Hello, all. I am attempting to graduate to the realm of original fiction writing with a near-future dystopic about robots programmed to detect when people who are near death's door have reached the point of no return, thus freeing medical personnel and family members from a daunting decision. The majority of my work will either take place in a near ( Read more... )

Does anyone have (English) email notifications from LiveJournal (eg "soandso added you as a friend," "soandso left a comment") from 2003? Yahoo deleted my old email address so I can't access emails from that era.

I'm most interested in the text of friend and comment notifications, including the subject headline. I appreciate any help you can give.

Pretty much what the subject says. Google tells me that Skype came to be in 2003, but I'm trying to find out if it was in common enough use in 2008 that it won't seem anachronistic. Also, most older references seem to lean towards Microsoft/Linux OS. Was it available for Mac in 2008? I tried all the google fu I could think of with combinations of ( Read more... )

Setting -- London, present day.

The protagonist is a woman who is a programmer -- or something in IT that allows her at least some of the relevant knowledge. She -- you know how it is -- finds herself saddled with a demon.

( This is spoilery for a story that's going to be published by Solaris, so I'm cutting... )

Setting: Slightly near future Earth -- contemporary for all practical purposes ( Read more... )

Okay, so, I'm from Europe. Germany, to be exact, and here we have something called DENIC where you have to register every domain and give your contact data. We also have something called an "Impressum" that needs to give that data on every website. Long story short, in Germany, it's fairly easy to get hold of a website's owner, if the law is ( Read more... )

Setting: New York City (Harlem), around 1986-1987; Modern day with some sci-fi elements, including aliens and robots

Databases & Search-engines used: Google, Wikipedia, some pdf documents

Search terms used: computer use in 1987 ; computer use in schools+1980s; computer literacy in the 1980s

Scenario: Basically, I'm setting up a character to be ( Read more... )

I have a question regarding a story I'm writing. There's a zombie outbreak - on a scale of 1-10 in terms of severity, I'd say it's an 8 - and I have four people trying to get around on unfamiliar territory. They're basically tourists in the US (round LA) so they don't really know anything much.

✗   How likely is it that anything satellite-related ( Read more... )

I'm contemplating a character who is a bit (understatement) of a nerd. Hardison in Leverage/ Willow in early Buffy level nerd (though this is not a fanfic ( Read more... )

Seeking your imaginative ways to destroy a laptop with nothing other than typical items found in a house. The protagonists are angry as hell about blackmail items found on the laptop, so bonus points for destruction that feels *good*. Of course, their main concern is to destroy the data irretrievably, so the hard drive needs to be obliterated. ( Read more... )