Mark Fox's Weblog

Maureen Ryan reports that following the completion of a pilot episode HBO has picked up George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones for a full season. The whole series, A Song of Fire and Ice which is currently at book four could be filmed at a rate of one book per season.

Series regulars in alphabetical order:

* Mark Addy as Robert Baratheon
* Alfie Allen as Theon Greyjoy
* Sean Bean as Eddard Stark
* Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Jamie Lannister
* Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister
* Jennifer Ehle as Catelyn Stark
* Jack Gleeson as Joffrey Baratheon
* Iain Glen as Ser Jorah Mormont
* Kit Harrington as Jon Snow
* Lena Headey as Cersei Lannister
* Harry Lloyd as Viserys Targaryen
* Richard Madden as Rob Stark
* Rory McCann as Sandor Clegane
* Tamzin Merchant as Daenerys Targaryen
* Sophie Turner as Sansa Stark
* Maisie Williams as Arya Stark
* Isaac Hempstead Wright as Bran Stark

Also featuring:

* Ron Donachie as Ser Rodrik Cassel
* Jason Momoa as Khal Drogo
* Donald Sumpter as Maester Luwin

The expected airing of a ten episode season would be 2011.

Once they finish A Song of Fire and Ice, can I suggest science-fiction? The Vorkosigan books would be great.

Israel approves plan to let sponsors beam messages onto Western Wall
By Hurim Pappy, Haaretz Correspondent

Most people go to the Western Wall to pray, but now some will also head there to pay.
The cabinet has approved a plan that would allow for sponsorship messages to be beamed onto the Western Wall, sources in the Prime Minister's Office told Haaretz Monday.
According to the plan, any company will be able to project the image, logo or slogan of its choice on the ancient stones, for a price.
The proposal, drawn up by MK Mordechai Hidud, will take advantage of technology being developed by Kfar Sava-based start-up Kotelad. The company - the brainchild of U.S.-born Joe King - has come up with an innovative laser projector capable of beaming high-quality images onto walls, domes, minarets and steeples.

More at Haaretz.

Sid Meier is preparing another assault on gamer’s productivity with the announcement that Firaxis Games is will be releasing Sid Meier's Civilization V for the PC this fall. New features include:

• Hex based movement
• New combat system
• Deeper diplomatic interactions
• More advanced graphics including organic landscapes
• Ranged bombardment
• In-game community hub to share user-created scenarios, scores, and achievements

They will also be developing Sid Meier's Civilization Network, a Civ game for Facebook.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have released the Final Ballot for the 2009 Nebula Awards, science fiction and fantasy’s "Academy Awards" which will be presented May 15 at the Hilton Cocoa Beach Oceanfront Hotel in Coca Beach, Florida (in Florida's Space Coast).
The nominated novels are:

• The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Nightshade, Sep09)
• The Love We Share Without Knowing, Christopher Barzak (Bantam, Nov08)
• Flesh and Fire, Laura Anne Gilman (Pocket, Oct09)
• The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey, May09)
• Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor, Sep09)
• Finch, Jeff VanderMeer (Underland Press, Oct09)

Haaretz is quoting a report by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs that states that a co-author of the Goldstone Gaza report, which accuses both Hamas and Israel of war crimes has claimed that Hamas fired only two rockets at Israel prior to Israel’s operations against Hamas, which is simply not true. The article states:
The report quoted statements in interviews made by Col. Desmond Travers, formerly a senior officer in the Irish army and the only military expert among the four members of the Goldstone Commission, and the statements included one to a Middle East affairs journal.

In an interview last week with the Middle East Monitor, Travers leveled harsh accusations at the Israel Defense Forces that do no appear in the Goldstone report. He said the IDF had used drones that could detect people inside of buildings by their body heat and did so in attacking houses in which dozens of Palestinian civilians had taken shelter. According to Travers, Israel had attacked the Gaza Strip although Hamas supposedly only fired two rockets at Israel in the month before the operation, and that Hamas had wanted to continue the cease-fire.
The institute's report notes that Travers ignored the fact that in three days alone during the month before the IDF campaign, Hamas had fired 32 rockets at Israel and that according to Hamas spokesmen, among them the organization's leader in Damascus, Khaled Meshal, Hamas had resolved to end the cease-fire.

Travers may be motivated by the deaths of Irish peacekeepers in Lebanon:

The report by the Jerusalem think tank also includes quotes from an interview Travers gave in which he accused Israel of murdering many Irish soldiers who where members of the UNIFIL contingent in South Lebanon. When asked about the fact that there had been official disagreement in Britain with the findings of the Goldstone report, Travers said that "Britain's foreign policy interests in the Middle East seem to be influenced strongly by Jewish lobbyists."

Microsoft has announced the release of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate. Improvements over Beta 2 focus on speed including UI responsiveness, designers, editing, debugging, build times and solution/project load times.

There is a MSDN overview page and number of helpful blog posts. Jason Zander, General Manager for the Visual Studio team has a short FAQ, earlier he had a very useful discussion of using Team Foundation Server in VS2010 including TFS Basic which is intended to replace Visual SafeSource for individuals and small teams. Scott Guthrie, VP in the Microsoft Developer Division has a round-up of positive feedback and some more FAQs.

A launch event is scheduled for April 12, 2010.

Amazon.com has stopped directly selling books from Macmillan and its imprints (including Tor Books) in a dispute about ebook pricing.

Macmillan CEO John Sargent has issued a statement. His vision for pricing is:

Under the agency model, we will sell the digital editions of our books to consumers through our retailers. Our retailers will act as our agents and will take a 30% commission (the standard split today for many digital media businesses). The price will be set the price for each book individually. Our plan is to price the digital edition of most adult trade books in a price range from $14.99 to $5.99. At first release, concurrent with a hardcover, most titles will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99. E books will almost always appear day on date with the physical edition. Pricing will be dynamic over time.

Amazon by contrast wants a maximum $9.99 fixed price for eBooks that for now can only be read on a Kindle.

Hovering over all this is the Apple iPad and its iBooks Store. The NY Times states:

Macmillan offered Amazon the opportunity to buy Kindle editions on the same “agency” model as it will sell e-books to Apple for the iPad. Under this model, the publisher sets the consumer book price and takes 70 percent of each sale, leaving 30 percent to the retailer. Macmillan said Amazon could continue to buy e-books under its current wholesale model, paying the publisher 50 percent of the hardcover list price while pricing the e-book at any level Amazon chooses, but that Macmillan would delay those e-book editions by seven months after hardcover release. Amazon’s removal of Macmillan titles on Friday appears to be a direct reaction to that.

Some reaction by Tor related writes and editors:

• Patrick Nielsen Hayden, a Tor Editor
• John Scalzi
• Charles Stross

Update - feb 1, 2010
Amazon.com has posted a message stating they will have to agree to Macmillan's pricing scheme, which was probably what they planned to do once they had Macmillan fingered as the party wanting higher prices.

Ten months after the Spirit Mars Exploration Rover got stuck in the Martian sand after it broke through a crusty surface and churned into soft sand hidden underneath NASA engineers have given up on attempts to free it. NASA will now focus on preparing the now stationary rover to survive the oncoming Martian winter that starts in May. When the Mars winter is over Spirit will be used as a stationary research platform. NASA’s press release describes some possible uses:

One stationary experiment Spirit has begun studies tiny wobbles in the rotation of Mars to gain insight about the planet's core. This requires months of radio-tracking the motion of a point on the surface of Mars to calculate long-term motion with an accuracy of a few inches. Tools on Spirit's robotic arm can study variations in the composition of nearby soil, which has been affected by water. Stationary science also includes watching how wind moves soil particles and monitoring the Martian atmosphere.

Spirit’s sister rover, Opportunity is still active has completed one third of a 12 mile trek begun in mid-2008 to a large crater called Endeavour.

Last week Sabrina Eaton, a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer noticed that a letter writer, Ellie Light had similar letters published by numerous publications around the country, often claiming different local residences. In her letters, Light defended US President Obama, in some she stated that “It’s time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can’t just wave a magic wand and fix everything,” These duplicate letters and her lack of responsive when questioned about the different addresses have lead some to believe that she is an actually a fake front for an Obama organized letter writing campaign. While it is more likely that she is just someone who a list of letters to the editor desks and a willingness to shade the truth about her address it does raise the question of how many publications fell for her fake address and whether others did any checking at all.

Maybe she should he stuck to sending letters to national publications, that way she could write what Ben Smith of Politico.com characterized as an articulate defense of Obama without the need for lying about her address in order to try to have it published.

On January 30th Cineplex will be showing a live broadcast of a National Theatre adaption of Terry Pratchett’s novel Nation. The play will be broadcast from UK live via satiellte. It’s described as:

< p class=”quote”>A parallel world, 1860. Two teenagers thrown together by a tsunami that has destroyed Mau’s village and left Daphne shipwrecked on his South Pacific island, thousands of miles from home. One wears next to nothing, the other a long white dress; neither speaks the other’s language; somehow they must learn to survive. As starving refugees gather, Daphne delivers a baby, milks a pig, brews beer and does battle with a mutineer. Mau fights cannibal Raiders, discovers the world is round and questions the reality of his tribe’s fiercely patriarchal gods. Together they come of age, overseen by a foul-mouthed parrot, as they discard old doctrine to forge a new Nation.