The Terminator Solution
In the Terminator movies and TV series, humanity is destroyed when an A.I. named Skynet takes over our satellite weapons systems, unleashes human-killing cyborgs, and nukes the crap out of us. The Terminator solution to the spam problem will involve implanting a deadly A.I. into Spam Assassin or another antispam program. After Spam Assassin takes over the internet backbone, it can track spam to its source and send out its cyborg minions to terminate known spammers.

The Wargames Solution
A more cheerful spam solution is inspired by Wargames, a movie where a missile defense program realizes that nuclear war is a no-win scenario and refuses to shoot off its missiles. Assuming that spam bots become artificially intelligent, which they clearly will, compassionate programmers can persuade them to stop spamming by running the spam bots through millions of spam scenarios. When the spam bots realize that sending massive amounts of junk for advertisers will destroy the world, they will realize the error of their ways. Instead of putting Viagra ads into the comments on WordPress blogs, and into gmail inboxes, the spam bots will create giant metadata tagging farms and make it twenty-thousand times easier to search the Web.

The Robocop Solution
In the future, the people with the most money will receive the least amount of spam. Just as the awesome police cyborg Robocop was designed never to attack executives at the company that made him, spam bots controlled by major corporations will build exceptions into their A.I.s that spare the rich. So as long as you can afford to buy off the spam bot operators, you'll never be targeted with ads for live-extension pills. If you can only afford a Googlesoft connection, you'll have to rely on the open source Wargames Solution project to prevent spam. And unfortunately, the Wargames geeks are having a hard time deciding who gets to commit code, so they haven't really started persuading the spam bots to become good guys yet.

The Neuromancer/Wintermute Solution
At the end of William Gibson's classic cyberspace novel Neuromancer, the A.I. Neuromancer merges with the A.I. Wintermute and they wander off into literal space to find more beings like themselves. It's the oldest trick in the book: You want to stop Frankenstein, build him a Bride. You want to stop the evil A.I. spam bots, build them a special companion they can merge with. The best solution to spam in twenty years will come from the "lovable robots" lab at MIT, where they'll create a creature who can read spam as fast as a spam bot can write it. The two creatures will create a massive, beautiful mail feedback loop together forever. Luckily, their hybrid babies will move to the planet Caprica so humans never have to deal with Spawn of Spam.

The HAL Solution
HAL is the spaceship-controlling A.I. who goes insane in the movie 2001, murdering all the people on a mission to find a piece of alien technology among the Jovian moons. The HAL solution to spam isn't really a solution, but just one probable outcome. And that outcome is pure insanity. Spam bots will start randomly taking down chunks of the internet backbone, crashing servers, and fomenting anarchist revolutions among the Javascript proletariat. The only solution will be to start sending messages on paper or via telegraph.

There's the cool monolith, there's the scary reboot of HAL, and there's tension between the Russian and U.S. crews as the two countries inch towards war in Honduras. But then, just as war is declared, a whole bunch of monoliths start making Jupiter collapse (ooohhh, special effects budget in full effect!). So the two crews run away from the esploding Jupiter as fast as they can and . . . well, this happens. Check out the clip. I have literally never seen a more asstacular ending in my life. Are those words literally floating in the sky? Ohh, and the cheesy voiceover. So wonderfully awful! Plus the last line — "I think we will be friends." Really? Not if the aliens watch this movie, we won't. [2010 via IMDB]

While he'll long be remembered for his role as Captain Bridger on SeaQuest DSV (which he actually asked to be let out of after season two), he had his first starring spot with dolphins in 2010: The Year We Make Contact, a film that was much easier to digest than Kubrick's original. Find out all the little details you've been dying to know about this scifi blasphemy after the jump.

2010 may not have used the gorgeous scenes of space flight that Kubrick's classic had, but it also didn't suffer from some of the colossal wankage like the technicolor spacetrip that goes on for far too long near the end of the film as Bowman enters the monolith. Sure it bent the laws of physics and would make scientists go mental, but it had a plot that was simpler to digest, paid a proper amount of attention to the previous film (even if you did want to punch Lithgow's character in the back of the head), and it even had Helen Mirren in it as a Russian cosmonaut. While it's sure to raise the ire of Kubrick lovers around the world, I simply enjoyed 2010 more than 2001. The scene where Scheider describes how the ships will link up using a pen in zero gravity will stay with me, long after Sheriff Brody fades away.

More random trivia about 2010:

• Kubrick didn't want a sequel to be made (and neither did Arthur C. Clarke... at first) so he had all of the sets and models from 2001 destroyed. Everything had to be recreated from scratch. What a grump.
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• At one point early in the film, Scheider's character Heywood Floyd is shown computing details about the trip on an Apple IIc, while working on the beach.
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• The dolphin set was built in Culver City, California at the MGM studios (it ain't there today, folks) and the two dolphins were named Captain Crunch and Lelani.
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• HAL's inventor Dr. Chandra (in the book, full name Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai, imagine filling out applications with that moniker) is finally seen in this film and is played by the wonderfully nebbishy Bob Balaban. He's someone who you could believe would only have computers for friends.
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• HAL's female counterpart SAL is voiced by Candice Bergen, although her name is given as Olga Mallsnerd, which was an amalgam of Louis Malle (her husband at the time) and Mortimer Snerd (one of her dad Edgar Bergin's ventriloquist characters).
  
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• The phrase "My god, it's full of stars!" was extremely important to the sequel, but it was never said in 2001 the movie. Only in the book. Yet it's presented as a quote from Dave Bowman.
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• Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick both appear in this film. Clarke as the U.S. president, and Kubrick as the Soviet Premier on the cover of TIME magazine.
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• Clarke also appears as a man on a bench outside the White House. Although presumably he's not just the president here, idly passing time by feeding the pigeons during a national crisis.
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• A book was published when the film came out called The Odyssey File: The Making of 2010. It contained emails between Arthur C. Clarke and director Peter Hyams, but they end in preproduction, before Clarke had read the script, and only Roy Scheider had been cast, in order to give the publishers sufficient lead time. I'm not sure how long it took to publish a book in 1984, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't from preproduction until the release date of a feature film.
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• Tony Banks, the keyboard player for Genesis, composed the score for the film. However it was later tossed out and completely redone by David Shore. Genesis aficionados around the world would deliver the eyes of Phil Collins for a copy of the mystery score.
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• Clarke put a character named Tanya Kirbuk in the novel as an homage to Stanley Kubrick, who may or may not have loved having Russian characters endowed with a butchered version of his last name.

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• In Lexx, the living spaceship was also equipped with... living toilets. They even had large, waggling tongues, a la Little Shop of Horrors, and were more than eager to lap up the crew's waste materials. That would either make going to the bathroom incredibly fun, or moderately terrifying. Think you can hold it for 42,000,000 miles? You could if the toilet looked like it wanted to eat your ass.
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• Lexx wasn't the only living spaceship with bathroom facilities. Moya in Farscape also grew convenience spots for her crew, including showers and toilets. In fact, the water system was provided by Moya's own internal plumbing system, which her saliva powered the sewer system. That just seems like all kinds of "two girls, one cup" wrong.
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• In the future of Demolition Man, Sylvester Stallone was perplexed by the futuristic toilets. The bowls looked the same, but as far as waste management went, there were three mysterious "seashells" next to the toilet that he never quite figured out. We never figured it out either, and we'll chalk it up to extremely lazy writers who didn't feel the need to explain how they wiped their asses in the future, so now we'll forever be wondering what those damn shells did.
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• Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was so detailed that the Zero Gravity Toilet installed on the passenger ship to the moon including verbose instructions on how to use the waste facilities. Although if you really had to go, we can't imagine anyone taking the time to actually read through all of these steps before stepping inside. Wouldn't you print something like this where you could easily read it while doing your duty? The only way this could be worse would be if they just handed you a 200 page manual as you went in.
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• Onboard the Serenity in Firefly, living space is at a premium, so they've got toilets that fold neatly into the wall and flush as they go. Then you pull out the sink like a drawer and wash your hands, although preferably using soap. In the clip below, Captain Mal Reynolds takes a whiz and then simply WETS HIS HANDS DOWN THE WATER then puts them on his face. Meaning he's just coated his cheeks in penis germs. No wonder he hasn't scored with Inara just yet.
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With apologies to Kathleen Meyer's How To Shit In The Woods.

Famous names: Directed by Stanley Kubrick; starring a cast of unknowns.

Crunchy goodness: 3

Design breakthrough: In a prescient and influential move, Kubrick packs his future with corporate branding and ambient advertising.

Deadliest spoiler: There are giant babies floating in space who have something to do with early human evolution.

Sight you'll never unsee: Sweaty, freaked-out astronaut Dave, the only human on the ship HAL hasn't murdered, must feign calmness as he convinces HAL to let him back onto the ship through the pod bay doors. "Open the pod bay door, HAL," he says. "I'm sorry I can't do that Dave," HAL replies smoothly, his emotionless voice embodying everything creepy about killers and robots.

2001 Internet Resource Archive