interpretations of Shakespeare, and with an astonishing range of work in important science fiction and fantasy films, has died at age 88. Holm's depiction of King Lear was celebrated, and he brought Puck to life in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." But most people on Slashdot will remember him for a few other roles, such as Bilbo Baggins, in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and two of the "Hobbit" movies. Holm also appeared in "Alien" as the android Ash, as Napoleon in "Time Bandits," and Cornelius in "The Fifth Element." Holm received a Tony Award in 1967, a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in 1998, a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in 1981, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in Chariots of Fire. Holm received royal honors in 1989 and 1998.

As Marvel cuts staff and publishers stop selling new titles, artists, shop owners and writers worry for the future of an industry worth billions. From a report: There are no new comic books. Steve Geppi, head of Diamond Comic Distributors, which distributes nearly every comic sold in the anglophone world (or used to), announced this on 23 March, though senior industry figures already knew what was coming. The coronavirus pandemic had sunk retailers deep into the red. They couldn't pay their bills to Diamond or rent to their landlords, because they hadn't made any sales. "Product distributed by Diamond and slated for an on-sale date of 1 April or later will not be shipped to retailers until further notice," Geppi wrote. If shops can't pay Diamond, Diamond can't pay the industry's constellation of comics publishers, who then can't pay artists, writers, editors and printers, who now can't pay their rent or credit card bills -- or buy comics.

Sales of comics, graphic novels and collectibles distributed by Diamond were $529.7m in 2019 -- a huge number which suggests that a months-long gap between issues of Batman, Captain America and Spawn will stretch into tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue. (Though Diamond plans to start shipping comics to shops again on 17 May, many around the world will still be in lockdown then.) The unprecedented situation has encouraged many acts of kindness, by individuals and companies. In solidarity with the shops relying on physical sales, most publishers are not currently selling new comics digitally. And dozens of artists and writers are auctioning off books and art to benefit others; DC artist Jim Lee is sketching a superhero pinup every day for two months, selling them for thousands on eBay to benefit comics shops.

The Washington Post describes it as "the next internet." Wikipedia defines it as "a collective virtual shared space...including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet." But it was Neal Stephenson who named it "the metaverse" in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash.

Are we closer to seeing it happen? The Washington Post reports: In the past month, office culture has coalesced around video chat platforms like Zoom, while personal cultural milestones like weddings and graduations are being conducted in Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The Metaverse not only seems realistic — it would probably be pretty useful right about now. The Metaverse reality is still years, possibly decades, away. But Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has been publicly pushing for its creation, and he isn't alone in his desire to push for the Metaverse, where the online world echoes and fulfills real-world needs and activities. Constructing the virtual Internet space is Silicon Valley's macro goal, many of whom are obsessed with Neal Stephenson's 1992 book, "Snow Crash," which defined the term.

In recent years, Facebook, Google and Samsung have all made heavy investments in cloud computing and virtual reality companies in anticipation of a Metaverse... But it's Epic Games, with Fortnite, that has the most viable path forward in terms of creating the Metaverse, according to an essay by venture capitalist and former Amazon executive Matthew Ball... [The article also notes other "traits" of the metaverse in Minecraft and Roblox.] The most widely agreed core attributes of a Metaverse include always being live and persistent — with both planned and spontaneous events always occurring — while at the same time providing an experience that spans and operates across platforms and the real world. A Metaverse must also have no real cap on audience, and have its own fully functioning economy... Fortnite hasn't reached Metaverse status yet. But Fortnite as a social network and impossible-to-ignore cultural phenomenon, Ball says, provides Epic Games a key advantage for leading in the Metaverse race. Fortnite draws a massive, willing and excited audience online to engage with chaotically clashing intellectual properties... "This organic evolution can't be overemphasized," Ball writes in his essay. "If you 'declared' your intent to start a Metaverse, these parties would never embrace interoperability or entrust their IP. But Fortnite has become so popular and so unique that most counterparties have no choice but to participate... Fortnite is too valuable a platform...."

The current swarm to an online-only social and capitalist economy has only highlighted the current Internet's failings, and what the Metaverse needs to do, Ball said. Big sites like Facebook, Google and Amazon continue to dominate online activity, as do larger streaming services like YouTube and Netflix. But each location requires its own membership and has separate ecosystems. "Right now, the digital world basically operates as though every restaurant and bar you go to requires a different ID card, has a different currency, requires their own dress codes and has their own units [of service and measurement]," Ball said. "It is clear that this really advantages the biggest services. People are just sticking to the big games, really. However there's a clear argument that reducing network lock-in can really raise all boats here."

Sweeney said as much in his DICE Summit keynote speech February. If the game industry wants to reshape the Internet and move away from Silicon Valley's walled gardens, Sweeney stressed that publishers need to rethink economies in the same way email was standardized... "We need to give up our attempts to each create our own private walled gardens and private monopoly and agree to work together and recognize we're all far better off if we connect our systems and grow our social graphs together.
Neal Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot readers back in 2004.

The esteemed science fiction author, best known for movie "Arrival" that is based on his novel, on how we may never go "back to normal" -- and why that might be a good thing. From an interview on Electric Literature: EL: Do you see aspects of science fiction (your own work or others) in the coronavirus pandemic? In how it is being handled, or how it has spread?
TC: While there has been plenty of fiction written about pandemics, I think the biggest difference between those scenarios and our reality is how poorly our government has handled it. If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there's no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn't be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what's known as an "idiot plot," a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren't an idiot. What we're living through is only partly a disaster novel; it's also -- and perhaps mostly -- a grotesque political satire.

EL: This pandemic isn't science fiction, but it does feel like a dystopia. How can we understand the coronavirus as a cautionary tale? How can we combat our own personal inclinations toward the good/evil narrative, and the subsequent expectation that everything will return to normal?
TC: We need to be specific about what we mean when we talk about things returning to normal. We all want not to be quarantined, to be able to go to work and socialize and travel. But we don't want everything to go back to business as usual, because business as usual is what led us to this crisis. COVID-19 has demonstrated how much we need federally mandated paid sick leave and universal health care, so we don't want to return to a status quo that lacks those things. The current administration's response ought to serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of electing demagogues instead of real leaders, although there's no guarantee that voters will heed it. We're at a point where things could go in some very different ways, depending on what we learn from this experience.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've been meaning to check out "Star Trek: Picard" or "The Good Fight," but already perhaps have one streaming subscription too many, you can check out CBS All Access for free until April 23rd in the US. Jean-Luc Picard himself (okay, Partick Stewart) revealed ViacomCBS would make it around the time of the show's finale.

schweini shares a report: Every year the world celebrates the anniversaries of masterworks and maestros. In 2020, a host of events and publications commemorated the lives of Ludwig van Beethoven, Raphael, Charles Dickens, Anne Bronte and William Wordsworth. Such milestones usually come in neat multiples of 50. The 42nd anniversary of anything is rarely observed. Yet on March 8th fans of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" ("HHGTTG") paid tribute to the comedy science-fiction series, which had its radio premiere on that day in 1978 and was subsequently adapted into novels, TV series, video games and a film.

To mark the occasion, Pan Macmillan reprinted the scripts and novels in colourful new editions ("HHGTTG" was the first book published under their "Pan Original" imprint to sell more than 1m copies). The British Library will host a day of "celebrations, conversation and performance." BBC Radio 4 has aired the original episodes; Radio 4 Extra will put on a "five-hour Hitchhiker's spectacular" including archival material and specially commissioned programmes. Such is the enduring interest in Douglas Adams's story that it is due to be adapted into a new television series by Hulu, a streaming service.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: SETI@home has announced that they will no longer be distributing new work to clients starting on March 31st as they have enough data and want to focus on completing their back-end analysis of the data. SETI@home is a distributed computing project where volunteers contribute their CPU resources to analyze radio data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

Run by the Berkeley SETI Research Center since 1999, SETI@home has been a popular project where people from all over the world have been donating their CPU resources to process small chunks of data, or "jobs," for interesting radio transmissions or anomalies. This data is then sent back to the researchers for analysis. In an announcement posted yesterday, the project stated that they will no longer send data to SETI@home clients starting on March 31st, 2020 as they have reached a "point of diminishing returns" and have analyzed all the data that they need for now. Instead, they want to focus on analyzing the back-end results in order to publish a scientific paper. SETI@Home has a list of BOINC projects on their website for those interested in donating their CPU resources.