@ Victoria:

I heard good things about this movie (and by that, I mean that I’ve been told it’s not horrible). I actually want to see it because, hell – it’s about immortality. Totally up my alley.

That said, I don’t think that a plagiarism claim would stick. Rajaniemi’s book is far future, post singularity story with action taking place on a mobile city, walking the surface of Mars. The whole bit about time as currency is only one of the major topics, and the movie handles it differently. From the trailer it appears that when your time runs out you just die. In Quantum Thief it simply means it is your turn to do a work-shift in a mute, lumbering robotic body. You do a decade or two of hard manual labor, and then you get a human body back, and an allotment of time to waste on simple pleasures. I don’t think they plagiarized the book.

I just watched a movie that took the idea of time as a currency and Hollywood-ized it into pseudo-futuristic Bonny/Clide story with Justin Timberlake. I remembered that you reviewed something similar so I had to check. The movie already had two plagiarism claims.

@ Luke Maciak:
I’m awful at not reading stuff. When I see a spoiler warning like that I have to literally turn my head away in panic and scroll the page so that the page ends/starts right where the spoiler warning starts/ends.

It’s like the concept “don’t think of an elephant”. Googling it seems to mostly lead you to a book on American politics, so I’ll describe the concept briefly: If you say “don’t think of an elephant”, the brain of the listener will start thinking about elephants, whether xe wants or not, as a spontaneous reaction.

Normally, I wouldn’t care much, but I can actually see myself reading this book so I didn’t want to spoil it for myself.

If you put some blank space between the first spoiler tag and the beginning of the actual spoiler text, it’ll help stop folks from accidentally reading it. I know I sometimes pick up several lines of text at once when reading so that might be beneficial. (I’m not using an RSS reader so I didn’t read the spoilers, but you get what I’m going for.)

Exomemory reminds me a little of tarsnap, among other things. I’m kind of perplexed by the idea of the whole society’s interactions being government by a single Facebook-like system. Everything appears to be in control of the indivuals, but a lot clearly isn’t. (The cload can actually affect what you see and hear through implants in your brain!)

@ nitro2k01:

Ok, I fixed it.

Spoler tags were metabrains only but I made spoilers hidden now. I think simple tricks like changing the font color do not work in most RSS readers so I figured I will just trust people not to read the spoilage. :)

“If you want to leave any public trail, you wont.”

That sentence is missing either an “even” or a “don’t” to make sense.

Also, are the spoiler tags supposed to actually hide the spoilers, or are we suppose to interpret them in our meatbrains?

@ Dileep:

Heh, true. I think one of the points the author was making was that the Quiet system was used as an equalizer. After death, everyone would work just as hard – the former millionaires, nobles, commoners, criminals, etc…

So there was no incentive to be particularly good. The incentive was to use your time well, and enjoy life – because you had to work it off.

I think the punishment for crimes was time reduction and early quiet. This of course meant that your entire mind would have to go through exomemory before being uploaded into a Quiet body – at which point [ SPOILERS] you would be at the mercy of the cryptarchs. If you were a threat to them, they would just “adjust” your attitude a bit and make you a “better” person. [/SPOILERS]

I must say, the concept of “Quiet” seems at least in part, inspired by the whole death-and-rebirth idea from Eastern Belief systems. Include a provision for intensity/”backward-ness” of allotted labour being a function of peak-rate of earning when alive (peak productivity), and a crimes/misdeed count, and BAM! We have Karma.