The hero, a young thug whose traveling companion is a mutant, telepathic dog, is lured to an underground community but rebels against its sterility. The novella was the basis for a 1975 movie starring Don Johnson. The film's gruesome but darkly comic ending elicited stunned laughter from its audience when it was the featured film at a science fiction movie marathon in Los Angeles that year.

A long-dormant TV project appears to have finally emerged from its hibernation, if Showtime is to be believed. The premium cable network announced Thursday it had ordered 10 episodes of a television series based on the popular "Halo" video game franchise. The project was originally announced five years ago. The news was confirmed in a Thursday blog post on the official Halo Waypoint website by Kiki Wolfkill, the head of transmedia for "Halo" developer 343 Industries. The show will be headed by "Lone Star" creator Kyle Killen and "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" director Rupert Wyatt, with Steven Spielberg's Amblin Television producing.

Author Hugh Howey is a favorite with many of the Boing Boing staff. We first fell in love with his Wool series of stories, which won Kindle Book Review's 2012 Indie Book of the Year Award and is being developed as a movie by Ridley Scott. Today, Amazon is selling Howey's collection of stories in a volume called Machine Learning for just $2 in the Kindle edition. Even better, if you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read it for free.

The popular'Halo' video-game franchise will get a 10-episode, live-action series on Showtime. The "Halo" video-game franchise is coming to TV in a new form: a live-action, scripted drama series. Showtime Thursday announced it is picking up a 10-episode season of the tentatively titled "Halo," based on the iconic Xbox franchise. Production will begin in 2019. Premiere date and casting details were unavailable.

This feature is part is Reviewed.com's Guide to Cord Cutting, where we explain everything you need to know to start living life without a cable bill. Remember when staying in to watch TV was a cheap date and/or family night? Well, it's gotten really expensive. However, cable and satellite TV services have gone up over the years. Between channel lineups, DVRs, taxes, and fees, it's gotten to a point where TV programming has become a luxury for a lot of people.

As with any new disruptive technology that is moving it's way up the hype cycle, Artificial Intelligence won't be uniformly adopted. It will be a better fit in certain sectors and for businesses of a particular type. "The future has arrived -- it's just not evenly distributed yet." This new research from the McKinsey Global Institute is useful since it looks specifically about how AI and Machine Learning will generate value in the future. One finding, which mirrors our advice for marketers is that businesses should focus on using machine learning applications to support the marketing and sales process and acquire skills where needed in this area.

According to SIIA, CODiE Award recipients produce the most innovative businesses technology products around the world. The award spotlights the unique innovation associated with Max, Apttus' applied AI for Apttus Omni, the company's Intelligent Middle Office Platform. Max utilizes an intelligent conversational user interface that proactively delivers insights and recommendations to help sales, legal, operations and financial professionals maximize revenue and other critical business outcomes. The resulting actions accelerate and optimize Apttus' CPQ, CLM, E-Commerce and Revenue Management solutions that comprise Apttus Omni. Max's success stems from an overwhelming customer need for speed and efficiency in executing revenue operations and managing commercial relationships.

It's time to shift the conversation around AI and machine learning from threats of job replacement to opportunities for job redesign. The conversation around artificial intelligence and automation seems dominated by either doomsayers who fear robots will supplant all humans in the workforce, or optimists who think there's nothing new under the sun. But MIT Sloan professor Erik Brynjolfsson and his colleagues say that debate needs to take a different tone. New research finds that specific tasks within jobs, rather than entire occupations themselves, will be replaced by automation in the near future, with some jobs more heavily impacted than others. "Our findings suggest that a shift is needed in the debate about the effects of AI: away from the common focus on full automation of entire jobs and pervasive occupational replacement toward the redesign of jobs and reengineering of business practices," the researchers write in an article published in May in the American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings.

One of the top universities in China, Tsinghua University, established an institute of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Thursday, June 28. The newly-established institute, according to a report by Chinese news outlet Netease Technology, aims to make fundamental innovations in both theories and key technologies of AI, and broaden the influence of Tsinghua University. Professor Zhang Bo from the school's Department of Computer Science and Technology, who is also an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, will be the head of the institute. Chinese computer scientist Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, who won the most prestigious award in computer science -- the Turing Award, in 2000, will be the director of the institute's academic committee. Additionally Jeffrey Dean, head of Google.ai--Google's

No one likes having their streaming video experience interrupted by pre-roll advertising that doesn't appropriately match the content and video duration; it can be inherently disruptive. In fact, a 2017 report from IPG Mediabrands' Media Lab found that 65% of pre-roll ads are skipped. This is challenging for streaming video platforms and content publishers that want to provide an optimal viewer experience, but need to monetize their content too. While ad-free subscription models have worked for some platforms--notably Amazon (AMZN) Prime and Netflix--they're hardly a panacea. Three years after its launch, for example, YouTube's subscription service YouTube Red still only accounts for 7% of the company's revenue.